The pet industry is booming and I see a lot of people doing OK in the business. It seems like in such a competitive environment, it would be difficult to really blow the lid off of your site with explosive business. But with the right Marketing, and a solid plan, it is doable. Based on the numbers and stats that you posted, it proves that there is room for not only many big players but also a wide variety of other sized sites as well. There is plenty of business to go around.

I am surprised though, that you left out the most solid of Marketing Strategies that is more sustainable long term with a lower cost of acquisition for new buyers as well. Especially considering that there are fanatical groups all over the world based on each breed of dog and the different species of all of the types of pets. A content based community driven by our love and concern for creating a great life for our pets in conjunction with our own, over-runs any one of the strategies that you mention above by themselves. Paid ads work great until the minute that you stop paying. Educating your audience about your products only goes so far. No one likes to read ads or sales material. People read what interests them. there are many different human interest angles that an be taken that have nothing to do with selling a product but build authority and trust at the same time.

Sites like Amazon had led many marketers to lose site of the various stages of the buyer journey and how to market to them. That ois there is only one stage of the journey on Amazon, the purchase. There is nothing social about amazon or informative. Amazon is about one thing and one thing only, closing the sale. Long term sustainability is not about closing the sale, it is about providing value to your user base, creating trust, authority and loyalty through helping them improve their quality of life and/or solving problems.

The marketing strategies that you speak about all reference selling, educating them to sell better to them, enticing them to buy with sales material. That will only go so far. Depending on whether your product is a one and done or a recurring buy product, focusing only on the sale is a lot of wasted energy,
When you are able to retain a buyers loyalty through low cost but extremely valuable content and they visit often enough to digest that content, getting the sale out of them becomes far easier and far less costly.

With Facebook, sharing content with less and less of your followers every year, social media is and should be a tool but not the only one. Website content is evergreen. You pay to have it created, maybe a little bit of pr in the beginning and then it is the gift that keeps on giving via ongoing traffic year after year if it is relevant. Building up a content library means ranking for thousands of keyword phrases which in turn drives more organic traffic.

When your only strategy is sales, your cost of acquisition skyrockets. Just look at the new seller failure rate on Amazon. It is awful because the focus is the purchase and very little is done to engage or extend any relationship. Amazon doesn’t allow sellers to contact buyers directly and will not share the mailing list but that is easily overcome when you focus your marketing off of Amazon. Sellers that do not market their products end up burning through their capital due to the unsustainable high cost of PPC and Amazons’ business killing practices.

While I agree that the marketing strategies that you suggest are part of the big picture, none of them will alone create a great business and even together still give you no advantage over the bigger competitors or retailers for that matter. Tie them to a high quality, value added content librtary that provides info and valuable solutiions to users and you have a long term traffic machine that drives itself once it is large enough.