(Newswire.net — January 2, 2014) Eagle, Idaho — Equestrian professionals are quickly realizing that marketing in the horse industry is rapidly changing. What once was a traditional marketplace with successful catalog and magazine advertising has rapidly turned into an Internet dominated field. Many horseman still enjoy receiving their Dover Saddlery catalog in the mail but the days of strictly shopping through post office delivered media is long gone. Replaced by a quickly growing market of web savvy horse lovers the Pony Express has taken a back seat to internet sales, email distributed deals and viral Facebook postings. With an increase in technology and cell phone use, horseman across the country are connected online like never before. This growing market of web users has learned how easy it is to purchase tack and supplies, read about supplements and acquire information about their horses health, equine products and riding tips that they never had access to before. For equestrian based businesses now building their marketing plans for the New Year, an Internet marketing strategy will be crucial for success.
Web marketing continues to grow at a rapid rate and understanding how horse savvy consumers search the web and what they’re looking for online allows businesses to build a strong foundation for cultivating rapport with clients and increasing sales. There is a lot of data available about web user behavior that is often overlooked. Daniel O’Donnell, owner of Equine Marketing Success™, (http://EquineMarketingSuccess.com)a marketing firm devoted strictly to marketing equestrian businesses, shares his thoughts about social media in a recent webinar. “With social media continuing to be a hot topic for equestrian businesses, it is surprising how many companies don’t have the right tools in place to take advantage of this growing marketplace. Each social media portal has a different approach to reaching consumers and it is important to understand when to use Twitter, how to optimize Facebook postings, what content to put on Google+, and which information is best delivered through a YouTube video. This knowledge is what allows for a successful social media strategy that fully engages web users”. Sales through social media have been hard to come by for many business owners and countless smaller businesses with limited resources have opted to avoid social marketing completely.
“As it is getting harder and more expensive to gain top placement within Google search queries, small equestrian based businesses need to employ a strategic approach to social media marketing that reduces the amount of time spent writing and responding”, states O’Donnell in a post webinar interview. “And at the same time it is essential to multiply the number of marketing channels and targeted web users who will receive their marketing message. For a small business, time and efficiency are the preemptive factors in running a high impact social media strategy”. (http://equinemarketingsuccess.com/social-media/)Alleviating these two roadblocks and creating a simple process that can easily be employed can give horse professionals hope that 2014 will be the year that social media will have a significant impact on business growth.