From the 1st January, here at the Business of Selling Flowers, we hope you’ll join in with the #Flowerfarmerama Social media challenge.
We’ve come up with a list of prompts to kick start your marketing for the season. One for each day throughout January. (see the previous blog) They will help you to tell your own story, and engage with those that will help your business to thrive in 2020. We all have a different tale to tell, with hugely varied businesses, markets and customers.
Your customers will really enjoy finding out what makes a flower farmer work, what you can offer them later in the year, and your individual approaches to the challenges of living from what you can bring from the earth.
Although we hope it will be lots of fun for you, and give you inspiration to keep your feeds full of information, there is a serious side to it. Promoting your flowers and marketing your business at the beginning of the year, will help your customers and potential customers to know lots more about you and be ready to buy from you and be engaged with you, as soon as you have flowers to sell.
In preparation for the extra traffic and interest that should come your way, here’s 5 tips that we suggest you work through to prepare.
1) Does your Social media feed say WHO you are? - Make sure your name is in the Bio. If there are several of you in the company, make sure you let your customers know who they are communicating with.
Claire’s Facebook Bio.
The Bosf Instagram account, - not quite enough space for all our full names, but you can click through to our individual accounts which have our names on.
2) Who are your customers? - If you’re not 100% sure who you are sending your messages to, you won’t know what to say, so do write down who your ideal customers are. Then you’ll also know which Social media platform they are likely to be on.
I sell to 3 main groups of customers
Florists
DIY brides
Local customers who want flowers to arrange themselves, to come to my workshops, and to send as gifts.
My Instagram feed is mainly for my florists and my brides, My Facebook feed is mainly for my local customers. Knowing this, I can make sure that my messages are applicable to my customers.
Note: Although other flower farmers are a wonderful supportive bunch, and are likely to be following the #flowerfarmerama hashtag, unless you are wanting to sell plants or workshops to them, they are NOT your customers (But they’ll love to know what you’re doing so that they can help you if they can)
3) How can your customers contact you? In this day and age there are many many different ways for people to connect with you. How do you want to hear from potential customers? Email? phone? text? direct message? Any that you won’t answer? - Have you told them that?
Are your contact details in all your Social media Bio’s. If you have a website, is there a link to that? - Are your website / email and phone number links clickable?
4) What do you want your customers to do with the information? If you want them to book something, then you have to send them to a booking site/ Website where they can pay and get more info. (more then 2 clicks from your feed and you’ll loose them)
5) Photos - Do look through for the best photos. Make sure they’re in focus, have a background that isn’t distracting and fit with both your branding and the point that you’re trying to make. I always thought that you couldn’t get interesting photos at this time of year, until I started to work with Emma Davies. She showed me that there is always something to see that can look good, especially trays of seedlings.
