Opening & Operating Advertising for a Dog Daycare
How to Advertise once you open
The second phase is your opening and operating advertising. If you have done a good job up to this point of pre opening advertising you should receive quite a few walk ins and tours the day you open the doors. There may not be a lot of clients but there should be a buzz that will bring out many individuals who are interested in seeing what’s new in town.
You should also be receiving calls from advertisements that you placed in the Yellow Pages, local Club News Letters and off of fliers, pamphlets and business related paraphernalia that you strategically placed around town. This is the point where you need to seriously find ways to get advertising for free. You are open, you are paying bills, you have utilities and rent- basically the vast suction of overhead is draining away at your wallet everyday- and you may have made the mistake of over hiring and are now paying employees to sit around and look at the empty or sparsely populated play areas. All the while you still need to build clients and build them fast while saving money to continue daily operations until you have enough clients providing sufficient revenue to offset your expenses and put you in the green. The absolute best way to get free advertising is to again start calling around to local animal shelters and rescue groups. Call one and all and let them know about you if you have not already done so. Again offer to let them hold events at your facility like pet adoptions, or offer to foster some animals for them for free or at a reduced rate.
About Advertising
A quick note on Advertising Your Dog Daycare- YOU NEED TO DO IT!!!!!!!!!
I want to drive this point home, people are not going to randomly be pulled into your location as if you have some kind of strange planetary gravity working for you without effective advertising. YOU MUST ADVERTISE YOUR BUSINESS to keep bringing in new customers and replacing the ones that relocate, who's pets die, or just no longer have a need for your services etc. Business grow with increased revenue, and the only way to increase revenue is to sell more product, the only way to sell more product is to bring in more customers. It's such a simple principle, that I can't understand why so many fail to adhere to it.
I see so many Dog Daycares that seem to have a mental aversion to intelligently spending money on effectively advertising their business. It's generally a case of a minimalist personality doing the absolute bare minimum to create what they feel is effective advertising. A single yellow page ad, or some fliers at the local vets office seems to satisfy the advertising requirement in a lot of their minds, preferring to rely on referrals once they have reached what they feel is an acceptable level of clients. Some how, seeming to forget that advertising their business is what started the initial growth of it in the first place. Dog Daycares run with this mindset will generally plateau way to early and stagnate from that point on. Then after a number of years with little or no real growth and expansion the owners will tend to burn out and the facility will go up for sale.
The Technical Aspects of Dog Daycare Marketing
In order to maximize the effectiveness of your available advertising budget while reaching the absolute maximum in potential new clients you are going to have to do some math. This involves really studying the available forms of advertising in your area on the basis of a price per thousand, this is the amount that it costs you to reach 1000 potential customers. For the purposes of this section we will only be discussing printed advertisements, other forms of media are covered in detail in on other pages of this site.
The First step in doing this is to contact all of the local publications that serve your market area and request an advertising rate card or that a sales representative meet with you to discuss your advertising needs. Generally they will fax or mail you a card that displays the type of publication, the number of subscribers, as well as the various add sizes and their costs. Do not be pulled in to advertising in an overpriced publication just because it is pretty and has all gloss covered pages, remain objective and remember that your goal is to reach as many potential clients as possible with the least amount of expense.
Once you have received all of the rates and quotes from the various publications it is time to do some quick math and determine the to reach 1000 potential clients.
The formula is fairly simple.
Divide the circulation by the cost of the advertisement to get the per copy price. Then multiply the per copy price by 1000 to get the actual cost to you to reach 1000 potential clients.
Example. (We will use a 1/4 newspaper ad for the example)
Publication 1 XYZ Herald Tribune
Circulation 85,000 (the number of potential customers it reaches)
Cost of 1/4 page ad $300
Take the cost of the Ad (in this case $300) and divide it by the Circulation (85,000)
$300 / 85,000 = $.00352 per copy
Now multiply the per Copy Cost times 1000 to get your Cost per Thousand
$.00352 x 1000 = $3.52 per Thousand (This is the cost to you for every thousand subscribers you reach)
Publication 2 ABC Readers Times
Circulation 140,000
Cost of 1/4 page ad $420
$580 / 140,000 = $.003
$.003 x 1000= $3.00 per Thousand (15% less than Publication 1)
This means that Publication 1 would have to generate 17% more customers per 1000 reached than Publication 2 to be of equal value.
Once you have evaluated all of the available publications and have determined a price per 1000 customers reached you can effectively target the largest number of people with the least amount of expense.
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