You have a website

March 8, 2012

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

Eric Hoffer

You have a website.

It was either-

  1. Developed professionally years ago and never updated
  2. Set up by your wife’s nephew
  3. Set up on a free website domain
  4. Started, but not finished
  5. Any combination of the above

Most Independent garden center (IGC) operators know the nuts and bolts of producing the plants they sell and how to take care of them. Most of them also know little or nothing of how and what their website does and doesn’t do, much less what it should do.

They hear terms like SEO, Google page-rank, organic search results, PPC advertising, etc. and most don’t have a clue (except for that organic word) about what these things mean to them.

And the honestly, for the average IGC these things don’t matter.

Try this- open up your web browser and search on the term “garden center” and you will see that Google lists over 73 million results. 73 MILLION! Use the quotes around the words (something most of your customers won’t do) and you narrow the results down to a mere 17.9 million. Add your zip-code and you will get the results down under a million. And, chances are the local big box store will pop up at the top of the listing in a shaded area. Why? Because they paid the search engine owner to be listed there. The rest of the listings are known as organic search results.

The point of all this is that chances of your website showing up in the first page of search results is pretty slim, especially if your website is newer and doesn’t change much. There are ways to get around this so that your business does show up on the first page and it’s something that you can do yourself.

The major search engines (the SE of SEO) have local search options where businesses can list their businesses for free. You just enter basic information and they’ll pop your business up on a map and display your information when a consumer searches for your type of business.

We’ve used Google for the above, but the information will be pretty much the same for Bing, Yahoo, Ask, or any other search engine.

Your website should be able to do the following-

  • Collect e-mail addresses for marketing
  • Give consumers an easy way to find your location and hours of operation.
  • Educate and entertain your customers

Let’s face it; your customers are not going to be visiting your website all that often, mainly because they don’t have a reason to do so. In fact, most of them may only visit it once when they are searching for a garden center and see yours. If you have only one shot at getting their information, it better be a good one.

In exchange for their personal information, you have to “make them an offer they can’t refuse.” Most IGC websites have an innocuous box somewhere on the website that invites the visitor to sign up for their newsletter. Whoa! An offer for one more e-mail in my already crowded inbox- let me sign up right away.

I’m not a big fan of coupons, but this is an instance where they can pay off. Think about it- you have a consumer searching for a garden center in your area. You won’t get a more targeted audience than that. If they stumble upon your website in their search, how can you get them to come into the store? Offering them a valuable coupon may do the trick. Combining the coupon with information about gardening such as a basic gardening course, free seminar, or other information that they may be able to choose from will help them to see that you are there to help them in a way that no one else can.

This is your shot at cementing a relationship with a new customer that may become a customer for life- and that should be the primary goal of your marketing efforts.

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What business are you in?

February 29, 2012

“The primary purpose of business is to create and keep customers. Marketing and innovation produce results. All other business functions are costs. Prospecting and increasing the average value and frequency of sales are the bedrock of marketing and business.”

Dave Kekich

It happens all the time. You’ll be somewhere and someone will ask you what you do. “I’m in the garden center business; we sell plants and garden supplies.” This might be your standard answer, but is it the correct one?

Whether we like it or not, we are all in the business of marketing our business. You don’t make a dollar growing plants, purchasing inventory, or paying your employees. The only time you see a dollar is when it goes into your cash register.

And you don’t see that dollar unless a customer spends it. And the customer can’t spend it in your establishment if they don’t know about you or forget about you.

You are no different than your customers when it comes to advertising. It’s estimated that we see over 5,000 advertising messages per day, and that number was first published in 1988, before the internet and social media really took off.

In fact, Samuel Johnson wrote this about advertising clutter in 1759, “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.”

In order for you to get your marketing message through all of this clutter, you have to be different and stand out from the crowd.

You can’t expect that your message will get through when you do what everyone else does such as mass media ads, newspaper inserts, billboards, etc.

Many IGC’s that we talk to tell us the same things. They tried e-mail, newsletters, Facebook, twitter, in-store seminars once or twice and they didn’t work. They say they have a website where customers can sign-up for their e-mail newsletter but no one does.

You have to train your customers that your message is different.

You have to give them a reason why to open your communication, as we said in an earlier post; you have to communicate your vision to your customer.

Where most people go wrong with their marketing efforts is that they are constantly trying to sell. The only time they communicate with their customers is when they are advertising a sale. Customers become trained to that and your communications, in whatever form, get ignored- in other words, they fail.

Customers need to be communicated with on a regular basis, to be shown why you are different, and therein lies the difference between marketing and advertising.

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Social Media- the New Word of Mouth

February 22, 2012

An old adage states that “word of mouth” advertising is the best advertising. There are several reasons that this is true, but the main reason has always been the premise that word of mouth represents a sincere recommendation from one friend to another. Your customers, interacting with friends and acquaintances, would give a (hopefully) good [...]

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Do your customers even notice?

February 15, 2012

A recent story in the news recounts the tale of the “Poe Toaster.” As the story goes, a mysterious person would leave three Roses and a half bottle of Cognac on the grave of Edgar Allen Poe every year on Poe’s birthday. It became a yearly event with Poe fans watching, but never interfering, with [...]

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Communicating your vision

February 8, 2012

“Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it lighteth all them which are in the house.” William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament We all have a vision of what our perfect world is. Employees cheerfully greet the throngs of customers ringing up massive sales [...]

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Why Do I Need To Market My Garden Center?

January 25, 2012

“Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” Bertolt Brecht It’s been said that the only constant in life is change. As a garden center operator, you know this all too well. You must always be living in the future. Growing and selling plants is unlike most businesses. [...]

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Is your Garden Center doomed?

January 18, 2012

I recently came across this article on the state of independent garden centers in San Diego, California. There are a couple of items that jumped out at me as I read this article. These are points that independent garden centers must pay attention to in order to survive, let alone thrive. These points are- Customer [...]

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E-mail Marketing

January 11, 2012

“A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.” Liberty Hyde Bailey I stopped in your garden center once. There was a display that invited me to subscribe to your newsletter. Since I found your garden [...]

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Looking Forward to 2012

January 4, 2012

Making resolutions for the New Year is so cliché. People vow to- lose weight stop smoking exercise more be better at ____________ The problem with these resolutions is, while they are worthwhile goals, folks seldom align these goals with a plan. Just ask anyone who works out regularly at a gym or fitness center. The [...]

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The power of the upsell

December 28, 2011

“The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.” Edith Sitwell If someone offered you a painless way to increase sales as much as 25% or more would you take advantage of it? That’s the pitch that you might [...]

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