Pet ownership significantly jumped in the past decades. So, if you need to target pet owners, we’ve got some insights that will help you understand and attract your target audience. As of 2024:
- 66% of homes in the US (86.9M homes) own a pet.
- 33% of pet owners are millennials, 25% are Gen Z, and 24% are baby boomers.
- Yearly, dog owners spend $730 on their dogs.
These, and other insights about pet owners’ behaviors, demographics, and else, will help you successfully launch campaigns for your business.
So, let’s look at how to target pet owners and run effective campaigns to sell your pet products or services.
In this article, we talk about how to implement some of the best strategies to target pet owners in 2024:
- Targeting pet owners with your Facebook page
- Targeting pet owners by using targeted consumer email lists
- Discovering pet owners on social media (UGC creators, pet influencers, etc.)
- Deeper analysis of your pet owners customer base for better targeting
How to Target Pet Owners with a Facebook Page
Suppose you’re the owner of a pet shop or a veterinary office, in need of a Facebook strategy that will help you expand your market reach and generate more leads. Who would your ideal customers be?
Clearly, they are the people who are interested in pets and pet care products and services. Let’s discuss how can you get them to notice your business.
Targeting Pet Owners with Facebook Ads
Facebook with its 2.95 Billion active users is an excellent tool for lead generation since no other advertising channel can equal the level of detail that the platform provides.
With Facebook’s Ads Manager you can reach specific audiences based on their interests. Facebook determines interests and assigns them to users. Then, it analyzes the pages users like and the content they engage with.
However, it’s important to distinguish between liking a page and being genuinely interested in a topic. So, when you select interests use the “but nobody else” criterion to define and isolate your target audience.
So, if you focus on precise interests that resonate with your audience, you can optimize your campaigns and minimize budget waste when targeting pet owners.
Let’s quickly go through the process of setting up Facebook ads that target pet owners.
Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that the following audience groups are just examples. They do not promise that your ad efforts will result in sales. A variety of things, such as ad copy and creativity, go into creating a successful ad campaign. These templates can be used as a starting point for your own targeting approach.
The first steps of setting pet campaigns are:
- Choosing campaign objective – The objective depends on the nature of the campaign you wish to run. So, if you’re looking to boost engagement on your Facebook page, then that would be your campaign objective.
- Setting up an ad campaign – This means defining your target audience which happens to be the biggest challenges to most business owners. But, we share the best and easiest way to do it.
1. Location Targeting
When it comes to defining your target audience, this is the first set to consider. Facebook has advanced location targeting settings that allow you to target people owning a pet by country, state, zip code, and even some specific roads. You can also select to exclude places from your query that may have audiences you don’t want to reach.
2. Demographic Targeting
In this section, we can set the language, age, and gender of our target group.
Also, if you’d like to target people who are speaking certain languages, this is the place where you can make the appropriate setting.
3. Detailed Targeting
The detailed targeting section allows you to dive into the specifics of who you’re targeting, and narrow down your target audience. You do this by leveraging demographics, interests, and behaviors, which Facebook collects on a daily basis from its users.
For example, we can set our pet campaigns to appear in front of prospects who have expressed an interest in dogs or cats. We can also set the interest targeting to spot people who had shown interest in purchasing pet food. With detailed targeting, you can also exclude certain interests where needed.
Go ahead and test these settings and parameters until you are satisfied with your target audience. .
As a matter of fact, the Facebook ads platform has some incredible targeting capabilities, but with the latest limitations that Apple’s update imposes targeting individual pet owners can be hard.
Fortunately, there is an effective way to bypass these limitations and target pet lovers on Facebook. Read on to find out our prime strategy for targeting pet owners.
Targeting Pet Owners By Using Consumer Email Lists
The Facebook ads platform allows you to import email addresses from potential consumers as your target audience, and run ads only to users within that database. This is referred to as creating a custom audience.
A Facebook custom audience enables you to precisely identify a target market for your pet care products and services.
Due to the high targeting control, this is the most ROI-positive way to target pet owners. When creating a custom audience you can import pet owners’ email addresses and run your ads only on the people from that list.
The best part about these custom audiences is that Facebook doesn’t ask for confirmation that the people in your database are opt-in on your list. This way you can target pet owners, dog influencers, etc. on Facebook with ease.
Here’s how to create a custom audience on Facebook with pet owners’ email addresses:
1. In the Facebook Ads Manager click on the Create Audience field
2. Next, choose from where you’d like to source your information.
3. After clicking the Customer List option, you can begin importing your customer list. You can do this in two ways:
- By importing a customer list from Mailchimp
- By importing a CSV or text file (pay attention to your formattings here, you want to be sure that Facebook understand all of the data you’re giving)
When you’re done, hit Import and Create, and you’re good to go!
Discover social media profiles of pet owners
Now it’s time to cover how to get the email list of the pet owners you want to reach.
We have one of the largest social media databases in the world with 80M+ of profiles that can be accessed and filtered through our dashboard.
In this screenshot below we can see how I was able to identify 81k profiles that have used the hashtags #PetLovers and #Petsofinstagram.
There’s no limit to the number of hashtags you can add so those 81k results can easily become 500k or more.
Now, not all those people that use these hashtags are relevant to you so you can also combine other filters like:
- Location
- Gender
- Keywords in bio (you can use this to go very niche)
- Number of fans
- Or any of the other 50+ filters.
Once you’re finished you can export the list of profiles and get a CSV with all the data points we have for every profile. You will also get verified public email addresses that you can use in your ad campaign or to reach out to them for a collaboration.
This way you can find and engage with pet influencers, pet owners, and UGC creators that are relevant to your niche.
In-depth customer analysis for precise targeting
If you already have a customer base of pet owners, having a better understanding about their interest and preferences will significantly improve your strategy.
You can do this by using the Enrichment feature on our dashboard.
The process is very simple:
- Sign up to our creator discovery dashboard
- Upload your customer email list
- We match your list with our 80M+ database of social media profiles
- We give you back a list of all public social media profiles connected to the emails in your list with 40+pieces of information about each profile.
This way you not only understand who your customers are, but you will also find out specific details about them like the type of pet they have, the size of their audience, whether there are content creators with large audience, etc.
Moreover, having a clear picture about who your customers are will help you make informed decisions about product development and you can invest your time and resources in areas that will give you highest returns.
To sum up
Whether you’re a pet shop selling pet accessories, or you’re about to start a drop shipping business for pet care products and services, we at can help you effectively target pet lovers.
Other than the marketing strategies we mentioned above, you can also sneak a peek into your competitors’ followers, get their emails, and target them with data driven marketing campaigns.
So if you’re ready to take your pet campaign to the next level, schedule a quick call with our team and let’s discuss the best strategy to target pet owners for your business.
