The secret world of dog influencers

As a research-obsessed ex-journalist with a penchant for full-on brand immersion, turning my scruffy mutt into an influencer was inevitable.

Working with pet brands gave me the perfect excuse to turn my hobby for following cute dogs and cats on Instagram into a semi-professional pastime.

My fox terrier, Margot, launched into the limelight on Instagram two years ago and, almost immediately, my social media day job became an evening job…and a night job and a weekend job.

Being a dog influencer is both time consuming and extremely addictive. It’s also really, really fun, especially when you can tell yourself you’re doing it as part of your job. Even my social-media obsessed children think I’ve lost the plot. But hey, Margot has more followers than either of them, so…

Margot’s one of more than four million pets in the UK earning money, free stuff, likes and comments by simply strutting her four-legged stuff on social. And to be fair, she and I are only very small fry as influence goes, with a mere 12.4K followers on Instagram (her engagement is pretty good though, in case you’re looking to hire her).

According to American web hosting company, GoDaddy, the more serious entre-paw-neurs were on target to earn an average of £15,224 in 2022, with animal-earned funds used as side-hustles by almost £1.9 million UK pet owners. Incredibly, for 832,000 of us, our pet’s income has become a main source of income.

Margot still has a long way to go.

Aside from meeting some very funny humans pretending to be dogs, supporting my dog’s not insignificant rise in popularity gives me some invaluable insight into how the nation’s furry social communities function. It’s very handy for the job I do.

As Instagram saturates with dog and cat influencers and TikTok follows, not too far behind, a pet brand’s ability to capitalise can only get trickier.  The audience is getting tougher to reach, as more and more humans create accounts for their pets. Paid ads will get your brand on the feeds, but winning over the dog-owning audience is the real challenge.

This is why brand engagement should never be overlooked and why quality content should always be important. Connecting with your audience inspires long-term loyalty. It’s what we all learned in Marketing School, isn’t it? A carefully researched, planned and executed influencer strategy is the low-cost, slow-burn activity that can help future proof any brand.

Through my ongoing foray into the socialised dog space, I’ve noticed how engagement can drop drastically as soon as accounts starts blatantly plugging a product or brand. As animal owners we’re definitely getting bored of the traditional brand ambassador model of old. I want to see Tilly the whippet doing something funny, silly or heartwarming. I’m not too interested in her telling me all about the flea spray she’s just agreed to promote.

And dogs endlessly posing next to bags of tasty food with a long product-related caption? Please don’t. It’s time to up the ante.

Lots of brands have cottoned on. These are the brands that are working their brand reps a little harder, commissioning them with content briefs that are topical, or in line with a campaign that resonates beyond product selling. Increasingly, they’re allowing their products to simply exist in each influencer’s space, without dominating it. They realise that it’s far better to be part of the pack than to try and start one of your own. The key to building loyalty through canine community is to infiltrate not dominate.

Back on Margot’s Instagram feed, Tilly the whippet just posted a reel that brightened up my day enough to like, comment and follow.

Oh, and she’s wearing that fabulous sweater brand again…