As a florist, you know how to nurture flowers. But are you looking after your floral website with the same care?
Your floral website is a key part of your business and it’s essential that you make the effort to grow and maintain it. To thrive, your floral website requires online marketing like BloomSocial, which involves different digital strategies that we’ll discuss below.
Let’s go over some ideas for promoting your floral website.
- Create a refer-a-friend program for your website
Your regular customers have circles of friends who may be interested in your flower shop. You can reward these regulars with a discount for referring their connections to your website. This is a win-win: your regular customers will enjoy the discount and you’ll get new users to your site.
Tip: Make this easy by providing every customer with a business card, which includes links to your website and social media pages.
- Have a floral photo contest on your website
Everybody loves photos, especially of your flower shop’s stunning bouquets. Create a floral photo contest (for example #flowerpower or #petswithflowers) and ask for submissions from fans on social media. If possible, you can also have online users vote for their favorite. The details are up to you, but either way it’s ideal to drive traffic to your website.
- Engage with floral trade shows on social media
There are an extraordinary number of floral trade shows, including the top three: the International Floriculture Expo (IFE), the International Plant Fair (IPM) and the International Floriculture Trade Fair (IFTF). Even if you can’t attend them in-person, you should absolutely engage with these floral fairs on social media.
During these fairs, you can use the official hashtags, offer photos of your own products, comment on other floral arrangements and interact with other floricultural experts. It’s a great way to engage with industry-specific people and build your online reputation with your customers.
- Wow with multimedia of your flower products
Flower arrangements are beautiful to look at and an opportunity to engage with potential customers through multimedia. Post stunning photos on your social channels and create YouTube how-tos for your most popular bouquets. Depending on your interests, you might also try webinars, podcasts or ebooks.
Tip: Your website plays a key role in displaying this multimedia. Talk to your tech team about adding a video banner to your site, refreshing your site’s photos or embedding YouTube videos into your blog.
- Don’t forget about Yelp, Google Maps and Pinterest
There are a lot of digital spaces these days for driving customers to your site. Platforms like Yelp and Google Maps are often overlooked, but they’re important since potential customers often search for businesses on them. Make sure you keep all company info on Yelp and Google Maps updated.
For flower shops, Pinterest is another social site to consider. There are millions of people on Pinterest and plenty of flower-themed categories for your shop to contribute to. With whatever content you post, you can add a link to your website.
- Boost your floral website through email marketing
Email marketing is an excellent way to cultivate both your customer relationships and your floral website. Sending a regular e-newsletter or special deals can excite your base and result in online sales. Depending on your email marketing strategy, you can include links to different areas of your floral website. Fun fact: Emails are often more effective than social media in getting click-throughs.
- Use bit.ly and Google Analytics to track who’s visiting your site
The more you know about your website users, the better. Set up bit.ly and Google Analytic accounts so that you get more information about what links were successful and who your users are. You’ll get takeaways such as what platforms they used, what languages they speak, what pages they abandoned, etc.
For example, you may notice that a page with a high bounce-rate needs an SEO makeover, or that a certain social post didn’t generate a single click to your website. These are areas of improvement to work on. Platform developers will do this as part of their standard business practices to help monitor your traffic and growth.
- Opt for PPC and/or Facebook ads
Digital ads can do wonders for your floral website. The two most popular methods are pay-for-click (PPC) and Facebook. With PPC, you can create ads to run on Google to drive traffic to your site. Another route is to place Facebook ads, even though an agency, which has highly specific targeting for location and user interests.
- Make your floral website mobile-responsive
Finally, your website should look great on desktop and mobile. Cell phones have recently surpassed computers in internet usage, yet we often forget to think mobile-first. To promote your floral website, you should be sure it’s mobile-responsive. This will help improve user experience on your site and hopefully push sales. BloomNation sites are always mobile-responsive just for this reason.
With these nine strategies, you now have a digital green-thumb to promote your floral website. Good luck!
Need help promoting your floral website? Get a hand from our BloomSocial team to boost your social media and email marketing efforts.
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