Greetings to those who attended this year's ANLA conference in Louisville! If you got a chance to meet with me and discuss your project, it was a pleasure to meet so many enthusiastic small business owners at the network meetings.
I have been working in the Green Industry for the past 6 years. In that time I have designed nursery, landscape and non-profit green industry web sites. I have also helped to manage the Internet marketing campaigns for most of these businesses. As you may have heard at the conference, the Internet is quickly becoming the best places to run your targeting advertising campaigns. Although there is still value to print advertising, Internet marketing allows you to inexpensively and effectively target only customers.
I can help you design/re-design your website, implement a blogging system that you can easily update, drive local and/or targeted visitors to your web site and much more! Please view the Green Industry projects that I have worked on (below) and give me a call if you would like to discuss your Web Project.
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Bamboo Headquarters
I started working for this company fresh out of high school. Learning from this upstart speciality nursery and participating in the growth of this green industry business is what has influenced and inspired me most in pursuing an entrepreneurial career. As the webmaster for this company (as one of the many duties held while I worked there) I have been able to hone my skills in developing ecommerce sites from the ground up. One of the many ideas that this company has taught me, is that the web is an extremely effective marketing medium for small to medium sized businesses.
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Van slyke Landscape
eCommerce is not the only effective way to market your company on the web. Vanslyke Landscape is a project that has a very different focus from a standard product-based business site. Service businesses are all about showing off what you can do, and through the use of slideshows and aesthetics, I was able to achieve this.
A typical Internet marketing campaign for the green industry consists of the following:
- eNewsletter: A great resource for inexpensively keeping in touch with all of your customers on a monthly basis. eNewsletters serve to educate your customers and remind them to visit your nursery or call your landscape business back, time and time again.
- Blog: Blogs generate interest for Internet users to visit your website again and again. The more time someone visits your site, the more likely they will be to purchase your product or services. Blogs also help boost your websites rankings in all of the popular search engines, such as Google.com.
- Search engine advertising: Have you ever noticed the advertising on Google.com or Yahoo.com? Next time you are using your favorite search engine, take note of the advertisements on the top, side and bottom of the page. These are paid listings that target users that are searching for specific keywords. Search advertising is an inexpensive way to help new customers find you on the Internet. Search engine advertising is not only great for retail sites that sell plants online, they are also great for local landscapers and nurseries who want to target customers within a certain mile radius from their location. Online advertising is the high tech way to target the exact customers that you want visiting your garden center.
- Online promotions: Many users are incented to visit you time and time again if you offer them small discounts and rewards for being a customer. The web has made this process much easier and can be implemented into any website.
- Online communities: Online forums and blogs help to generate customer interest. The more customers of yours that talk to one another, means the more of a chance you have of spreading word about your business in the most effective of all marketing tools: word of mouth.
- Press releases: If you own a garden center and want to turn it into a destination point, press releases are the first way to generate interest. It is also much less expensive than advertising in garden magazines, because if the local press becomes interested in your destination nursery, they will write about it in their magazine and you will have all of the free publicity that you need.
