Marketing under construction

One year Proven Winners asked its customers which of five names for a plant they preferred – and they got 18,000 write-ins. Yes, for a name of a single plant.

Obviously Proven Winners has a large consumer base to pull from, but the principle is still important – engaging with customers and asking them what they want.

“It’s like M&M asking, ‘What should be the next M&M?” says Marshall Dirks, director of marketing and PR. “The pretzel M&M was developed out of asking consumers what they should try next, and that’s what they came up with. Anything you can do in your business to get your customers to provide feedback [is important].”

But this goes beyond just giving your customers a feedback form.

“Feedback boxes don’t work,” he says. “They’re always empty because it’s never the right time or the right mechanism to do it.”

So how, in this digital, technology-savvy world can you first get good feedback that will actually help you but then also market more effectively to build your business? A few keys can help you market better, and it starts with talking to people who aren’t your customers, building better websites and engaging better online.
 

Talk to your non-customers
If you want feedback on something, often the first person you turn to is your customer. But they already like you. They already do business with you. Dirks says to take a different approach. He says in the case of Proven Winners, if more than 51 percent of the readership of a consumer magazine knows their brand, they won’t advertise there – it’s time to move on to another outlet where people aren’t familiar with their name. He suggests growers take a similar approach with their marketing efforts.

“Put an ad out in a newspaper and say, ‘We’re looking for 25 people who have never been to our business – will you come over for one evening and answer some questions and help us be a better business in this community?” he says.

Taking this route can be a game changer because you’re getting fresh opinions from people who really don’t know you and may not even care about you because they’re not emotionally tied to you.

“Do you know how empowering it is to those 25 people who actually show up?” he says. “It’s life changing. It can be business changing to have your company really give thought to those customers.

“Often times we just talk to customers – and we need to do that – but why aren’t we talking to our non-customers? Why they don’t see us? Why they haven’t been there? What are the stumbling blocks? Everybody needs a new customer.”

Build a better website
So many growers built websites 15 or 20 years ago and haven’t touched them since then. Many are out of date and don’t provide the information customers are looking for. That’s where Mark Bolin, owner and CEO of The Site Gardener, comes into play. One way he says you can have a better website is to automate it.

“The biggest problem we have in this industry is when the information needs to be online, everyone is so busy that they don’t get it online when it needs to be,” he says.

He helps owners put information up during the off season so that when the busy season comes, information is programmed to appear at the exact time customers will need it, including pictures of what the product looks like at that particular week.

“People in the spring are always calling saying, ‘I want to buy 1,000 of these, but what do they look like right now?’” Bolin says. “Then you have to run out there, take a picture, bring it back in, download it and e-mail it. You can put a group online, and when someone goes to look, it’s already there for them. It saves another step that drives everyone nuts in the spring. If you don’t send the picture, you’re saying, ‘I don’t really care if I sell you this,’ but at the same time, you don’t have time to be out there taking pictures all day because you’re trying to load trucks.”

You also need to focus more on SEO – search engine optimization.

“If you have a full description of your plant instead of just your list, you’ll get a lot more attention from Google,” he says.

Engage better online
Social media has changed the way any company interacts with customers and how it presents its brand.

“You have to answer in your mind, ‘It’s not for my own business – how is this better serving my customer?’” Dirks says. “Sometimes we just regurgitate information we already have or it’s about us, and really, the change in social media and QR codes, it’s allowing the customer to have an experience with your brand, and they’re the one in the driver seat determining where they want to go.”

Do more than just have a Facebook page or just have a website. Engage with them and collect information about them so you can better reach and serve them. For example, Dirks said that his customers can request a free idea book, and when they sign up for it, that’s data about them that the company is capturing.

“We create digital pieces for them, and we can send out an e-mail that’s geared toward the beginning gardener, if that’s what they’ve done, or if they’re a master gardener or a weekend gardener, so we can custom-tailor our content based on the type of gardener they are,” he says.

Likewise, you can collect data about your customers in terms of who they specifically sell to and learn more about them and their needs as well as their customers and their needs, so you can present options to them they may not have considered previously.

“By collecting that information, we’re in the process of being able to more tailor that method,” Dirks says. “It’s really customizing content because there’s so much out there. Then you become irrelevant if your information is vanilla to everybody.”

For more: Proven Winners, www.provenwinners.com; The Site Gardener, www.thesitegardener.com