Marketing Your Dog Biz

As we said in Part 1 of Building a Great Dog Pro Website, your site is your most important marketing (and sales!) tool. In Part 1, we looked at the role of engaging website copywriting. In Part 2 we turn our attention to creating great design to showcase your great copy.

Make it easy to read
Given our emphasis on the importance of copy last month, it only makes sense to open an article about effective website design with an exhortation to make sure your copy is laid out for easy reading. While this may seem like a bulletin from the DOD (Department of Duh), a designers’ bias for design can lead to compromising readability for looks.

Two simple things can make your website more readable. Be sure your text is at least 12-point, and that there’s enough contrast for easy reading. For the latter, avoid large blocks of colored copy, even if it looks good.

Design around your copy
There’s a reason we wrote about copy first and design second—the most effective website designs are those built around good copy, with the purpose to enhance it. Too often designers create beautiful website frames, plugging copy in as an afterthought. Sites built for the copy, by contrast, are more likely to create a compelling user experience where design, images, and text work together to tell your story and sell your services. Consider these sites, for example—you can see right away that the designers took their cues from the strong copy. Note how the layout guides you through the content, keeping you reading.

www.letusdothewalking.com

www.pawscompanion.com

www.melanieceronephd.com

Keep it clean
Don’t fear blank space. It’s okay for a site to be visually dense with purpose, but it requires higher level design skills to pull this off well. Clean-looking sites with plenty of breathing room are more likely to feel professional and approachable. Resist the temptation to fill open space just to do so, particularly with bones and paw prints or background wallpaper—these things can quickly make a site feel homemade.

Make services easy to identify and get to
Give your site visitors at least two ways to make their way to your service pages. One path should be via a clear menu with separate tabs for each service you offer. For example, forego a generic “Services” menu tab for separate service options such as “Private Dog Training” and “Dog Training Classes.” If you offer classes for different audiences, consider breaking your tabs down further. For example, tabs for “Puppy Training Classes,” “Dog Training Classes,” and “Dog Sports Classes.” This gets your visitors where they need to go faster, and breaking your services out onto separate pages provides you richer key wording opportunities for search engine optimization, too.

The second navigation pathway to offer your site visitors is featuring each service in your home page copy. List each, providing a brief description (remembering to focus on marketing benefit rather than service details) and a link or button to each service’s page for more details. Using a picture, icon, or other graphic for each service can help draw the eye to this more visual menu, and add visual interest to you home page as well.

Include plenty of visual interest
Speaking of which, your site should look inviting. Sites with lots of copy and little to no visuals are much less likely to keep and engage visitors—they just feel like too much work to get through. Remember that people tend to scan sites more than read them. Visuals are part of that scanning experience. This includes not only high-quality photographs (of your own taking and/or carefully chosen stock photography), but also pull-out boxes, color strips, and the like.

Also create visual delineation between sections of copy on each page, making it that much easier for visitors to scan and find what they’re looking for.

Brand it!
One way to add powerful visual interest to a site is playing off your branding. Good designers will find creative ways to use the colors, fonts, and shapes from your logo to enhance the branding and visual appeal of your site. Done well, you should be able to cover up your logo and still be able to tell at a glance whose site you’re on.

Part of achieving this is the use of your brand colors, shapes, and fonts where appropriate. It’s also key to avoid the use of extra colors and visual elements not related to your overall brand look and feel. Forego colors that don’t appear in your logo unless your logo is very simple and requires a contrast color for design reasons. (As Gina says, keep your extra crayons in their box!) And don’t add canine iconography like paw prints, bones, and collars unless they stem directly from your logo. Less is more is almost always a good design tenant.

Beware the bling
Website user research shows that many impressive website design flourishes actually discourage visitors from staying on a site. This particularly applies to any moving parts that a visitor doesn’t put into motion herself, including automatic banner slideshows, self-launching videos, and animations. Your designer may want to offer such bells and whistles, but in most cases you’d be wise to decline.

Make contact easy
Put your contact information on every page in an easy-to-find location, such as the upper-right corner of your site and the footer—or even both. Include either a live email link and your phone number with every call-to-action, or a button linking to your contact page.

And even though your contact info is riddled throughout your site, offer your visitors a dedicated contact page, too, as many will look for it. Your contact page should be yet another place where a potential client can grab your number or fire off a quick email. If you include a contact form, keep it very brief and do not require its use—research is clear that doing so will lose you business.

Don’t leave money on the table with DIY
The recommendations we’ve shared in this 2-part series are basic guidelines for a strong, effective dog pro website. There are, of course, many more considerations in building a site that really goes to the mat to do your selling for you, including good, up-to-date search engine optimization practices.

But between the writing and design guidelines here alone you can see why hiring professionals—just as your clients seek your expertise to get the best results for their dogs—is well worth the investment. After all, your website is your most important marketing and sales tool. While it’s tempting to save money by building your own site, in most cases the money saved is far outweighed by the money lost in failed new client conversions. This is one time where the old adage “Spend money to make money” rings true, as every cent you spend to get your website right will come back to you many fold.

Your site is your most valuable marketing tool—and one of your most valuable business assets. Created properly, your site should do most of your selling for you. If you’re like the majority of dog pros we know, that’s welcome news.

So let’s dive in to what makes a great site! In this article we focus on what makes great website copy:

Create your copy first
Most people prioritize the design of their website, the look and feel of it. This is a mistake. Design is important, but without great copy design is irrelevant. It’s your copy, ultimately, that sells your services. And the best site designs are driven by good copy; your copy will do more for you if your designer builds around it instead of treating it as an afterthought.

It’s all about your marketing message
Your marketing message(s) should be front-and-center on every page of your site, and returned to throughout your copy. To do this, you have to understand what a marketing message is: Think why, not what or how.

Too often dog pro sites focus on the what—what services they offer (dog daycare, group dog training classes)—or the how—how those services are provided. The how includes service details (like how many training sessions or the activities included in your daycare) as well as your training methods or care philosophy.

But what service you offer and how you provide it only matters if you offer a compelling why—that’s where your marketing message comes in. Telling people what you do isn’t enough. You must explain what will happen as a result. How will their lives with their dogs be improved? How will they feel better? You aren’t selling dog training or dog walking or pet sitting. You’re selling change, relief from guilt/stress/frustration/fear, peace of mind, a calmer household, more enjoyable walks or evenings with their dogs, etc.

What you actually do for people—how you make their lives better, easier, less stressful, more productive, etc.—it’s this picture you must paint with your copy. Think of your copy as a story, as a narrative that takes potential clients from where they are now to where they want to be as a result of working with you.

Show them your empathy, show them that you understand why they might be looking for a dog trainer or a dog walker. It’s not to solve leash reactivity or make their dog’s day better. It’s because they’re walking their dog at 3am out of fear or embarrassment. It’s because they’re sitting at work worrying about their dog home alone all day, or what kind of destruction of energy they might come home to.

Then paint the picture of what could be instead, of the results of using your service. Tell them about walking a dog who looks at you for direction when she sees another dog, and invite them to imagine the relief and enjoyment of bark-and-lunge-free walks. Describe the peace of mind of being able to focus on their job, knowing the dog is having a great afternoon with you.

Trainers, you’ll stop well short of any specific behavior guarantees. But you must tell people in some way or another that you’re going to make things better. If you don’t feel sure you can do that (provided of course that the client follows your instructions), you shouldn’t be offering your services.

Writing good copy
Website copy should be created for easy scanning. Some visitors will read every word on your site, but many will only scan through. Website usability stats say you have only 2-3 seconds to convince someone to stay on your site, and the average visit by those who do only lasts 2-3 minutes. While you want plenty of copy for readers who want a more in-depth experience, your copy should be accessible to people in a hurry, too.

This means largely avoiding long, bulky paragraphs that look like too much work. It means chunking your information into headers, sub-headers, bulleted lists, numbered lists, and pullout boxes or strips of color to break things up for the eye. It means writing in short, jaunty sentences that read smoothly, using active verbs and avoiding unnecessary extra verbiage. For example, consider these two sentences:

1. We will help teach your dog to respond to your requests so that you can enjoy a well-behaved companion.
2. Enjoy a well-behaved dog who responds quickly to your requests.

Page structure tips

Your home page. In addition to your marketing message, your home page should include short, easy-to-scan summary overviews of your services, with easy ways to click deeper into your site to learn more. You might also include a short introduction to yourself or your staff, with a link to learn more on your about page.

Your about page. Speaking of which, your about page should be primarily about your clients and what you’ll do for them, not about you. Yes, it should focus on your qualifications—that’s part of making this page about them: What qualifications do you have to do this work to make their lives better? It’s okay to tell your story or talk about your own dogs, as some potential clients will want a sense of who you are personally. But do that further down the page and keep it short. Your bio should never begin with any form of “I’ve loved dogs since I was five.” Do not confuse your life story with your professional bio!

Your service page(s). If you offer more than one service, give each service its own page. This allows you room to share your marketing message, explain the details of your service, and even provide a bit of education about the topic to your site visitors if you’re so inclined. (For example, sharing information about puppy socialization on your puppy training page, or tips for how to choose a dog walker on your dog walking page.) Be sure to include all details potential clients need to make a decision about your service—including your pricing. To leave your rates off your site is to lose clients. That said, too much detail can be a deal killer, too. In most cases you’ll want to leave most of your policies to your service contract rather than your website.

Getting it done
Just as we recommend serious dog guardians hire a qualified, professional dog trainer, we recommend serious dog professionals hire a qualified professional to write their websites. A well-written site means calls and emails from potential clients ready to become actual clients, saving you time and discomfort during sales calls. As we said above, your site is your most critical marketing and sales tool. If you don’t have a background in marketing and writing (specifically the unique niche of website writing), the money you spend on a writer will come back to you many times over.

Once you have your writing ready, it’s time to think about design. Read Building a Great Dog Pro Website Part 2: Great Design.

Over our years supporting dog pros, we’ve noticed certain sticking or stress points common to many of our clients. Choosing the perfect business name ranks high among those.

We’ve been thinking a lot about business names lately. You may have noticed we’ve undergone our own name change from dogtec to dogbiz, and a bit of a visual branding update as well. It’s actually not our first name change and brand polish. Some of you may remember the original version of dogtec way back when we were dogTEC and sported multi-colored stripes. Back then the TEC in dogtec was an acronym that we quickly grew out of. (Extra points to those of you who remember what it stood for!) While we dropped the longer name and eventually de-capitalized the TEC, there was always the wish in the back of our minds that we’d had a crystal ball when we first started. If we had, we’d have called ourselves dogbiz from the start and saved ourselves the hassle of being mistaken for a software company or veterinarians!

But enough about our name—what about yours? Here are some tips on choosing a great dog business name:

A few words of caution and cheerleading
Unless you choose really, really badly (i.e., a name with sexual innuendo, for example), your business name won’t break your business. Really, it won’t. It can feel like the most important decision, but it’s far less important to your success than many other things—like doing your marketing, for example, or providing good customer service. (We’ve had 15 years of success with a name that really didn’t make sense!) So try not to let this decision lead to an ulcer; as a small business owner you have far bigger fish to fry.

Also, keep this thought front and center throughout your naming (or renaming) process: This isn’t for you. It’s for your clients. You don’t have to love your business name. It doesn’t have to be the most perfect, most clever name ever. You don’t have to nail this. And it’s really hard to. Thousands of people have been through this process already. It’s going to be hard, if not impossible, to come up with something truly unique. That’s okay. We just need it to work, and there are lots of ways to do that.

What makes a good dog business name?
Make it memorable. Your name should be something that’s easy to remember. That might be because it’s clever or funny, like the dog walking company in Edson, Alberta called Poop’d Out. It might be due to alliteration or rhyming, like Dynamite Dogs. The point is, with a little repetition your community should be able to call up your name.

Keep it short. The shorter your name, the easier it will be to recall. Avoid lengthy names that require acronyms (unless the acronym stands well on its own). Avoid names that attempt to explain all you do—they don’t have to. (Nike certainly doesn’t!) Just generally avoid anything overly long or complicated.

Think about tone and audience. What services are you offering, and how do you want to be perceived? Your name is part of your brand, after all. Wags ‘n’ Whiskers works well for a pet sitting company or animal supply shop, but less well for a dog training business specializing in serious behavior issues. Write down a handful of words you want to come to clients’ minds when they think of you. Caring? Professional? Warm? Expert? Be sure the tone of your name reflects the values you intend.

Avoid inside jokes or meanings. Again, your business name is for your clients and referral sources, not yourself. If you have to explain it, it’s probably not a good idea. That includes training methodology/ philosophy references!

Leave room to grow. Maybe you’re a dog walker or pet sitter now. Are you sure you won’t continue your education and eventually study to become a dog trainer? Or your training business is focused on puppies now, but will this remain your direction? Unless you’re sure about your niche, choose a name that’s broad and open enough to allow room for you and your business to evolve.

Types of business names
One thing that can help you find a name is thinking about the various categories of business names. Here are some for thought and inspiration:

Puns and other wordplays. We start here because this seems to be where most people look first. It’s a hard one, though, because most the good puns and wordplays are already taken (many times over!), and because they can backfire, too. It’s hard to be memorable when your name is a variation on a common theme. For example, if your community is already full of dog businesses spelling Positive as Pawsitive, adding yourself to that mix can leave you lost in the crowd. On the other hand, a unique pun well suited to your business can be a great find. For example, a canine warm-water and exercise therapy business in California calling itself The Rex Center (a play on Rec Center) is brilliant: relevant, clever, short, and memorable.

Local references. As we said, those sorts of Yes! moments in naming a dog business can be hard to come by. An easier strategy might be naming your business based on your location. This approach can help endear your community to you, particularly in areas that are fiercely local. (Just be sure when using this strategy that you intend to live where you do now for the long haul.) You can use your actual city or county or state name in your business name. Or you can make use of a local moniker, such as a neighborhood name or a regional nickname (such as PDX Pet Sitting—PDX being local shorthand for Portland, Surf City Dogs in Santa Cruz, CA, or Southern Mutt, a dog training company in Chattanooga, TN). You can also reference a local landmark, such as a mountain range or river or valley or famous site, like Golden Gate Dog Walking.

Your own name. Using your own name is a simple way to arrive at a business name, as in Peggy’s Pet Sitting or Dan’s Dogs. This tends to be tempting when there’s alliteration involved, but it’s not necessary. For example, Kathy Santo Dog Training. In fact, how you use this strategy matters a lot. If your business is more on the dog care side, like pet sitting, using just your first name and some alliteration (if the opportunity is there) can certainly work. But you have to be careful in your visual branding (logo, website, etc.) not to go too kitschy or look homemade, as you may undermine a sense of professionalism. For dog trainers, using your own name can lend a sense of authority and gravitas, so long as you avoid anything that sounds too cute (which probably means avoiding alliteration and thinking about using your full name).

Descriptive. We’ve said your business name does not have to describe what you do, and it doesn’t. People will encounter your name in context, giving it meaning. They’ll see it on your website, or print marketing material. They’ll see you wearing it on a shirt while walking or training a dog. That said, descriptive names are another category to consider. For example: Canine Behavior Solutions for a dog training company specializing in behavior. Note that what makes this name work isn’t just that it describes what the business does, though—it works because it describes the benefit the business provides—in this case, solutions to behavior problems.

Niche names. If you’ve nailed your niche, you might use it to your naming advantage. SF Puppy Prep, for example, is a San Francisco business specializing in puppy training. Or Canine Trail Adventures for a dog walking company that takes dogs out of the city for trail hikes. Or dogbiz, for a company that helps dog professionals succeed in their businesses.

Creative. We started by talking about how important it is that your name be memorable. A creative name might be whimsical or abstract, such as The Art of Dog. This is a San Francisco dog walking and daycare company that specializes in small dogs. There’s nothing in their name that would indicate any of that, but it’s very effective. It’s memorable, short, and suits the local culture perfectly.

Finding your name
If considering these various name categories still hasn’t led to your eureka moment, here are two strategies for landing on your business name:

Throw a party. Invite your most clever, creative friends, family, and co-workers (unless you haven’t yet told them of your new career plans!) to a naming party. Have a white board or large sheet of butcher paper handy. Pass out snacks and drinks, then call your party to attention. Describe for your assembled guests what you’re up to. Tell them about your services and your ideal clients. Tell them how you want to be perceived in your community. Share your brand value words. Give them instructions about anything you want to avoid (such as common industry words you don’t want to use or shying away from anything too cutesy). Then pick up your marker to capture all ideas and let the brainstorming begin!

Hold a contest. Use email or social media to challenge your social circle to come up with your business name. Again, share all your do’s and don’ts and guidelines as above. Give people a deadline and tell them what the person who comes up with your name (or submits an idea that sparks the final name) wins. Maybe a batch of your famous, coveted chocolate chip cookies, for example?

Don’t despair if your party or contest doesn’t land on the perfect solution right out of the gate. Sit down with your resulting list of ideas and strike through any options that are clear no’s. Circle any that are maybes or that suggest an interesting direction. Then walk away for a few days before coming back to your list with fresh eyes. You’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by something jumping out at you—either a suggestion you had initially overlooked, or one that sparks a great idea of your own.

 

Still struggling after all that? Consider a consult with one of our friendly business consultants; we’ve got a great track record of helping clients nail business names (even if it took us 15 years to get our own right!).