project background

Leaning heavily on traditional marketing methods (TV ads/catalogues/word of mouth/direct mailings) when the pandemic hit and the world leaned further into social media than ever before, PetMeds® struggled with brand messaging, tone of voice, consistency across channels and producing quality content that resonated with their various communities.

The goals were multi-faceted:

1. Optimize the social media profiles and bring a continuity and consistency to the over all brand image

2. Create a cohesive editorial and content calendar that aligned with PetMeds® marketing initiatives as well as pet related (or contextually relevant) holidays and events.

3. Enhance brand recognition and work towards increasing followers across platforms.

4. Properly build out and optimize their robust, but under-utilized enterprise level social media management tool.

   1. So that social campaigns and stats could be better tracked, reported on and generate more useful/actionable data.

   2. So that community engagement & moderation responsibilities could be handed off to the Social Care Team division of the Customer Care Team.

creative process

After doing a detailed audit across PetMeds® social channels, it was determined the key KPI was best centered around community engagement.

Pets Are Family

I introduced PetMeds® Family Shares and #PetMedsFamily to help shape brand persona around the concept that PetMeds® was just like your friendly mom & pop corner pharmacy but— for pets. A professional, but friendly place where you're seen as a valued member of the greater community as well as part of the family because pets are family. And the thing everyone knows about raising a family is that, 'it takes a village.' The message I wanted to convey to our community was:

PetMeds® is part of your village. We're family and we're all in this together. In fact, we're pet parents, too and we get it. We're your loyal partner who's in it for the long haul and we consider it a privilege to support you in caring for your furry BFF. We understand how important it is that your pet is healthy, happy and living his/her best life.

Pets, Not People

To that end, I was intentional about crafting the brand narrative around the 'pets, not people' paradigm. In the pet health & wellness space, my angle was the exact opposite of how competitors approached their social media messaging in that— industry wide, the emphasis overwhelmingly revolves around how pets benefit humans.

Telling The Story Differently: The Village = We

In travel journalism, the cardinal rules are, 'avoid cliches' and 'tell the story no one else has.' A worthy challenge that tests writers of all skill levels, that rings particularly true when writing about places everyone's been/heard of (think NYC, LA or the Eiffel Tower.) This story telling principle was equally true in the crowded pet health & wellness space.

What's true for pet parents of all ages is: they LOVE talking about THEIR pets in their same way grandparents LOVE talking about THEIR grand-babies. Creating a space & place for the pet parent community to have authentic conversation with PetMeds® as their Trusted Pet Health Experts was essential.

final results

With an average community engagement rate in the 30% range, PetMeds® was well ahead of its major industry competitors (% engagement to account following.) We had a monthly average reach of 5M and 300k followers across 10 channels.

Branding & Messaging

After 1.5 year push, community members recognized and begun to refer to PetMeds® in their own posts using #PetMedsFamily across channels. PetMeds® pet parents loved participating in our #PetMedsFamilyShares Show & Tell posts and various contests, especially the weekly 'help us turn this photo into a meme' Caption Contest. They were also delighted when we began regularly featuring their pets on PetMeds® social channels through sharing/re-posting their user generated content (UGC.)

The space & place community engagement strategy also served as a fear alleviating measure. Many pet parents (like many online shoppers) are afraid of being scammed by shady online companies who swindle people in an emotionally vulnerable state (an ill/injured pet fits this profile) out of hard earned money.

The more authentic conversation we engaged in with pet parents, the less suspicious and more confident they became that PetMeds® was a legit business and worthy of its Your Trusted Pet Health Expert tag line. This reassurance to customers was especially important as PetMeds® business was 100% online and the only 'store front' customers could access was via social media profiles/company pages.

Scheduling & Content

The editorial and content calendars were planned out for an entire year, across all channels— significant as there was nothing in place when I came on board. The social media management scheduling tools were properly set up/optimized for streamlined work flow, partitioned teams based on function (Social Media Team vs. Community Engagement/Moderation Team), automations/tagging filters/IFFT rules were set up, tested and implemented.

Onboarding & Training

I trained and onboarded a team of 9 (including the new in-house Organic Social Media Manager) and prepped them to take over the community engagement and moderation role using their social media management tool. This included developing community engagement & customer service through social media best practices guidelines.

The PetMeds® social media management ecosystem successfully transitioned back into to an in-house operation and the entire team was well prepared to begin the next phase of the company's digital branding transformation journey.