Content strategy is key for dog trainer business marketing. If you feel as if you’re pulling content topics out of thin air — with no plan or big picture about how your efforts will build your business — you’re definitely not alone! 

While creating something is always better than doing nothing, content marketing is most effective when it’s done with a strategy in mind. But how do you come up with a strategy? And what makes it … well… strategic?

There are multiple components to consider so let’s dive straight in…

What do you want to achieve?

Firstly, what are your goals for your content marketing? What are you hoping your efforts will achieve for your business?

Are you trying to:

• Get new visitors to your website?
• Promote your expertise in a specific area?
• Teach skills or create reference materials for existing clients?
• All of the above?

As you might guess, the goals you want to achieve will strongly influence the topics you choose to cover.

Who are you creating the content for?

Our next consideration is your audience for each of these goals.

A completely new web visitor will have a very different level of knowledge than someone who has already worked with you. So, a piece created for the naive person will, by necessity, be very different to that aimed at someone with prior knowledge of the topic. This will mean that you may need to create multiple pieces of content around the same topic so you can aim each piece at the correct audience.

For example, you could create a post or video about teaching the very first steps of loose leash walking and use it to attract new visitors. But for your existing clients you could do a follow-up piece about troubleshooting the typical problems they might experience during the training.

How are you going to promote it?

If you create content but no one sees it, you’ve wasted all that effort. So, a key part of a successful strategy is working out how you’ll get your content in front of the right eyeballs. Let’s look at our options.

Established clients and followers

Let’s say you’ve put together some awesome resources for your clients. The most obvious way to get those resources out to them is by email. You can either use your email marketing newsletter or direct individuals to the resource when appropriate. For example, after having a session with a client working on loose leash walking you could email them the link to your troubleshooting guide — which is a post on your blog with a video from your YouTube channel.

If you have followers (people who are on your email list who haven’t yet signed up to work with you), your email newsletter is a great way to share your content with them. But you could also share content with your social media followers by creating smaller bits of content that direct people to check out the bigger pieces.

New web visitors

Attracting new visitors, to get fresh eyeballs on your business, needs a slightly different approach. These people may not know you exist, so to attract them you need to make your content discoverable — so they come across it during their day-to-day online activities. There are three main options:

Appear in search results

Top of the list of ways to do that is creating content that ranks in Google search. For these pieces you would include targeted keywords and phrases; the sort of thing people might type in as a search term. Good examples might be “How do I get my dog to stop barking?” or “3 dog-friendly restaurants in Raleigh, NC.” 

Not sure how to go about writing for SEO? We’ve got you covered. Read more about creating SEO friendly content here and local SEO here.

Get backlinks

Another way of getting your material out there is to create content that other businesses will want to reference. If someone links from their site to your content, you get what’s known as a “backlink.” The more backlinks your site has, the higher you’ll rank in search — but also, the more likely it is that someone new to your business will find you.

If you’d like to see an excellent example of a site that provides great referential material, check out Eileen and Dogs. She writes well-researched and presented articles on dog training and behavior. Many people link to her blog posts when they need to reference something that’s both scientifically sound and easily accessible to the lay reader.

Use social media to attract new people

If attracting new people to your business using social media is your primary goal you might need to tweak your writing style a bit. So, if the title and key words for SEO need to be very literal, for social they need to scream “click me!!!.” 

Although click bait is to be avoided, you can change the title of a post — or make the headline of your social media content — eye catching by injecting humor, using unexpected associations, or dialing up the emotional wording. 

For example, instead of “3 Dog-Friendly Restaurants in Raleigh, NC”, something like “3 Local Date Night Ideas for You and Your Dog” is far more likely to grab attention. You can find more about using social media to attract new clients here.

As you can see, you have options when it comes to topics and promotional approaches. Although each piece of content can tick a few boxes, it makes sense to focus on one specific goal as a primary reason for creating it.

So, the short answer to “What’s a good content marketing strategy?” is: 

“One that allows you to easily choose goals and promotional strategies for the content you create.”

How frequently are you going to post?

The last part of the puzzle is working out how often you need to create those specific, targeted pieces of content to reach your goals.

For example, Click and Repeat’s two big goals could be to: 

1. Engage existing followers and subscribers who aren’t quite ready to sign up. (In this industry, folks are often looking for marketing tips, even if they’re not ready to overhaul their website yet.)
2. Create content to bring new clients to the business.

With these goals in mind, we might choose to alternate — one week the post will be targeted mostly at the first goal, then the next week it will be aimed at the second goal.

But strategy doesn’t stop there, because one of the goals is to bring new people in, and as we’ve seen, there are multiple options for that. So, when addressing goal two (bring in new clients) we might alternate blog posts that aim at attracting people via search and posts that aim at attracting people via social. 

Bringing it all together

When you put all of these factors together, you end up with an outline for the type of content you’re aiming for — which can make brainstorming individual topics and ideas easier.

But keep in mind that content marketing plans are more of a roadmap and guide than a set-in-stone directive. You’re aiming to average things out over time, not stick to a strict schedule of topics and promotional approaches.

Let’s take a look at what a content marketing plan for January might look like. Imagine you’re planning on publishing a new post every Wednesday. Based on the goals above, you could have something that looks like this:

• W1: How do I get my dog to stop barking? (Post is SEO-friendly to attract new clients to your site.) 
• W2: 5 Ways to Use Mat Work in Your Dog’s Daily Life — and Save Your Sanity. (Aimed at creating engagement with your existing clients.) 
• W3: 3 Local Date Night Ideas for You and Your Dog (A social media-friendly post to attract new clients to your site.) 
• W4: Troubleshooting Loose Leash Walking: Beyond the Basics (Creates engagement with existing clients.) 

But what if it’s the third week in January, and you just can’t write that “3 local date ideas” post — your brain just doesn’t want to go there? Well, you don’t have to! You’re not going to mess anything up if you do the “troubleshooting loose leash walking” one first and then do “date ideas” the following week.

If your marketing strategy goal is to have roughly 50% of posts aimed at attracting new people and 50% of posts aimed at engaging existing clients, you’d still be meeting those broader ratios over a longer period.  

Having a well thought out marketing strategy gives you the flexibility to make changes and go with the flow — without throwing your goals out with yesterday’s vacuum cleaner hairball. And a strategy saves you a lot of wasted time and effort because you’re no longer creating content just for the sake of creating content. That’s got to be a win in anyone’s book!

Now you have everything you need to create your own content marketing plan, why not get started and finally get the marketing results you deserve? Don’t forget to leave a comment and let us know how it goes!