Now What?

Katie Elzer-Peters

I’ve been on here before talking about how to reach out to your customers via social media, digital marketing and the Internet. In fact, several of the Garden Dispatch columnists have as well. We told you to get online because that’s where your customers are. Most of these services were free. Now, if you want to stay in front of your customers, they’re not. The big network, Facebook, has made such drastic changes in the way it displays content to users that, in order to get any benefit out of it, you have to pay on the level of a pay-per-click campaign on Google or get really creative about what you post.

The More Things Change …
The point of “doing Facebook” isn’t to do Facebook, though. The point of all of this online activity is to stay front and center in your customers’ minds, solve their problems and provide inspiration. It used to be that Facebook was a good way to do that. It really isn’t so much anymore. At least, not by itself, without a greater strategy and not without a budget. A post on Facebook will now get served to somewhere between 1% to 5% of your page fans without promotion. Instead of being upset about this, it’s much more constructive to decide what to do about it instead.

Stay Front and Center
There are different ways to approach this. I wouldn’t give up on Facebook. If you have a great sale happening or have written a meaty blog post with great ideas and how-tos in it, it’s worth the money to promote the post. Your customers “liked” your page because they wanted to see the information you have to share.

Find out where else your customers are hanging out online and in person. If you have e-commerce, Pinterest is a no-brainer. Instagram can also be effective, depending on whether or not you have e-commerce. I love Instagram because it’s so easy. Snap a picture on your phone, upload it and go. These two networks are highly visually oriented, and as luck would have it, so is our industry! You have plenty of “eye candy” to use for these posts.

Solve Problems and Provide Inspiration
One of the garden centers for which I do work has clearly identified its niche. A conversation with the owner included this sentiment: “People aren’t coming to us for giant landscaping project materials. They want instant color—beautiful hanging baskets and containers. We don’t sell a lot of large caliper trees.” Located on a busy thoroughfare, they make sure to merchandise ready-planted containers near the front door so customers can find what they want, take it inside to pay and be on their way.

Gardening is still a little terrifying to people, even when they’re really excited to do it. Make plant-care handouts. Merchandise plants together so that customers can pick up plants in odd numbers and have a ready-to-plant garden bed. Take the fear out of it and make success almost guaranteed. Buying plants is expensive. If you can make it seem less risky and ensure that new gardeners get a reward (a gorgeous garden) right off the bat, they’ll be loyal for life.

And then there are those customers that are avid gardeners and are looking for the new thing. Do they know to come to you to find it? Handselling is more important than ever. During one of my early trips to my garden center this summer, one of the associates came up to me and said “Have you heard about Digiplexis?” I had not. “Oh, it is gorgeous—like foxglove but will bloom all summer.” I bought five. And I’ve seen all of my friends posting pictures of their plants blooming online and I feel like part of a club of awesome gardeners that have the latest and greatest, but I wouldn’t have known about it without my local GC.

Your problem—making sure your customers think of you when they need plants hasn’t changed. The way you solve it has. GP

Katie Elzer-Peters is a garden writer and owner of The Garden of Words, LLC, a marketing and PR firm handing mostly green-industry clients. Contact her at Katie@thegardenofwords.com or at www.thegardenofwords.com.