2026 Pet Business Marketing Strategy
- Use 2025 Engagement Data to Guide Strategy: Identify your top-performing social posts, most influential review phrases, and highest-converting booking channels to understand what drives customer decisions.
- Give Customers What They Love: Share adorable pet photos, seasonal promotions, grooming transformations, and pet care tips—paired with value-rich review language that highlights trust, care, and convenience.
- Adopt the Right Tools for Growth: Strengthen your 2026 marketing with online booking, automated review collection, social scheduling, analytics, Google Reserve, and AI search optimization to stay competitive in a fast-evolving pet care market.
Modern pet owners consider their pets to be a crucial part of their lives, with many people treating their four-legged family members more like children than animals. As a result, pet businesses thrived in 2025, but many in the pet care services industry found that competition continued to grow — especially online.
Today’s pet owners now consider quick booking, trusted reviews and engaging social content to be the standard for the businesses they rely on. This provides you with an opportunity for 2026: Use the lessons of 2025 to refine your marketing strategy and win more loyal customers.
The Pet Business Marketing Landscape in 2025
The demand for pet products and pet care services is on the rise, particularly as pet owners spend more time at home with their pets and frequenting pet-friendly locales. According to the American Pet Products Association, Americans spent more than $152 billion on pet products in 2024, proving that if you market your services correctly, your pet business can thrive in this dynamic economy.
The key, however, to your success as a small business owner is to understand the current marketing landscape and leverage the power of your 2025 marketing data. As you evaluate what worked well in 2025, you will want to consider the following:
- Which social posts got the most engagement on your Facebook, Instagram and TikTok pages? It was likely cute photos of the adorable animals who visit your business, information about your seasonal promotions or practical posts with actionable tips about caring for your animals.
- Which online reviews highlight what your customers value the most about your business? Look for buzzworthy keywords such as reliability, trustworthy staff, gentle care, fast service or easy online booking process.
- Where did your bookings come from? Consider whether you earned more bookings over the phone or through your online booking system. Know which channels lead to revenue growth for your business.
The end of the year is always a time for reflection. Before you explore the best content marketing strategies for pet businesses in 2026, you should consider what worked well in 2025, and learn how you can turn that insight into action in 2026.
Looking to the Future — How You Can Create a Strategic 2026 Marketing Plan
Collecting and reviewing your marketing data from 2025 is only the first step. Next, you have to learn how to transform those insights into action in the new year. The emerging 2026 pet business marketing trends combine the power of personalization with the intuition of advancing technology, requiring you to create a refined marketing strategy that uses the leading online marketing tools in the industry.
You can turn your 2025 insights into a targeted 2026 marketing strategy by taking the following steps:
Post What Works — Give Your Customers What They Love to See
As the old saying goes, you don’t need to fix what’s not broken. You know what your customers love to see on social media, so give them more of what they want! At a time when social media can be flooded with divisive posts and loud opinions, social users have never craved adorable pet content more. Some ideas for 2026 social content include:
- Before and after grooming photos of the impossibly cute pets who visit you each day.
- Pet spotlights of your regular customers who come into your business.
- Seasonal promotions that highlight the products and services that you offer.
- Pet care tips that make life a little bit easier for modern pet owners, who truly care about their pet’s physical and emotional well-being.
Leverage the Power of Review Language in Your Marketing Materials
Consider the words that your customers use to describe your business, and weave those key phrases into your marketing copy. Remember, your prospective customers are searching for pet service businesses that align with their core values, which are likely the same values that your current customers have. Powerful phrases such as “gentle and loving care” and “personalized service” should be incorporated into your social content and marketing copy in order to attract the attention of customers who are searching for high-quality service in a crowded market. Use words such as caring, safe and friendly frequently in order to appeal to your like-minded customers.
Promote the Power and Ease of Online Booking
Online booking is no longer the exception. In 2025, it was clear that online booking was the primary channel for the pet services industry, so it’s incredibly important to use an online booking tool in order to attract and retain the most loyal customers. If you already have an online booking tool in place (and you really should!), make sure your customers know that they can quickly and easily reserve a spot online. Online booking is vitally important for groomers, veterinary clinics, pet salons and other pet care businesses that rely heavily on appointments in order to streamline their workflow and maximize revenue.
Using the Best Marketing Tools for Pet Care Services
There are many marketing tools for pet care services businesses, but not all marketing platforms are created equal. It’s important to invest in a local marketing platform that provides the tools that small- and medium-sized businesses need to grow their online presence, broaden their reach and boost their revenue.
Surefire Local is the leading local marketing tool for the pet care services industry, allowing you to:
- Schedule your social posts in advance. You spend way too much time taking care of animals to worry about manually updating your social accounts. With Surefire Local, you can plan, draft and publish posts in advance across multiple platforms, allowing you to give your followers the adorable content they crave while focusing on the animals that you are caring for.
- Effectively manage your reputation online. Our platform allows you to automate review requests after appointments, allowing you to gain trusted feedback instantly without a lot of effort on your part. These reviews can easily be used for future social content, allowing you to share valued customer testimonials with your followers.
- Leverage the power of Google Reserve. You don’t have to make your customers work harder than necessary just to get an appointment. Instead, you can enable seamless online booking, allowing pet owners to secure appointments from their search results in just a few quick clicks.
- Oversee your marketing results in action with a user-friendly analytics dashboard. On this innovative and visually-stunning dashboard, you can see which posts, campaigns and booking channels performed best in 2025, allowing you to create a targeted marketing strategy for 2026.
In the past year, you have likely seen your business grow in both expected and unexpected ways. Before you can move forward with confidence in 2026, you need to be able to accurately reflect on what worked in 2025. Surefire Local allows you to easily understand the past so that you can create the future that you both want and need for your business.
Future-Proof Your Marketing
The marketing landscape of tomorrow will be dominated by AI search and zero-click visibility, requiring you to take action now. Surefire Local allows you to leverage the power of AI search and zero-click results, positioning you for success in 2026. The pet care service companies that take advantage of this opportunity will win, both in the short- and long-term, making now the right time to refine your strategy and invest in the right marketing tools for pet care services. With Surefire Local, you will enjoy premium visibility, improved trust among your target audience and easy conversations, allowing you to automate your marketing efforts and achieve your desired results.
How to Market Your Pet Care Business in 2026
Still wondering how to market your pet services business in 2026? These concrete examples can help you start formulating a strategy that is sure to work:
- Schedule your January posts now, and create content that focuses on your New Year pet wellness packages.
- Share a weekly customer review that highlights the exceptional service that you offer, allowing you to establish trust and credibility in the local market.
- Activate Google Reserve so that your customers no longer have to search your website to fill out your online booking form. Enabling this feature allows busy pet parents to secure their appointment with you in two quick clicks.
Begin the New Year With Fresh Buzz About Your Pet Business With Surefire Local
2025 gave you the playbook that you needed to succeed — now it’s time to put it into action for 2026. Surefire Local allows you to take advantage of the emerging 2026 pet business marketing trends and make the most out of your marketing budget. By allowing you to take advantage of AI search and zero-click visibility, our innovative local marketing platform helps you personalize your promotions while attracting the attention of your target audience.
Schedule your demo today, and begin a new year of marketing with a fresh start.
