Cats and Dogs Boost Your Business By 300%. Here’s How.

In this Marketing Report:

• Cats and Dogs Help With Visibility and Engagement
• Pets bred for the web
• Pets and viral content
• Conclusion
• Methodology

It’s the age-old question that has endured ever since the creation of the internet: are you a cat person or a dog person? Or do you love both cats and dogs?

For brands, the issue may be more than a matter of preference. It turns out that, as cats and dogs have grown in popularity throughout the years, so has companies’ inclination to boost their engagement and visibility with pictures, posts, and commercials featuring the two iconic pets.

Cats and Dogs Help With Visibility and Engagement

Across all channels, pets have been shown to improve social media engagement rates, which according to Nichefire, can rise up to 63% higher than those for the average business post.

Similarly, a study by NewsWhip revealed that, on average, a brand post with a pet resulted in an increase in comments of approximately 89%, while the average increase in likes was around 19%.

Cats: the no. 1 views-booster

Starting in 2021 and going as far back as 2009, we noticed that the cat ads have seen a whopping increase of 2,700% views when compared to the average number of views of any single video on the brand’s Youtube channel.

Additionally, 32% of the cat commercials belonged to British brands, including Sainsbury’s, Cravendale, and O2, leading us to conclude that the United Kingdom is, without a doubt, a cat nation. It’s followed closely by Germany, whose cat ads represented 20% of our list.

Dogs: an honorable second

Out of the dog ads, ranging from 2008 to 2021, the increase in views was lower than cats’. Dog ads accounted for 547.6% more views for their brands on Youtube than the average number of views of any single video on the brand’s channel.

42.8% of the dog videos on our list belonged to brands in the United States, followed by France with 14%.

Cats and dogs attract engagement

62% of the randomly selected brands featured dogs in their organic posts, while 37.9% featured cats.

Organic posts that featured both animals saw an increase of 337.4% in likes and 226.9% in comments.

Pets bred for the web

Pets and viral content

The psychology behind it

Cats and dogs are associated with viral content, which, aside from being massively shared, has been defined as having the ability to trigger specific emotional responses.

Additionally, virality is shown to have a strong connection to positivity, which explains why positive content will likely receive widespread social exposure.

#DogsOfInstagram

Despite all their popularity, cats cannot compete with the kings of social: dogs. On Instagram, there are over 146.9 million dog searches, compared to 123.8 million cat searches.

Likewise, there are 23 million more #dog posts than #cat posts, while #DogsOfInstagram trends at 11 million more posts than #CatsOfInstagram.

Why you should use pets in ads

• Ad ad with a pet can increase views by 1,642%.

• They generate a 337% increase in likes on Instagram posts.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this piece, we set out to put the most important debate of our generation to rest. The trend is clear for us: cats make your ads look good, and dogs make your feed stand out from the crowd.

It’s no surprise then to see more viral views from cat videos than from dog videos. For the average cat post, that’s approximately 9,000. For dogs, it’s only about 5,000.

It stands out as one of those new, unwritten laws of the digital world: if you want to increase your social media presence, get a pet. Whether it’s the next big creative campaign for your brand or a “Bring a Pet to Work” day for your employees, these two furry fellas can help you gain the traction you need and engage your community in ways you had never imagined.

Methodology

We analyzed 500 commercials uploaded by brands to Youtube featuring cats and dogs. We made sure not to include ads for cat-related or dog-related products, and just focused on unrelated brands that had opted to include these pets in their advertisements.

To calculate the average likes on Youtube and Instagram we used social blade.

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