From Canada with love
Following his recent trip to the International Garden Centre Association in Canada, Garden Connect's Edwin Meijer shares three online marketing tips for garden centres that he learned while away.
Print19 October 2017
The following is a blog from the marketing director with Garden Connect. Garden Connect helps garden centres attract more customers via innovative online marketing solutions and have to date worked with over 250 garden centres.
It was my first time but definitely not the last one! Two weeks ago I came back from the International Garden Centre Association trip to Niagara Falls, Canada. With a group of over 200 people from all over the world, we enjoyed the trip through the garden industry in this part of Ontario.
Since I was travelling around in a bus with a group of about 20 youngsters from the industry it was very relaxed and entertaining, and we even learned something while having fun! Here are three online marketing tips that I learned about in Canada which you can apply to your own centre. At the end of this newsletter, I have also included a link for you to check out that will provide you with much more inspiration for your garden centre!
- Solutions, not products
Monday morning started off at 8am with an inspiring presentation about Amazon and Blue Apron (like Hello Fresh delivering meal boxes in the US). And it was spot on! A box, home delivery, recipes and a bunch of carrots aren’t really innovating. But if you combine them you’ll create a solution rather than a selection of products. And that’s exactly what younger customers are expecting. They want to have a garden but don’t want to do the gardening. And we would like to cook, but preferably without using our brains.
A lot of opportunities. How about a webshop with ready-to-use products like pot/plant combination. Let Amazon sell products, you’d better focus on solutions.
- Sell a front yard
Photo: Edwin Meijer
Life was tough in Canada. At each garden centre, we visited we had to conduct an interview with one of the owners to learn more about their ambitions, challenges and successes. I also had to do one together with Franco, a marketer of Garden Centre Maier in Switzerland. I had the honour of interviewing one of the family members of the Holland Park Garden Gallery; quite remarkable because she wasn’t an older man, but rather a former Miss Teen Canada (and that isn’t a joke!).
Anyways, both she and her mother had some very bright ideas. They plan to start selling front gardens via their webshop. They designed three gardens fitting into the most common gardens in their surroundings. And they plan not just to sell the gardens in a DIY package, but they also offer to do the landscaping as well. Apart from that they started to specialise in decorations for weddings – which worked really well. This is an example of a great combination of solutions, online marketing, and offline services!
- Video works. Period.
At Terra Greenhouses they are using a lot of videos. They noticed they are able to generate a lot of exposure via YouTube among their customers. They have two types of video’s which should be appealing to different audiences. One in a more traditional style showing how-to’s: how to plant a container or how to care for your lawn, for example. The other one is a vlog in which a young lady is maintaining her garden. The funny part of the latter: she also includes the mistakes she’s making. I rarely see mistakes happening on TV, so this is way more recognisable for the younger audience!
Apart from these online marketing tips a lot of topics have been discussed including succession (nothing to worry about for me!), catering (and how annoying chefs can be) and staff management. In other words, it was an overall very useful trip and I suggest you go to the website of the 2018 congress which will be held next year in Prague: check it out.
Last but not least: thanks for reading my blog. Have a look at the photos I posted on our Facebook Group. Wanna learn more about How To Grow Your Own Pizza? Have a look and enjoy!
See you at the HTA Marketing Forum on the 15th of November! Go to www.gardenconnect.com if you want to learn more about online marketing for your garden centre.
Edwin Meijer
Edwin@gardenconnect.com
0203 475 5541
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