Project Background

Dog Food Advisor was originally founded by dentist, Mike Sagman, who tragically lost his dog after the US melamine pet food scandal. Honourably, Mike vowed not to let the same happen to anyone else's dog. 

As such, he set up Dog Food Advisor as a free website & email service on canine nutrition.

The website gets 350k+ monthly visitors. It gives impartial dog food star ratings based on the quality & quantity of ingredients. The email service has over 1 million subscribers. It alerts pet parents to dangerous dog food recalls, so that they can keep their good dog from eating bad food.

In 2023, Dog Food Advisor was bought by Wag! The new team wanted to increase the brand's social media presence, but while they had talented writers & canine nutrition experts, they didn't have a social media specialist. 

Which is why things were looking so pear-shaped...! 

By Dec 2024, Facebook followers were dropping at a rate of -400 per month. Reach & engagement were at an all-time low, with each post getting the ol' embarassing 2 likes... from Wag! employees. Meanwhile, a 1 year old Instagram account had under 50 followers & zero engagement. 

Action

When Wag! approached me to improve the Dog Food Advisor's social presence, there was very littloe in their own social analytics to steer us towards success, so I took the following actions: 

1. Competitor analysis - I looked at successful social media accounts handling canine nutrition for content ideas & formats that would grow & engage the audience. 
2. Newsletter deep dive - I reviewed the brand's Aweber stats to see which topics generated the most opens & click throughs from the newsletter audience.
3. Website assessment - I used SEMrush to determine what questions & topics were bringing people to the website via organic search, as well as which articles were getting the most traffic.  

These analyses told me that Dog Food advisor fans tend to be well-educated, independent thinkers who care about scientifically-backed canine nutrition advice. It also told me that they are, what I affectionately call, a bad news crowd. 

So too, they were always up for great deals on dog food. 

With this in mind, I devised a new social media strategy to deliver clever content through bad news spectacles, with a sprinkling of delicious dog food offers thrown in. It was a hit!

Results

After just 6 months, Dog Food Advisor's Instagram presence had gone from a standing start to over 1.5k followers - that's a 3000% increase on the 50 followers they'd gleaned in the space of their 1st year. At the time of writing, the account gets over 20k views per month with a 15% engagement rate... and both figures are going up.

Meanwhile, Facebook is gaining 280 followers per month - instead of losing 400. Monthly reach is 220k+ per month (785% increase) while content views are over 465k per month (4600% increase). Finally, Every. Single. Post. gets far more than the ol' 2 likes. 

In fact, most posts get 10s of 1000s of views, and several hundred interactions. I told you I know what I'm doing!  

If you'd like to see similar results for your brand, drop me a line at [email protected].