The U.S. pet industry reached $152 billion in expenditures in 2024, according to the American Pet Products Association’s 2025 State of the Industry Report, with $157 billion projected for 2025. Ninety-four million U.S. households now own at least one pet, up from 82 million in 2023. The fastest-growing buyer segment, Gen Z, grew its pet-owning household count by 43.5% in a single year and relies primarily on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to discover and purchase pet products. For pet brands competing in this market, leveraging an influencer marketing service is not a supporting tactic. It is where the category’s most valuable new audience lives. HireInfluence has been building enterprise influencer programs that reach exactly this audience since 2011.
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Why the Pet Category Demands a Serious Agency Partner
Pet is one of the most emotionally engaged consumer categories in existence. People do not just buy pet products. They advocate for them, share them, and review them with the same intensity they apply to products for their own children. That emotional engagement creates a content environment that is uniquely suited to influencer marketing, and it also creates risks that brands underestimate.
A creator whose pet content feels forced or inauthentic will not just underperform. They will generate negative sentiment in comment sections that audiences read carefully. A campaign that activates creators without vetting their pet ownership, audience demographics, or content history may reach the wrong buyers entirely. A program without proper FTC disclosures exposes the brand to regulatory risk in a category that regulators have increasingly scrutinized.
Managing those variables at the scale enterprise pet brands require, across multiple creator tiers, multiple platforms, and multiple product lines, is what HireInfluence’s full-service campaign management is built to deliver. The agency handles everything from creator sourcing and vetting through contracting, compliance, content briefing, approval workflows, scheduling, paid amplification, and performance reporting.
The Gen Z Opportunity and Why It Changes Platform Strategy
APPA’s 2025 report is explicit about where pet brands need to be: Gen Z discovers and purchases pet products through social media platforms, with TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram named directly. That is not a general social media trend. It is category-specific behavior from the demographic that drove a 43.5% single-year increase in pet-owning households.
Gen Z pet owners are also the most likely to own multiple pets and the most likely to treat those pets as family members in a demonstrable, spending-oriented way. Thirty-four percent buy birthday cakes for their pets. Thirty-nine percent purchase birthday gifts. This is an audience that buys products based on creator recommendations and engages with pet content at a depth that older demographics simply do not match.
That behavior shapes how HireInfluence structures programs for pet brands. TikTok is the primary discovery platform for this audience, and the agency’s status as an official TikTok influencer marketing partner gives pet brands access to exclusive platform data and ad tools that most agencies cannot offer. Better audience data means better creator selection. Better creator selection means campaigns that actually reach the Gen Z pet owner at the moment they are making purchase decisions.
Instagram remains critical for the broader pet owner audience, particularly millennials, who still represent the largest overall segment of pet owners. YouTube serves longer-form product review content, deep dives on pet nutrition, training, and health topics, where creators in the pet space have built some of the most loyal subscriber bases in consumer content. HireInfluence’s multi-platform execution capability means pet brands can run coordinated programs across all three without managing separate agency relationships for each.
Creator Strategy in the Pet Category
Pet content has one of the most naturally high-engagement creator ecosystems of any consumer vertical. Audiences follow pet creators because they have an emotional connection to the animals featured. That connection transfers to the products those creators recommend in a way that few other categories can replicate.
The creator tier strategy for pet brands depends on campaign objectives.
Celebrity and macro pet creators can deliver awareness at scale for product launches or brand repositioning. A widely followed creator whose dog or cat is essentially a media property in its own right can introduce a new product to millions of pet owners in a single post. HireInfluence’s talent sourcing capabilities include this tier, with vetting processes that evaluate not just follower count but audience quality, engagement authenticity, and brand alignment.
Mid-tier creators in the pet space often have highly specific audiences, whether that is dog owners in a particular breed community, raw feeding advocates, or cat owners focused on indoor enrichment. For pet brands whose products serve a specific use case or pet type, mid-tier creators can reach exactly the right buyer with far better efficiency than broad-reach alternatives.
Micro-influencers in pet are where some of the highest purchase-intent content lives. A creator posting daily about their rescue dog’s transition to a new food, with honest commentary on palatability, digestibility, and the dog’s reaction, generates content that reads like a trusted recommendation from a friend. HireInfluence’s UGC and creator content programs are designed to activate networks of micro-influencers at scale, producing authentic content volume that enterprise pet brands can deploy across owned channels, paid media, and retail partner placements.
What Enterprise Pet Brands Need From an Agency
The pet brands operating at enterprise scale face a specific set of requirements that smaller agencies consistently fail to meet.
Category expertise in compliance. Pet food and supplement brands operate under FDA oversight for product claims. A creator saying a product “cures” or “treats” a condition is not just brand risk. It is a regulatory violation. HireInfluence’s FTC compliance management includes content brief standards that prevent creators from making claims the brand cannot substantiate, with review workflows built into every program.
Retail attribution. Pet brands selling through Petco, PetSmart, Chewy, Target, Amazon, and grocery chains need creator content that drives measurable traffic to specific retail destinations. HireInfluence’s analytics infrastructure ties campaign performance to trackable outcomes, including affiliate links, UTM parameters, and platform-native purchase integrations, so brands can see exactly which creator content is driving which retail behavior.
Multi-product execution. Enterprise pet companies often operate multiple brands or multiple product lines simultaneously. Purina alone runs dozens of distinct product lines targeting different species, life stages, and nutritional philosophies. Managing influencer programs across that breadth requires the kind of operational infrastructure only a full-service agency can provide. HireInfluence’s specialty services include the coordination infrastructure to run multi-brand, multi-tier programs without the client team becoming the de facto project manager.
Content rights for retail use. Creator content produced for a pet brand has significant downstream commercial value. Brands use it in digital advertising, on product pages, in email campaigns, and in retail partner presentations. Every contract HireInfluence executes includes content rights provisions, so brands own what they paid for.
Campaign Performance Benchmarks
The Ricola #CoatYourThroat campaign illustrates the kind of outcomes HireInfluence’s execution infrastructure produces. Managing 18 influencers across micro to celebrity tier, the agency generated 26 million impressions, 20.5 million in reach, and a 13.17% engagement rate, with 62,500 retail clicks tracked via MikMak purchase link integration. The retail attribution component is directly applicable to pet brands selling through mass retail or specialty pet retail channels.
For pet brands that need to demonstrate the commercial case for influencer investment internally, the Grammarly program offers a useful scale benchmark: 133 top-tier creators across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram generating 214 million impressions, 33.1 million views, and $15 million in earned media value. Programs at that scale are achievable when the infrastructure, sourcing capability, and multi-platform execution are in place from the start.
Getting Started
HireInfluence’s minimum engagement is approximately $100,000, which reflects the infrastructure required to run programs at the level enterprise pet brands actually need. Understanding the cost of influencer marketing at this scale means accounting for more than creator fees. That investment covers strategy, creator sourcing, contracting, compliance, content management, amplification, attribution, and reporting.
For pet brands ready to explore what a program looks like, the agency’s work reflects consistent performance across categories and platforms. The conversation starts at HireInfluence’s contact page. The pet category is large, growing, and increasingly won on social media. The brands building creator programs now are the ones capturing the Gen Z pet owner before their competitors do.
