Technology: Profiles in power - Routine maintenance

Q: You offer customers instructional videos, advice in blogs and allow them to ask questions in a form on the ask the experts section of your website. Why is it important to communicate with customers digitally?

A: The website is the hub of everything. The ultimate measurement in your marketing success is your sales, but the long term focus is [other indicators]. The more friends you have on Facebook, the more visits you have on your website and the more interaction in general leads to more sales and also developing your brand image and brand name. Our website was just completely redone last year to be more modern looking, and we want to make it as relevant as possible. Right on the front page you need to see what’s happening now and it needs to change a lot. It’s just another way people can choose to interact with the company. Our brand name is strong in this area and this is what we need to do to keep reinforcing that idea that we are the authority, we are the experts and we have the knowledge. That’s absolutely what independent garden centers need to do.
 

Q: I understand that you had someone redesign your website in-house. What is the advantage of that?

A: The tribal knowledge. This guy has been here five or six years now and he gets our way of thinking and our business. And he gets it right the first time versus an outside company where you have to go back and forth three and four times before they understand it. We were fortunate. It was a fifth of the cost, and it got done just as quick and more accurately. This was a secondary thing for him.
 

Q: What’s your overall strategy and goal for the blog, videos and ask the experts section?

A: Ultimately, your website needs to be a hub for your marketing. When it comes to this is on sale, that’s on sale, Google and others don’t rate you as high versus if you’re talking about a specific plant or product. The word that’s used is authority. That expert advice section adds authority – it talks about all of the things we’re excited about, which is plants and all products related to design. We’ve engaged an outside online marketing company on retainer recently to help us with three distinct things related to advertising inbound versus outbound. We’re trying to take 20 percent of our overall marketing budget to electronic advertising. We were big in mailers but we’re going to cut back. Instead of sending out 30,000, we’re sending out 20,000 for April. We’re going to try Google ad words so people who are gardeners in certain towns, say Hopkinton, our ad will pop up. This works on Facebook, too. They have to click through the smart ads to get a coupon or a landscape special that we’re offering. This company does all of the reporting and measuring to tell us how well we’re doing. But the expert advice section and the plant library gives you website authority.
 

Q: Tell me about your plant library.

A: We did it ourselves seven or eight years ago, and it’s accurate plant information, what we say about plants, not a plant library that you purchase. We have 1,900 plants, trees, shrubs and perennials. One person was hired just to do it as a project hire. We always had a catalogue, and it was like the bible of the industry around here. We said we’re not going to do our catalogue. We’re going to make our [online] plant library really good, and it’s going to be better because it will have pictures. That was our approach — create a plant library to educate mostly with accurate information of what we have now with pricing. It’s accurate for our area, our climate, our zones and we know. We’re a 91-year-old business and we’ve watched these little babies grow.
 

Q: Can people access the plant library and the website with a cell phone?

A: Yes, it’s on mobile devices, too, because most people are using their mobile devices to get to our website. We’ve built a responsive website. That’s a big deal, because it means when you look at it on a tablet or phone it formats itself to fit whatever screen you have.
 

Q: How do you measure the success of these initiatives?

A: That’s the trick. Every goal you set for the company, you want to make it measurable. We want a certain amount of hits on our website, or this page of the website. We want to see a 5 percent redemption rate with the Google ad words. More than anything else, measure your marketing. Marketing needs to be looked at it as an investment; you can’t just [consider] it an expense.
 

Q: What advice would you offer to other independent garden centers?

A: The website is the most important form of advertising, and I still see a lot of independent garden centers that are letting it go, and you can’t do that anymore. You see some who don’t pay attention to it at all, and you see some who don’t even have one. No one wants a brochure. No one wants to read too much, especially the younger generation. You need to spend time figuring out how to get your point across as quickly as possible, and according to how most people want to see it, and it is electronically these days, and it is on your website.

Send your Profiles suggestions to msimakis@gie.net.