Looking ahead and want to bring in more clients so you can hit your financial goals in 2026? Is your year off to a slow start and you want to jumpstart things to help fill out your schedule?
This week we hosted a Facebook live to talk about Marketing a Dog Training Business in 2026 — including how marketing works, from a strategy perspective, how to choose which marketing tactics to try, narrowing your focus for your target customers, and comparing tactics to determine what’s really moving the meter for YOUR business.
Recording Notes & Summary
What Marketing Actually Is (And Why That Matters)
Marketing isn’t branding.
It isn’t social media.
It isn’t “posting consistently.”
Marketing is the process of taking someone who has never heard of you and getting them ready to buy.
That means it includes everything that happens before someone hands over money:
- The Google search
- The website visit
- The contact form
- The follow-up email
- The decision to sign up
If any of those steps are weak, your funnel leaks.
The Customer Journey (And Why Most Funnels Leak)
In marketing we talk about that behavior chain in 2 ways. The first way we talk about it is as a customer journey.
A custom journey is the particular process one customer takes to become a customer. They begin as a random stranger, who has no idea you exist. Then they begin down a journey, where they interact with your brand or company. (Marketers call each of these interactions a “touch point.”)
They go from random stranger to someone who knows you exist, but who you don’t know anything about yet. Then, with any luck, you get to know a bit about them – they call or email or you meet them at an event. From there, hopefully they make a purchase, then become a customer. This process can be quick (a single day!) or slow (months or years).
In the Facebook live, we walked through a simple example: A dog jumps on Aunt Mary → Owner decides she needs help → Googles “dog trainer” → Finds your website → Contacts you → Signs up.
That’s a customer journey.
The other way Marketers talk about that behavior chan is as a marketing funnel.
A marketing funnel takes your customer journeys and looks at them in aggregate. In essence, a marketing funnel looks at how many people are making it from one step to the next.
Our goal is to get as many people as possible from the top of the funnel to the bottom. Where most business owners go wrong, is that they don’t understand that each piece of marketing you do should flow into the next… That leads them to end up with a leaky funnel.
When you choose marketing tactics, you want to think carefully about how you’re going to get people from each piece of your marketing down the funnel, and one step closer to hiring you! You don’t put up road blocks that make it harder for someone who wants to hire you to give you money.
Most trainers focus only on the bottom (“Why aren’t people signing up?”) instead of looking at where people are falling out along the way. If something about your marketing isn’t working — stop and ask if it’s clear at each step of your funnel what the next step is for the people in it.
Marketing works best when each step intentionally leads to the next.
You Don’t Need to Do Everything
One of the biggest mistakes trainers make is trying to do all the marketing tactics:
You don’t need to do all of it. You don’t even need to do most of it. What you do need is a goal for your marketing and a few tactics that cover each of the different parts of your funnel.
When creating your marketing plan, keep it simple. Do a few things well. Then review and adjust monthly.
Not sure which tactics to try? I recommend working on your Google Business Profile, and then choosing either ads or Facebook groups depending on whether you have more time or more money to invest at the moment.
Start With the Right Goal
Your marketing goal shouldn’t be to “post more.” It should be specific — and it should be based on the number of clients you need, so you can pay yourself what you want to make.
That means:
- Calculate what you need monthly.
- Divide by what you charge per client.
- That is the number of clients you need your marketing to bring you each month.
That number becomes your marketing target.
If you need 10 new clients per month, that’s the goal… and the question becomes: what will actually get you there?
Is Your Marketing Working?
It’s easy to get stuck throwing spaghetti at the wall without really knowing what stuck. To evaluate which marketing methods are working and which aren’t, I recommend calculating your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
The formula is:
Amount Spent on Marketing ÷ Number of New Clients = CAC
If you spend $30 on an ad and get 3 clients, your CAC is $10 per client.
But is that good?
There are two additional things we need to consider to answer that question.
First, we want to make sure it’s not costing you more to acquire a customer than you will make from that customer. So we’ll look at that next, so that you can figure out how much are you making from any one customer.
Then we need to know how it compares to other marketing tactics. That is, go through the math for multiple tactics and compare… keeping in mind that clients often interact with multiple marketing touchpoint throughout their journey. So for steps earlier in the marketing funnel, we may need to look at conversion rates instead. But we’ll set that aside for now.
To figure out how much you make from a typical client, we’re back to a bit more math:
(Income – Expenses) ÷ Number of Clients = Profit Per Client
So if you make $3000, your non-marketing expenses each month are $1500, and you work with 30 clients during that month:
(3000 – 1500) ÷ 30 = $50 Profit Per Client
If you make $50 in profit per client and it costs you $10 to acquire them, that’s profitable.
If it costs you $150 to acquire them and you only make $50, that’s a problem.
The goal is to build a money machine:
Put $1 in → Get more than $1 out.
When you take that and then calculate out your Customer Acquisition Cost for different marketing tactics, you can then compare those tactics to find the ones that are performing best. For example:
- Maybe Facebook costs $30 for an ad that got us 3 new clients — that’s a CAC of $10/client.
- Maybe networking costs $50 to bring dessert for a lunch and learn and got us 10 new clients — that’s a CAC of $5/client.
- Maybe a booth at a live event cost us $300 and got us 2 new clients — that’s a CAC of $150/client.
The best CAC? Networking… even though the Facebook ad cost less money as a tactic. Also, even though networking in this example also got us the most clients, even if it hadn’t, but had the lowest CAC, it would still be the best option to try and scale first.
(Want more on how to build your own veterinary referral network? Here’s our recording from Building a Veterinary Referral Network for Your Dog Training Business with Liz Machaffie)
Want to Go Deeper?
If you want more structured support with this kind of thinking, we cover it in depth inside our Trainer’s Growth Group, which is available on its own or 3-months come included when you buy our The Blueprint to a Six-Figure Dog Training Business course.
And if you’re specifically looking for help with your website or 1:1 consulting, you can find me at ClickandRepeat.com.
