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Four Simple Ways to Increase Holiday Boarding at Your Pet Daycare & Kennel

Last Updated: December 12, 2018

The time has come. Christmas is almost here. And with Christmas comes the long-term holiday boarders. The bread and butter of the pet daycare and kennel industry. Kids are going back to visit their parents and need to leave their fur babies with a boarder. Parents are going to visit their kids and grandkids and need to leave the pups at home.

First things first, if your business isn't currently going after holiday boarders, you're missing a huge potential revenue stream. As a small business owner, you need to make sure you have a constant source of varying income streams. If your grooming business slows down, your daycare business needs to pick up the slack, etc. So, first things first, start boarding. Second thing, follow the four tips below to start earning some extra income taking in the long-term holiday clients.

1. Offer Long-Term Discounts to Encourage People to take that Extra Bit of Vacation

One of the easiest way to increase the amount of time that your clients leave their pets at your facility is to introduce a long-term discount into your pricing plan. The same way that gyms give out discounts if you decide to sign a 3-month contract instead of a one-month contract, your business can leverage a long-term discount plan and get people to leave their pet for a bit longer. Let's use a simple $25/night boarding model. If you leave a pet for one week, that's $175 for the week. If you client was to leave their pet for two weeks, it'd be $350 dollars. However, you could easily publicize that you give out a 25% Weekly Discount for all weeks of boarding after two. You're only losing $50/week, but you're giving yourself the possibility of earning a substantial more. You might have some clients that are worried about $350 for two weeks of boarding, but the idea of saving $50 might be enough to convince them to take that extra week of vacation.

2. Create a Separate Page on Your Website Detailing the Logistics of Long-Term Boarding

If your business has solely focused on pet daycare and grooming, there's a good chance that your website doesn't talk about your long-term boarding options. That said, call up your website designer (or yourself) and get to work adding a new page to your website. There's nothing worse than an uninformative website that doesn't give people the information that they're searching for. Once you have the information on your website, make sure that you add some internal links, preferably from the homepage. If you don't link to your new page at all, it's what they call an orphan page and there's no way for the Google web crawlers to find it.

3. Start Doing Print Advertising to Let Clients Know about Your New Service

You might think that with the prevalence of social media that old fashion print advertising is dead, but you couldn't be anything further from the truth. My parents, the owners of two dogs that do a lot of pet boarding, don't have Facebook accounts and don't plan on getting them. They do, however, read the local newspaper every single day. If you're looking to target older pet owners that might have kids that live far away and they don't see often, you might want to focus your advertising efforts on print media. Have your graphic designer whip up a nice little newspaper ad.

4. Create a Localized Facebook Advertising Campaign to Spread the Word

If you're doggie daycare isn't known for doing long-term boarding, you're going to want to get the word out as soon as possible. One of the best ways is to create a localized Facebook advertising campaign that spreads the word among your geographic area. If you have a powerful Facebook fanbase, you can leverage these fans to broaden your daycare/kennel's geographic presence. To get started, create your Facebook advertising campaign and set the correct region. Figure out your ad spend and then create a nice, simple, advertisement telling people about your long-term holiday boarding service.

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