Bark Square opened its doors for the first time in January 2021 and offered a breadth of services, from dog daycare and boarding to grooming and an indoor dog park.
Here's the story of how our team helped the company launch, acquire hundreds of prospects, and get on track to reach the seven-figure mark.
The Challenge with Promoting a Dog Boarding Facility
Our team met with Bark Square in November 2020 after a colleague recommended that they seek our marketing advice before launch. During our initial discovery meeting, we identified the company's marketing strategy strengths as well as its weaknesses. While Bark Square was a novel concept as it would be the first indoor dog park in the area, the marketing plan in place lacked an essential ingredient: traffic.
The primary strategy the company had at the time was content creation, with the expectation that it would yield results and bring them close to a desired monthly cashflow.
But from our experience working with numerous businesses, we knew that sharing content on Facebook and Instagram alone wouldn't bring in any new clientele at scale.
It was crucial for the business's survival to adjust the strategy to generate awareness and traffic while, most importantly, getting appointments for its primary services: daycare, boarding, and grooming.
The Solution: Digital Dog Boarding Marketing
To acquire a significant number of new customers in a short period, it needed to run paid advertising campaigns online to reach people within a 10-mile radius. For that reason, we implemented campaigns targeting dog owners on two channels: Google and Facebook. This allowed us to reach thousands while driving users that were actively searching for their service offering.
Showing up for relevant searches with Google Ads for boarding & daycare
We implemented Google Search first, because it would generate high-quality leads fairly quickly. We ran ads on Google Search and would appear when someone would search for "dog boarding" or "dog grooming" within a 10-mile radius of the facility.
This led Bark Square to get over 150 calls from dog owners ready to purchase. Many callers went to Bark Square the first month the campaign ran.
Running impactful creative on Facebook and Instagram
To complement the Google Ads campaigns we ran, we executed a social campaign across Facebook and Instagram that focused on sharing images/videos of the dog facility. The photos and videos presented a list of the services Bark Square offered and helped showcase the facility's interior as the indoor dog park was a novel concept we knew would draw attention.
The use of social helped us reach thousands of people in the area and led to many phone calls and form submissions from interested people who were considering travel and would need a trustworthy daycare partner down the road.
Sales Process Improvement
While these campaigns ran, our team monitored every detail and communicated areas of opportunities with Bark Square. More specifically, we were listening to calls (with permission through a call disclaimer of course) to identify what should be said or shouldn't be said on the calls to increase the likelihood that potential customers would come into the facility for their chosen service.
This proved to be useful as we learned to increase actual show-ups by simply providing a call to action on the calls in the form of asking prospects when they'd like to schedule a visit.
Next Steps for Bark Square
Bark Square is now on track to reach the seven-figure mark. We're happy to have been able to help them get to where they are now and look forward to growing with them. Over the next several months, we expect to tackle website redesign, SEO strategy, email marketing, and more.
Conclusion
A company won't always get its marketing plan right the first time. But, it usually helps get another set of eyes to critique and determine what might be missing to reach its business goals. We've been there for Bark Square, and we can be there for you. Contact us.