 Southwood emphasizes educating customers about their produts.At Southwood Landscape & Nursery in Tulsa, Okla., it’s not all about the bottom line. While new marketing initiatives are meant to help the nursery increase sales, Southwood’s general manager Joe Ward said the main goal is to build relationships with customers in the community.“Really what we’re doing is cementing that relationship with our customers and community that we are the leader in Tulsa for information for gardening, design and style,” Ward said. This involves a bevy of innovative ideas such as switching to online advertising, creating a customer loyalty program and taking full advantage of social media. In addition to these efforts Southwood (www.southwoodnursery.com) has continued to host events to bring in new customers. Ward said the switch to a web-based approach came after company management realized that more people were making buying decisions while sitting at their computers. To capture this audience, Southwood uses high-color ads to pop off the page, but also keeps ads elegant. The business’s largest initiative has been the Great Gardeners program, which started in May 2010. Lauren Meyer, Southwood’s e-marketing designer, said the initiative started as a loyalty program, but evolved into a way for the business to accrue information from customers. After collecting information through registers, Southwood sends out monthly newsletters personalized to Great Gardener members. Meyer said Southwood created a Facebook page in August, and now the nursery has 350-plus “likes” and multiple albums displaying nursery events and décor. On the Facebook page, potential customers can post questions and comments for Southwood. The nursery responds promptly with answers, and also updates followers with pictures and event details. Alongside these endeavors, Southwood has continued to host promotional events. These have included “Plant a Row for the Hungry,” where participants brought canned food donations in exchange for vegetable seeds; and a pumpkin planting class, where Southwood patio-pot designers helped participants create a patio pot out of a pumpkin. As most of the initiatives are fairly new they have not been able to render tangible results in numbers yet. However, Ward said he can see and feel the results through the increased interest he has seen in customers. “A lot of this has been developing over the past couple of years. Although we’re not doing big numbers in it yet, we can see and feel the results already and we have an increase in interest for our website, so I’m expecting a fantastic spring because we’ve been building on this in the background for the past two years,” he said. Jennifer Iller is a freelance writer and editorial intern for Garden Center. Reach her at jiller@gie.net. |
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