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!

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