If you’re like most small business owners, you may be finding it hard to get the word out about your products and services. With the coronavirus world keeping people inside and away from each other, online marketing has become even more important.
Now is the perfect time to market your garden centre online. With fewer people around to visit the shops, more individuals are going online to research products and compare prices.
Here’s how to do just that…
Set Up Shop Tours
Whether or not you’ve landed on our blog article because you were searching for ways to market your garden centre online, we hope that you’ll consider implementing a virtual shop tour. During these virtual shop tours, you can showcase all of your products and introduce visitors to your offers.
Virtual shop tours are a fantastic way to both educate and attract potential buyers. Once you have set one up, you can simply follow the steps below to begin attracting visitors to your website.
1. Identify The Products That You Want To Market.
The first step in creating a successful online marketing plan for your garden centre is to identify the products that you want to market. Now is the perfect time to compare prices and discover which products are selling well. You can also read reviews and learn about the products that your competitors are enjoying promoting.
Your garden centre’s collection of seeds, for example, may be perfect for attracting millennial home shoppers. Not only do they love to grow their own food, but many also enjoy interacting with nature. With the pandemic and resulting lockdowns, perhaps now is the right time to expand your product offering and include kits for gardening.
On the other hand, outdoor cooking equipment may be a better fit for a grandmother-centered audience.
2. Select the Right Platform.
The next step is to select the right platform. Not all platforms are created equal, and you want to make sure that you’re using the right one for the type of audience you wish to engage with.
If you’re new to online marketing, you may want to try experimenting with various platforms and identifying the one that yields the most results. In the meantime, if you have a personal blog, you could try using that to promote your business. If that’s not the case, you could try setting up a simple website or buying a cheap domain to test the waters.
3. Decide On Your Marketing Goals.
Now that you have a potential audience, you can set your marketing goals. Just because you have a shop online doesn’t mean that you should aim to sell every product that you offer. You can use clickthroughs to track the success of your marketing efforts and determine whether or not you should continue down this path. You may also want to consider using conversion rate optimization (CRO) to increase the amount of people who visit your website and decide to make a purchase.
For example, if you plan on marketing your outdoor cooking equipment, you may want to tweak the text on your website to include items such as “saves you money” or “reduces food waste” to generate more leads.
4. Build A Watch List.
Once you have a functional website with SEO optimized content, you can start building a watch list. A watch list is a list of individuals who you want to stay informed about your products and services. You may want to use a tool like MailChimp to create a list of email addresses.
You can use these addresses to send regular emails, which will grow steadily over time as people subscribe. It is, therefore, a great way to both educate and incentivize potential customers to remain engaged with your company. You can also use the emails to send out special deals and discounts.
5. Set Up Regular Blog Updates.
Blogs aren’t just for showing off your latest blog post now, dear reader. Setting up a blog is a great way to both educate and encourage potential customers to come back for more. In addition to regularly posting new content, you can also use your blog to share company news, offer tips and tricks, and generally stay in front of your audience.
You can set up automated blog posts to keep things fresh and interesting for your audience. For example, you can use a service like Growly to automatically send out blog post ideas to keep your audience engaged. You may want to look into other areas of content creation to further expand your reach and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
If you are worried about lacking the skills to create engaging content, you could look into hiring a freelance copywriter or content strategist.
6. Use Video Content.
Another effective form of online marketing is to use video content. Not only does video content allow you to showcase your products and services in an engaging way, but it also enables you to connect with your audience on a more human level.
The rise of TikTok means that video content is everywhere, and people love to watch bite-size videos to discover new things. If you’re looking to market your garden centre online, you should consider using video content to attract potential customers. Not only does it allow you to connect with your audience, but it can also expose your products to entirely new groups of people.
7. Use Social Media.
Another important form of online marketing is to use social media. With TikTok dominating the market, many businesses are figuring out how to utilize its unique features to their advantage.
To succeed on social media, you need to have a solid grasp of the platforms. Once you know the ropes, you can grow your profile and begin attracting more followers. Once you have a decent following, you can then move on to more advanced techniques, like engaging with your audience and offering valuable tips and tricks.
With so much information available online, it’s easy for customers to find what they’re looking for. Promotions, discounts, and freebies are all the rage on social media. Post frequently to maintain your audience’s interest and drive traffic to your website.
8. Measure The Results Of Your Marketing.
Hopefully, after you’ve implemented the steps above, you will see an increase in traffic to your website and social media accounts. If not, you may want to try adjusting your strategy and measuring the results of your efforts.
You can use a number of free tools like Google Analytics to track the results of your marketing campaigns. In addition to providing you with valuable data, these tools can also help you figure out what content performs well and which products and platforms yield the best results. With these tools, you can set up automated reports to track the success of your campaigns on a day-to-day basis. This way, you can determine whether or not your efforts are paying off and adjust your strategy as needed.
To give you an idea of the power of video content, let’s look at some stats. According to HubSpot Blogs’ research, videos attract five times the number of clicks as typical text-based posts and eight times the number of shares. Additionally, 72% of the videos they analyzed were watched to the end.
With video content, your customers can actually feel as though they’re standing in your garden centre. Not only does video content allow you to showcase your products and services in a more engaging way, but it also enables you to connect with your audience on a more human level.
With video content, you can demonstrate how your products work and allow customers to actually “use” them. If someone clicks on your product or service and then decides to make a purchase, you can bet that they saw you demonstrating the product in action first.