A flower shop is a business—you need to make sure that it is profitable and sustainable.

Luckily, there are many metrics to objectively measure your business’s performance. Aside from helping make sure that your business is doing well, these metrics are also going to be measured when you’re trying to get a bank loan, for example.

Having an idea about how your business is doing, supported by hard numbers on the table, can help you plan ahead and make adjustments to your current shop’s workflow. You can also readily adjust your pricing formula, and even see what needs to be improved in your shop, from your equipment to your workforce, just by taking a look at these metrics. That’s how powerful these metrics can be!

Let’s dive deep into these metrics and how you can use them to be fully aware of your business’s current standing.

Floral Shop Operating Expenses

Kicking off with operating expenses or overhead, these are those costs that are not products, like electricity and marketing. Expenses that you incur that are related to your working and shop space, be it rent or utilities, count as this metric.

As a good rule of thumb, operating expenses shouldn’t go past 10% of your total sales revenue.

Image via Shutterstock

Flower Shop Payroll

Payroll and salary expenses are also one important thing to be kept track by florists. Many shops require other floral designers and employees. Because of that, we can spend a great deal on payroll because we rely on manpower to create our main products.

Labor costs can also easily go up high because of custom orders, thus these custom orders should be priced higher than most of your services to compensate for that. Having it take at most 30% of your total sales revenue should be a good margin to maintain.

Image via Shutterstock

Cost Of Goods

Then, there are COGS. The cost of goods sold includes all expenses for the production of your services that are used in the product, e.g. the flowers, vases, etc. Basically the opposite of overhead, many people can underestimate this metric because they forget to include the small or seemingly insignificant costs like the tax on the flowers and the cost of shipping.

To make sure that you are profitable, keep it below 30% of the total sale price.

Image via Shutterstock

Flower Shop Revenues

Of course, you need to know how much you have earned as profit after all your expenditures. This might be the simplest one so far, as long as you got all the numbers down. The formula is simple, just take all your earnings and subtract your expenditures.

There’s also no specific threshold for this metric; you get to pick how high your net profit, as it is called, is. Your goals for the shop will most likely decide that number for you.

That was a lot of math under a lot of explanations, but it is necessary for your shop to flourish and reach its goals. You probably didn’t sign up for all this when you started up your flower shop, but keeping track of these metrics will matter a lot.

Florists, do you use these metrics at your business? Have any thoughts, comments, or suggestions, please share below!

____________

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Are you looking to purchase a flower shop?

Whether you are looking forward to getting started in the floral industry or you’re looking to expand, buying a flower shop carries with it a lot of advantages over starting from scratch.

Buying a flower shop saves you the struggle of a new business: building costs, hiring capable staff, acquiring equipment, and building your reputation. All it takes is ensuring that the shop you’re buying is worth your investment. Here are a few things you need to look into when buying a flower shop!

General Floral Business

In the end, a flower shop is a business, so you need to look into the profitability of the shop before delving into the specifics.

There’s a lot of business jargon that might get thrown at you, but basically, you need to look into the assets and liabilities that you get with the quoted price, from the equipment to the accounts receivable.

Sometimes, some shops might be valued higher because of goodwill or intangible assets of the business (eg. reputation and branding). You should absolutely ask to see their work, so you can see if it’s worth the asking price.

Image via Shutterstock

Floral Shop Documents

If you are serious about buying that shop, you will also need to go through the managerial, financial and legal documents of the business. Examining these documents can give you a rough idea of how well the business has been doing for the past year or so, and it can help you understand its valuation. Cash flow statements, customer lists, and existing contracts are some of these documents. Asking for help from an attorney or M&A professional can be invaluable.

Flower Shop Equipment

Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of the shop and see if it is indeed the flower shop that you’ve been looking to work on.

A flower shop and its flowers thrive on great and reliable equipment, thus you should check up on its facilities. Check if they are still in good working condition and if they will be for the foreseeable future. Coolers, most especially, play a big part in the flower shop business, so you shouldn’t cut corners and make sure the one provided in the shop is a definite asset and not a liability to be replaced.

Some equipment and supplies might not have aged well, so you should take a look at those which might need to be replaced. It might be a frustrating buy if you can’t have the shop up and running right when you purchase it because of these hindrances. You can negotiate with the owner to even get them fixed it up for the purchase.

Image via Shutterstock

Floral Business Relationships

Knowing the shop’s current flower providers, and how economic the relationship has been between them is very important. You can also see if you can find better options and deals around. You also need to check if the shop is in a wire service and if they are still paying for the hardware of the service. You can opt-out of the service if you wish, too, once you acquire it.

Flower Shop Employees

Finally, you need to see the workforce of the shop. Management might change, but the employees don’t have to. Some might leave together with the original owner, while the owner themselves might stick around to help you learn the ropes around running a flower shop.

Of course, with new management, you might also change up a few policies around human resources, so taking a look at the current state can help you decide that. Hiring and firing people can also be a part of that process, so long as you can present a reasonable explanation. The important part is to have a team that can survive the shift in ownership and stay efficient and profitable nevertheless.

Image via Shutterstock

Flower shops are usually the fruits of someone’s labor and passion for the most beautiful members of nature. It might have been the hardest decision for them to put up a price tag on it for whatever reason they might have. As a flower shop’s future owner, the best that you can do is make sure that their life’s work continues on, now with the renewed vigor of a fresh proprietor.

Florists, what were some items you think are important when purchasing a new or current business that you can share with our readers, please share your comments below!

____________

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

There are important tools to help automate your florist social media accounts!

Simply put, social media automation software is used to automate or semi-automate the management of (usually) multiple social media accounts, from posting content to replying to comments and messages. They alleviate the painstaking process of going through each platform by providing a single place to manage them all.

Most of these tools will allow you to post to multiple accounts simultaneously or schedule them on specified dates, some even going the extra mile of giving you statistics about how your content has been performing.

Image via Shutterstock

Sendible

If you’re savvy with social media automation already, you might have expected Hootsuite to lead the pack in this article, but we opted for an undiscovered alternative gem, thus we introduce you to Sendible.

Users have raved and reviewed it to be better than Hootsuite, offering a similar set of features despite it being a newer one. They offer support for the major social media platforms (Facebook and Facebook Ads, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) as well as some well-known blogging platforms (WordPress, Medium, and Tumblr).

Sendible’s dashboard is considered cleaner than Hootsuite’s streams, as it puts everything in only one timeline, but you have control over what pops up in it.

Publishing and scheduling posts to multiple accounts are made easier to keep track of because of their content calendar, giving you visual reminders of the posts. Moreover, they have an integrated approval workflow, so everyone working on your accounts gets a say about each post or content before it goes live to your account.

Their social listening statistics are great for keeping up with your brand’s reputation in the platform, as well know how your accounts have been faring. You can export these reports and statistics to help you analyze how your social media accounts are doing, and make a move according to these reports.

Sendible offers affordable plans for using their services, but their mid-tier plan is the sweet spot for getting access to all these great features while paying an affordable fee for it, making it a perfect social media automation tool for small and medium businesses.

Image via Shutterstock

Sprout Social

Sprout Social supports the same major social media platforms as Sendible, but without the blogging platforms. Their dashboard is called Smart Inbox, which manages private messages, mentions, likes, and other interactions on your social media timelines. There, you can also filter messages and monitor keywords and hashtags.

They also have automation tools like the Bot Builder, which you can use on Facebook Messages and Twitter DMs, to help you with the bulk of messages that can be easily answered. Sprout Queue is their fancy name for the queue of the posts that you schedule ahead of time, while ViralPost lets Sprout Social decide what’s the optimal time for your posts to go online, by analyzing your audience engagements.

Team collaboration tools are also available, from letting you see which items are finished and even letting multiple members work on a single item.

Tagging items helps with organization, which is incredibly useful for large teams. Most of all, Sprout Social is well-known for its top-notch reports and analytics, which are very easy to understand.

For all its glory, Sprout Social can fall off in its prices, being priced rather luxuriously. However, if you are indeed serious in your social media marketing, the plans will be definitely worth it.

Image via Shutterstock

There are still a lot of other social media automation tools like Buffer, SocialPilot, Hootsuite, and eClincher. Each of them offers varying degrees of support to the major social platforms and sometimes blogging platforms, and their core features are similar, if not the same. The main differences usually boil down to customer preference and user experience.

The goal of these tools is simple: to make social media marketing as easy as possible. Streamlining a process of posting similar content across multiple platforms, social media automation tools are too integral to an online marketer’s toolkit, their benefits usually worth the price tag they don. And if you are well on your way to take social media marketing seriously, then you will definitely need to pick up one.

Florists, are you currently using an automatic social media tool? What are your recommendations to other florists? please share your comments below!

____________

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Florists’ goal is to make money doing the thing they love most!

Writing technical papers like business plans sounds like a lot of work, and you may think it’s irrelevant for someone who’s starting out. However, business plans are even more important for a business early on.

What Makes a Floral Business Plan Important

A business plan guides your helps you track your long-term objectives and the strategies you use to achieve them. Planning is crucial in business because we are not simply dealing with money; time and effort are on the line—your time, and everyone helping you. Also, formalizing your vision helps you assess your current position and your capabilities of reaching it.

Aside from that, business plans let you plan ahead for possible problems you might get into. This requires you to analyze the market trend of flowers around your area, and look into your possible competitors. By getting this knowledge, you can appropriately predict possible highs and lows of the industry.

Business plans are also a requirement to get a loan from most banks. Banks need to determine if you can, at minimum, pay the loan back. This is very important especially for newcomers and people who plan upgrades to their shop.

Parts of a Business Plan

Title Page

The title page contains all the basic information about your flower shop, which includes your shop’s name, address, your name as the owner (and of others who co-own the shop), and other relevant information like the registration number of your business (if you have any, this may vary by area). It should also contain your business logo.

Executive Summary

The summary of your business plan, It has its own parts in it: (a) the business summary, (b) the future summary, (c) the market summary, and (d) the finance summary.

The business summary basically contains all the basic information related to your shop (think title page but more comprehensive).

The future summary outlines your vision for your shop, as well as your goals and objectives.

The market summary contains the information you’ve gathered about your customers and the marketing strategies you’ll use.

Lastly, the finance summary contains your expected sales, the money you need to start up, where you’ll get these funds and other monetary information. It should tell the reader your current financial position.

Image via Shutterstock

Management Plan

The management plan or the operations section contains all the nitty-gritty details of your business, from your flower suppliers, equipment, and production processes to your inventory, payment modes, operating hours, and communication channels. You can list out the products and services you plan to deliver. This can easily become the longest and important part of the business plan, so take your time writing this part.

Marketing Plan

As the name suggests, the marketing plan contains your analysis about your potential customers and competitors. It also includes your key marketing strategies that you plan to implement for your shop, such as running special discounts on holidays and other special occasions.

Future Plan

Again, the name suggests that the future plan contains your prospective plans for your shop. Here you can state your vision for your shop (something like the “premier flower business in the locale”) and your business goals. It is important to not just think of quick goals to attain but rather long-term goals that you hope to achieve.

Image via Shutterstock

Financial Plan

The financial plan contains everything about your shop’s finances. Here, you go into detail about the cash flow of your business. You are expected to list out your current creditors and debtors, your source of funding, and your projected cash flow; these are often tabulated with the figures and dates. If you have been working on your business plan with your shop already up and running, you can also add a profit and loss statement.

Supporting Documentation

At this part of the business plan, you can include some documents that are relevant to your business: permits, maps, financial tables, and other attachments that readers of your plan might use to refer.

Florists, do you have a business plan in place, What are some things you put in place that could help other florists, please share your comments down below!

____________

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

As a present-day florist, you need to diversify the services you offer to stay above your competition.

We all know that simply selling flowers doesn’t cut it in the floral industry and economy of today. That’s why florists offer delivery, holiday decorating, weddings and event florals, and many other products and services to help business thrive. Organizing workshops is one technique we’d like to spotlight today that helps draw in potential customers and serves as a way to give back to the community.

A floral workshop is a space you can personally engage with your customers. You can do many kinds of workshops, from general flower arranging, caring for various houseplants, to arranging for different occasions and flowers.

Preparing the space and materials for the workshops can be hard work, but another part of the preparation that many florists forget is getting the word out about your workshops. What use are your workshops if only a few people attend it? The good news is thanks to the proliferation of social media, spreading the word about something has never been easier.

Florist Marketing Materials

First off, you should have marketing materials ready at your disposal. To be able to reach as much audience as you can, you should reach out to as many media outlets as possible and have appropriate materials for each medium. One important marketing material is the poster, one that you can physically print out to be posted in your immediate vicinity like your shop, community boards, and other places in your area that allows you to post such materials. 

You also need to have a virtual copy of that poster for a variety of purposes online, mainly for your newsletters (if you have one) and your social media networks. For newsletters, you can just reuse that same poster and maybe add more information, as well as an invite link to online registration if available.

Image via Shutterstock

Social Media Marketing

In social media, you’ll have to put in a bit more effort. To effectively let your marketing material catch attention, your poster must be designed so that it contains all the pertinent information in one go. You will need to take advantage of the thumbnail sizes of each social media platform so that when people scroll through your post on their timeline, they don’t need to click on the image to see the information they need and you can avoid cropping out important details. Here are some thumbnail sizes of some social media sites:

Facebook: Facebook automatically generates a thumbnail for images with a maximum aspect ratio of 2:3 (vertical). A good poster to post in Facebook would then have the same aspect ratio , or a shorter aspect ratio (up to 1:1 or a square) to avoid having any part of your poster cropped out. If you opt for a landscape poster, take note that Facebook will simply scale down your image to 500 px wide, retaining the aspect ratio. Make sure the details are still clear once viewed.

Twitter: Like Facebook, Twitter also generates thumbnails for images. Tweets with single images display their photos to an aspect ratio of 2:1 (landscape), so horizontal posters work best there. Posters that are 1024 px wide and 512 px tall are good enough for Twitter.

Instagram: Once renowned for square photos, Instagram has since then supported non-square photos, but this aspect ratio is still the popular choice among users, thus it’s the safest go-to aspect ratio for the site. For horizontal posters, you can go up to an aspect ratio of 16:9, while portrait photos go up to 4:5 before anything gets cropped out. Letting any dimension reach 1080 px is good enough for Instagram (for example, 1080 x 1080 square photo).

Facebook, Instagram Stories and Snapchat (and all similar platforms): Stories are all portrait pictures, and generally have an aspect ratio of 16:9. However, you don’t have to focus on this; posting the same image that you did to the main platform will work.

Image via Shutterstock

Be Excited About Your Event!

After the visual materials, you need to show enthusiasm about your own event, and let that positive energy spread. Facebook, especially, helps you do so with Events, which works like a normal Page, but for specific events with a date and time. Putting up posts works like normal, so you can pretty much easily pick it up the first time.

Keep the customers excited by slowly giving a sneak peek at the materials, venue, and things to learn. Dropping tidbits of your preparations let them be part of the event way before it even started, and it might even spark interest for those who weren’t interested beforehand. Engage with the people who comment on those posts by replying, always reminding them to attend the event and let them you are excited they’re coming. To encourage people to interact with your posts, incentivize engagements by giving discount coupons or something similar.

You also have to manage the frequency of the posts. Posting too much can intimidate customers or give them a blind spot for the event, while posting too little can allow them to forget about the event entirely. Posting once per day until the day of the event should be your goal.

Workshops can be tiring to execute, but at the end of the day, if done well they will contribute positively to your business and help your business grow.

Florists, what are some ways you promote or market your workshops? Please share your comments below!

____________

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Flowers speak a visual language in the natural world, communicating with colors and shapes.

Flowers also have meanings and connotations that we have devised for them. As a florist, you can take advantage of this beauty because people nowadays have become especially receptive to visual content. Given the rise of platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, making use of this high time for visual content is a no-brainer.

How do you take advantage of this, you ask? By creating visual content like pictures and videos! To do so, you can set up your space to be perfect for photo shoots. Today we will be discussing how to make the perfect DIY flower photo studio right at your shop, with little cost!

Image via Shutterstock

A DIY Photo Studio’s Physical Look

First and foremost, the most important thing we need for our DIY photo studio is the space. There should be some dedicated space around your shop for a photo studio. Consider the following:

Natural Lighting

In photography, nothing beats natural lighting in terms of its cost and effectiveness. Preferably, your photo studio should be near a large window, where you can have natural light from outside most part of the day. If natural lighting is hard to come by, then don’t fret, because artificial lighting will save the day (see below). But again, nothing can still beat natural lighting, so do your best to find a good space for this.

Space

This shouldn’t be that big an issue for florists; the largest single arrangement you may need to take a picture of is a wedding or funeral piece. However, your photo studio should still be spacious not just for the products but for your camera set-up. Give enough distance between your products and your camera, and for your artificial lighting rig.

Furniture

For the most part, you will only need a table (preferably circular) or a bouquet stand when you take pictures. A folding table is useful since it can be folded and tucked away when you need your space back. Keeping a chair around is a no-brainer, too.

Backdrops

If you happen to have a white wall in the space, then you probably don’t need any other backdrop—that’s more than enough for basic photography. If you want to get more creative with your flower shots, you can hand paint materials like a wooden board or canvas to make textured backdrops. With a bit of ingenuity, you should get fairly decent backdrops with that method.

Image via Shutterstock

After choosing your space, we will deal with lighting and how to manipulate it. As said before, natural light is by far the cheapest and cost-effective light source that you can have. With natural light, you can get by with only a white cloth or cardboard as light diffusers. However, if it cannot be helped, you can use artificial lighting.

Artificial light’s main advantage is your full control over them, but as a part-time flower photographer, this may not mean much to you. In photography, there are two types of artificial lighting: continuous and flash. Continuous (or constant) light sources are similar to natural light, and should be the most relevant type of artificial light for you. Flash light sources can be used in very niche situations, so you might not need to get one right away.

Even though artificial lighting sounds like it’s going to break the bank, with some creativity an ordinary desk lamp can go a long way for your flower photography. Any similar, or larger lamps can work for your set-up, too.

After deciding your lighting set-up, you should also get light modifiers in cases where your current set-up produces bad results. Some basic light modifiers are umbrellas, softboxes, and reflectors. In fact, in tight budgets, you could get by with just an umbrella and DIYing your softbox by covering a standing lamp with a white cotton or silk cloth. For reflectors, any material white and flat enough should work.

Studio Set-up

Now that we have our space, we need to set it up as a photo studio. As a quick rule of thumb, you should make sure to put your flowers or products near the light source to get as much even light as possible. Keeping this in mind, a good position to start with is having the table placed perpendicular to your light source, letting the light face the side of the product. Opposite the window and past the table is your reflector, to help distribute light evenly into the product. Put up your backdrop behind the table and your camera set-up in front. This should be  your basic set-up for most cases.

Of course, you can freely change this set-up for specific scenes that you might to play with. Don’t hesitate to add more objects as you see fit, as much as your studio allows.

Image via Shutterstock

A DIY Flower Photographer’s Tools

As a florist-turned-DIY flower photographer, you might be thinking that you need to splurge hard for your tools, especially with the camera. However, for all intents and purposes that will be covered by your studio, smartphone cameras are actually decent enough.

With today’s camera technologies, smartphones can deliver DSLR-level images with little to no fuss. Of course, dedicated cameras will still be superior over these devices, but for someone like us, newbie photographers who may not know much about photography, a good eye for images is all we need with our smartphones to make it work. Not only is it cheap, it is also convenient.

If you really want to get into the dedicated camera route, and you are confident about learning photography tricks with it, we recommend getting cameras that allow manual settings for exposure and aperture—most cameras on the market should allow at least this much.

Aside from your camera, one crucial tool that you will need is the tripod. No matter what camera you use, stability is important in taking that perfect shot. You should get the appropriate tripod that you will need for your set-up, there’s no avoiding this.

Lastly, to finish off your photo studio, you will need your knowledge as a florist to make everything work. As a florist, you have a keen eye as to which flowers look best and how well these flowers will look. You should let your creative florist heart lead each photo shoot to make sure that you capture the flowers’ beauty in its entirety, and be able to enrapture potential customers.

As a budding flower photographer, you don’t need to start out with the professional tools to be able to put out quality content. With a little bit of creativity and ingenuity, you can get by with a small budget and deliver beautiful pictures that give the flowers justice in their images.

Florists, how are you taking photos of your arrangements now? Any plans to change your setup? Share your thoughts and ideas below!

____________

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Online advertising, online promotions, and online visibility are all musts to stay relevant with your target audience.

Facebook has had the biggest user base among all social media networks, boasting 2 billion users globally. However, the story is dim for Facebook’s younger user base in the United States.

For the past two years, Facebook has lost 15 million users, and the majority of them are teenagers and young adults. Instagram, a social media network also owned by Facebook, is experiencing the reverse of that trend: in the same span of time, its user base composition of teens rose from 64% to 66%.

Snapchat, another social media network with a similar form as Instagram, is also experiencing the same trend.

Still, Facebook remains relevant as a platform for businesses, given its user count and expansive set of tools for advertising. However, Instagram and Snapchat become new pastures to be ventured or focused on, and the motivation to put out visual content is ever so higher.

Prioritizing these platforms is critical for businesses whose audience are the tweens, and we florists hit that criteria. So get your cameras and flowers out and start taking photos!

Pricing in Floral Advertising

Since Instagram is slowly entering as one of our main platforms to focus on, we’ll be dealing with its pricing strategies for advertising. However, spoiler alert: there are no clear-cut prices for it. Reasonable estimates round off to be $0.20-$2 per click or $5 per 1,000 visitors, depending on the advertising model that you want to do.

There are many factors that affect the price on Instagram. If you are familiar with Facebook’s advertising tools, then you’ll also know how Instagram advertising works, since Facebook, as the owner of Instagram, uses the same set of tools. 

Facebook’s advertising system works like an auction, and thus the pricing varies depending on a lot of factors. Instagram demographics are usually feminine, with a youth bias, and targeting this demographic will increase the price.

The factors that affect the pricing are the amount you are willing to bid for your campaign, your ads’ Relevance Score (determined by the quality of your ad, among other things), and your estimated action rates (how likely your audience will do your desired outcome, i.e. interact with it).

In this auction system, they subsidize relevant ads. To quote Facebook, “an ad that’s relevant to a person could win an auction against ads with higher bids.” The important part here is to note that ad quality and relevance matter in their pricing. 

Image via Shutterstock

Florists and Search Engines

In the world of the search engine, Yelp has partnered with Bing for better local Bing search results.

For example, Yelp reviews of local businesses will now show up on Bing’s search results page. Much like in the form of Google My Business and their Google reviews, you can also sort these reviews into Recent, Critical, and Favorable.

For businesses with multiple locations, it gives users the option to go through each location’s reviews. Information about businesses is also now available in Bing’s knowledge panel, courtesy of Yelp.

Yelp has always been a people’s favorite for assessing the quality of business places, and thus you should always maintain a good standing there. However, with this partnership with Bing, Yelp data are now more visible and thus you should be more mindful of them now.

Remind yourself to reply to reviews in Yelp; express gratitude and encourage people who left good reviews to come back, dropping possible offers or promos, and inquire and attempt to resolve issues addressed in the reviews, replying back if it has been done.

Image via Shutterstock

The world is not living in two versions of reality as you might think; the digital reality is interacting with our reality in very close-knit ways. Taking advantage of this will not give your business an even edge but rather a requirement in today’s fast-paced world.

Florists must be up to date with these business practices to stay relevant. Keeping yourself updated with changes in social media, search engines, and more can help make your business grow.

Florists, are you using Instagram, Snapchat, or Yelp to promote your Floral business? Any suggestions, comments, or ideas that could help other florists? Please share your comments below!

____________

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Today’s consumers rely heavily on the internet for everything, and shopping for flowers is no exception. That’s why your online presence must be strong!

Search engine optimization should focus on customers in your direct vicinity. Local SEO is important, perhaps even more so than general SEO, because your direct source of reliable income will be the customers nearest to you. so optimizing your online presence that will prioritize them should be the first step for your business SEO.

So, search engine optimization, as its name suggests, allows your business website to be easily seen at the top of search results, thus increasing your online visibility. The best way to go about your first steps of SEO is through Google My Business.

Florist Tools For SEO

For starters, Google My Business is a free tool that Google provides that helps business owners manage their online presence across Google’s services, particularly Search and Maps. It helps you organize information about your business, and complements your website if you have one. Optimizing your Google My Business listing is important since 90% of organic searches are from Google itself. GMB also seamlessly connects Local Search and Maps, saving you the effort of optimizing for two of the most useful Google services for businesses. But most of all, what makes it really attractive as an SEO tool is the arsenal of tools it has to manage your online presence effectively.

How to Start with Google My Business

So, to start with Google My Business, you’ll need a Google account. It’s best to make a separate account for your business, or use the one you want to be associated with your business. Proceed to google.com/business and click on the “Start Now” button at the upper right corner. From there on, fill up the basic information about your business.

Google also lets you set up the service area so that they can set it up for Local Search and Maps. There are five ways to verify your listing, so you can choose which way is easiest or most convenient for you. Putting up your store’s operating hours helps people know when you’re also available.

Image via Shutterstock

Google My Business Profile

After dealing with the basics, we should go over to the rest of your business’s listing. Go through your business profile and fill up as much information as you can, because anyone can “suggest an edit” to your listing for missing information, so getting accurate information the first time is crucial.

Upload as many images and as high-quality as possible; according to Google, businesses with photos see 35% more clicks to their website and 42% higher requests for driving directions in Maps. These images should showcase as much of your business as possible so that people can easily spot your business when they go past it. 

After your listing goes live, people going through it can also leave reviews about your business. In this case, you should try to be as responsive to all reviews as possible, whether the review is positive or negative. This way, people will see that you care about how satisfied your customers were after availing your services.

Thank customers for leaving positive reviews, encourage them to come back and maybe even drop an offer for a new service. For negative reviews, aim to resolve the issue, and get back to them if you have done something to fix it. Each response is a mark of sincerity for your dedication to customer satisfaction.

Continue to update Google My Business

Google My Business also lets you publish posts, which you can use for announcing events, offers, new products, and more. It can be useful to get new information related to your business out to prospective customers. What makes it such a great feature is that these posts appear alongside your listing in the Google search results page, so you can put out announcements that might entice customers. It’s a terribly underrated and underused feature of Google My Business that you should check out.

Further Optimizations

As with business, improvements for GMB will always be available at any point down the road. Luckily, it also offers tools that help you know which parts of your listing might need optimizing. GMB Insights is a nifty tool that shows how people have interacted with your listing. 

The Insights panel in the Google My Business dashboard tell you (1) how many views your listing had, (2) how and where people find your listings, (3) what people do with your listings, and many more. You can work around with the information you get there to know which parts of your listing might need improvements. You might need to update information around your listing, work on places where your listing is falling off, and make good use of the ways that people interact with your listing the most.

You can also add some sort of FAQs right at your listings. Called Q&A, this section lets people ask questions about your business that you can answer. The questions stay in your listing, so you should endeavor to answer common questions that you think most people will ask. People can also drop their own questions, so you should also check it from time to time.

Of course, do not forget about updating the information in your listing whenever it changes. Keeping your listing updated is ever so crucial in this fast-paced world, and missing a beat will also let you miss a lot of potential customers.

Image via Shutterstock

Keeping up with the trends of the business world can be daunting. It wasn’t until 10 years ago or so when the world became ever so dependent on the Internet for a lot of things. Businesses who wanted to be in the forefront of this era took advantage of this traffic, and Google has given businesses with the Google My Business tool to help ease the difficulty of keeping up with things like search engine optimization.

Not only does it help in your first steps in local SEO, it’s relatively easy to set up and greatly enhances your online presence, especially in Google’s most used services Search and Maps.

Florists, how has Google My Business helped increase your business’s visibility? Please share your comments, thoughts, and suggestions below!

____________

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Social media has had an overwhelming impact on human interaction since its inception, particularly in business.

Social media has changed how people obtain information, and vastly increased the volume of content that we consume. Facebook remains the most-used social media platform, but recently its title is being threatened by another social media platform focusing on images and videos, Instagram.

Origins of Facebook

Inspired by unviersity face books which contain students’ photos and basic information, Facebook began at Harvard University in 2003 as FaceMash. It creator, Mark Zuckerburg went on to open “TheFacebook” to other Harvard students in 2004.

As time passed, membership expanded to other universities, high schools, then to private companies, until it finally opened to everyone in 2006. Since then, it has slowly accumulated users, reaching a staggering 2.3 billion active user count by December 2018. As a company, Facebook, Inc. has also acquired other services, including the photo and video-sharing social networking service, Instagram, which also boasts a user count of 1 billion as of May 2019.

As two different social networking services, Facebook and Instagram compete against each other for the same audience, despite being owned by the same company. With similar features but a radically different overall focus, both services are popular all over the globe and Facebook takes the lead for most number of active users.

Image via Shutterstock

Facebook’s Decline

Over the past two years in the United States, Facebook has lost 15 million users, per a study from Edison Research and Triton Digital.

The decrease is most obvious among users aged 12-34, or teenagers and young adults. In the same age bracket and time period, Instagram showed growth, increasing from 64% to 66%. Snapchat, although outclassed by Instagram, sees the same trend across the United States and the United Kingdom.

From this data we can infer that tweens and young adults are turning to Instagram and Snapchat for their visual content, and eMarketer says the same. This does not pose a huge threat to Facebook, because they still rule the realm of social networking services. However, it will be a concern that they are losing out among younger age groups. As Facebook owns Instagram, that should soften the blow. But what does that mean for your business?

How Does This Affect Florists?

In the grand scale of things, it only slightly affects the floral industry. Facebook will remain relevant as a platform for promoting businesses for the foreseeable future, given its expansive set of tools for promotions and its largest user base compared to other services.

However, the motivation to focus on visual content becomes higher, especially for businesses whose main audience are young people, because this age group communicates most using visual content. The floral industry can greatly benefit from this traffic, as flowers speak in the same visual language. By focusing more on visuals, your floral businesses can reach your audience more easily.

Visual content is not limited to pictures, it also includes videos. Sped-up or “time lapse” videos are trending across social networks, which is a trend you can join in on with just your smartphone. You may also consider a montage of arranging the flowers for events, like weddings or parties.

Image via Shutterstock

Facebook may still be the king of social media, but in light of current trends, it’s high time for industries reliant on or benefitting from visual content to expand to other platforms.

Florists, have you seen a decline in engagement on Facebook? Are you using Instagram to market your floral business? Share your comments, thoughts, and ideas below!

____________

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.