Social media marketing gets a lot of buzz, but don’t neglect marketing in your local community!

The local community is your main source of revenue due to its closeness and your ease of access to this audience. Local customers are your first customers, and the immediate intimacy of personal contact gives you instant credibility, trust, and familiarity, making it easier to engage with them. With a low barrier for marketing, converting customers into brand advocates for you will be easy under the right circumstances.

Fortunately, there are very few hoops to jump through, and many ways to engage with your community.

Positive Floral Elements

There’s great power in associating your brand with positive elements. These positive elements can be anywhere in your community, so always be on the lookout with current happenings and public opinions of several things in the locality. Association is the easiest method to generate interest for your shop, but you also have to be smart about it. There are some sure ways to associate your brand with good examples, like events and shared passions among the community members.

Local Floral Events

Liven up the community by organizing and hosting local events. Possible events that you can run are workshops for flower arrangements and an open house that features rare or seasonal flowers. You can also collaborate with other businesses for local events and try to invite as many people as possible. 

Your space size doesn’t matter; being creative with the events can go big or small. You want the exposure from these events to showcase your business so capitalize on this high time. Aside from the close relationships you can foster, this also opens up opportunities to people who might have been new to your place and can become potential customers.

You don’t always have to take the initiative to organize local events, but be on the lookout for them. If there’s an event somewhere close, bring your brand there. Even a small stall can go a long way of promoting and engaging with the people. In the case of florists, you can even donate bouquets of flowers and help with the decoration of local events. A sash bearing your shop’s name should do the trick, but going beyond won’t be much harm.

Floral Teams

Aside from events, you can also sponsor teams in the community. A great example would be sponsoring local sports teams that the community itself supports. Let your brand show on their shirts, or donate some materials like water bottles branded with your shop. It’s a win-win situation: you get to help out people who are passionate about something and let them take their chances to bigger and greater places, and you get advertising not just to your community, but also to the bigger and greater places that the teams will go.

Loyalty Program

In these days of subscriptions and memberships, people appreciate being an honored and special part of something. By implementing a loyalty program and offering memberships, you incentivize long-term customers and keep them to your shop, as well as entice new ones to stay with your shop. People under these programs can also become your strongest patrons and advocates once you do your campaigns right.

As a bonus, adding a referral system in your loyalty program can encourage new customers to try out your services and products by incentivizing their first purchases to be discounted, for example.

Under these programs, you can also have giveaways and special promos, helping to generate buzz and interest around your shop.

Floral Talk

Word of mouth can travel fast, so gather up positive comments among your customers. Ask them what they prefer with your services, highlighting what they liked most. As long as you remind them and thank them for it, the impression lasts.

If you maintain a blog (which we recommend you do), then collate these testimonials and post them there. Since these are all comments from real customers, they are more reliable reviews and posting media that supports their comments (e.g. posting pictures of their bouquets when they liked the arrangement) can generate interest toward your shop.

Know your Customers

The end goal of all these might be to primarily generate interest around your brand, but there is one more thing that you can do while engaging the community: getting to know them. Getting to understand the community and their needs and wants can be crucial to the planning of your products and services. You might want to know when they are most likely to buy flowers and capitalize on that. You can even keep track of best-selling bouquets and flowers. Ultimately, trying to actively know your audience as you engage with them can give very good insights about them.

 

Engagement with the local community is incredibly easy because they’re just there. There is no need for heavy logistics and trying to make a great first impression. You only need to make the effort to approach the people, and once people get familiar with you, they’ll start to gravitate toward your shop. Eventually, your efforts will be repaid, and sales will boost greatly, simply because you treat your very first customers well, and this can ripple toward the rest of your customer base.

 

Florists, what is something you do to stay engaged with your community? Please share your comments below!

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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.

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.

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.

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!

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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.

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.

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.

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!

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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.

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.

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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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!

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.

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.

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!

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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.

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.

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!

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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.

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.

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!

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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.

Customers search online about the things they want to buy, even if it’s a simple local purchase.

 

Google is not only helpful for consumers, but it’s also good for businesses. As long as you can use that to your advantage by strengthening your business’s online presence, your floral e-commerce website can succeed. 

Florist Quick Guide to Google My Business

Google My Business is Google’s one-stop shop for all things online for your business. It is an online platform that contains tools where you can manage how your business will look like in Google and Google Search.

Google My Business (GMB) improves your local SEO by:

* Giving you the options to add your business and the relevant details to Search and Maps

* Viewing and replying to customer reviews

* Adding photos

What are Google My Business local Guides?

Google My Business’s Local guides allow people to contribute to the following:

*Adding information to Maps

*Adding photos

*Updating information on businesses they are familiar with or local to them

*Adding new places to the platform.

The program differentiates individuals into tiers, depending on how much they have contributed to Maps. The goal for them is to keep Maps updated and help other people be fully informed about the businesses and places around them. 

Aside from adding data, Local Guides can also add reviews to business listings. However, they are considered to be more reliable users, thus their reviews appear more frequently and on top of the reviews list. 

How Can I Improve My Local Pages?

Customers who come across your business, those who make a purchase or require service can be a Local Guide. It can be hard to tell Local Guides apart from normal customers. Local Guides reviews are trusted more by people just with the sheer fact that their reviews are given priority when displaying reviews on your listing.

You cannot just pick out Local Guides from your customers and give them the best service you can. The key here is to treat all your customers the same and give the best service as much as you can to everyone. 

Encourage customers to leave reviews for your business listing in Google Maps.

When receiving Positive Reviews:

*Reply to reviews in your listing

*Make sure to thank the reviewer

*Offer them to return 

*Try out a new service that you might have started on your business.

 

When receiving Negative Reviews:

*Be polite and courteous

*State the status of the concern or issue the review was having problems with.

*Apologize for the issue or concern

*Offer to replace or fix the issue

 

Doing this will give people the impression that you are very mindful of the concerns that your business has and responsive to your customer base.

 

The tools that GMB provides are beneficial in boosting your online presence, and most especially in the local setting. Taking advantage of these tools is thus invaluable in helping out your business grow.

Florists, have you been using Google my Business: Local Guides? Please share your thoughts and comments below!

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Floranext offers great florist software, florist POS, florist websites and florist wedding proposal software. Our florist technology products are built by florists, for florists. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

 

Did you know May is National Pet Month in the United States?

May is officially here! A month of Spring Flowers, Mother’s Day and a month to cherish our four-legged furry friends!

As florists, you may have been asked the question time and time again, what flowers or plants are safe around animals?

Every pet owner knows their furry friend will chew on anything it can get into, and at some point it will gravitate towards plants and flowers. As beautiful as plants and flowers are, some can be particularly dangerous to our furry companions. Pets are members of the family, so the last thing we want is for them to get sick from flowers or plants that are toxic to them.

Top Toxic Flowers and Plants

Aloe Vera
Amaryllis
Azalea
Baby’s Breath (toxic to dogs, safe for cats)
Begonia
Birds of Paradise
Carnation
Chrysanthemum
Daffodils
Dieffenbachia
Eucalyptus
Iris
Ivy
Mother in Law’s Tongue/Snake Plant
Narcissus
Oleander
Poinsettia
Tulips
Wisteria

Top Pet-Friendly Flowers and Plants

Aster
Alstroemeria
Daisies
Fern Varieties
*Lilies (safe for dogs, toxic to cats)
Marigolds
Orchids
Pansies
Petunia
Roses
Snapdragons
Sunflowers
Spider Plant this
Violets
Zinnia

Signs and Symptoms of Flower and Plant Toxicity

If you suspect that a pet has ingested a toxic plant or flowers, please contact your vet right away. Here are some signs:

• Lethargy
• Weakness
• Vomiting
• Diarrhea
• Drooling
• Nausea

For a full and complete listing of toxic and non-toxic plants, we recommend the ASPCA website for more information.

When customers are ordering flowers or a plant for a pet-friendly household, just take a few extra minutes to check the list! This will help strengthen the relationship between you and the customer and provides confidence to keep them coming back.

Florists, do you get asked a lot what is pet-friendly? What do you offer your customers when asked this question? Please share your thoughts and comments below!

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Floranext offers great florist software, florist POS, florist websites and florist wedding proposal software. Our florist technology products are built by florists, for florists. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Mother’s Day is just around the corner! Is your business ready for this busy floral holiday?

Having a plan in place to make the most revenue during Mother’s Day is critical to earning the rewards of this bustling, blossoming occasion. Read on for an agenda to help you plan and organize your shop for the upcoming Mother’s Day holiday.

1. Promote Your Floral Business!

Begin by using your floral website and social media profiles to start marketing your floral arrangements and your business. It’s not too late!

Images & Products

• • Post high-quality photos of your work or any specials you are offering during Mother’s Day on your website or social media platforms.
  • Don’t forget to link your social media posts to your website! You want to make it as easy as possible for customers to make a purchase—this also means that advertising your social media heavily on your website can actually lead customers away from making a purchase.
  • Mother’s Day products should be prominently displayed and easily accessible throughout your website.

Hours & Policies

• Clearly post your shop’s business hours on your website and social media.
• Having clear policies on delivery, returns, and substitutions will alleviate any headaches for you and your customers and help head off negative customer experiences.

Promotions & Discounts

• Increase traffic to your store by offering deals or discounts on pickups rather than deliveries.
• List special promotions. This is a great way to encourage customers to shop early, before Mother’s Day week.
• Don’t forget to update your product pricing to cover your costs!

Note: “Promoting” does not always have to mean offering discounts. Remind customers why they should order flowers through your business.

2. Staffing, Scheduling and Duties, Oh My!

Making sure you have enough coverage can be overwhelming during the holiday rush. Not to worry, take a deep breath and follow these tips!

Hiring

• If hiring extra help, have them come in on a day before Mother’s Day week to go over their responsibilities and training.
• If hiring extra drivers, discuss with them whether you require them to use their own vehicle.
• If you can, keep a standby driver at the shop to handle new orders for delivery.

Employees

• Have an employee meeting and discuss what is expected of them during Mother’s Day.
• Make sure to explain how important everyone shows up and does what is expected of them.
• Encourage and praise your employees and floral designers. Its always better to be positive than negative.

Scheduling & Duties

• Have your Mother’s Day week scheduled out two weeks in advance. That way there are no surprises to your staff and you have time to make adjustments and improvise as needed.
• Go over job descriptions with employees—it’s always useful to remind everyone what their responsibilities are.
• Assign sections for the delivery drivers in specific areas. Add finished flower arrangements to this area with the date of delivery that is bold and clear.

 

3. Don’t Forget your Flowers & Supplies

Making sure you have enough flowers and supplies to get through the holiday is important.

Supplies

• Start looking around for supplies, containers, baskets and vases weeks before Mother’s Day.
• Visit your local supplier. However, don’t forget to visit discount home stores and dollar stores. You can find some great unique items.
• Don’t settle! Shop around for the best deals on supplies and florals.

Flowers

• Start ordering your Mother’s Day flowers early to get the best value.
• Don’t forget to shop around if you buy from multiple wholesalers.
• If you are comfortable, get your flowers through a floral auction. A great opportunity to get some discounts when purchasing in large quantities.
• Make sure to order flowering plants, orchids, and dish gardens. These are big sellers and require very little work.

Note: If you are new to the floral industry, Mother’s Day spans for a week, not a day. So order enough flowers!

4. Start Prepping & Showcasing your Flowers!

Stay ahead of the game with these prepping and showcasing tips during the busy holiday rush.

Prepping

• Prep your flowers when they arrive.
• Teach your front of store staff how to wire flowers to help cut down the time.
• Cut ribbon and make bows ahead of time.
• Green any vases, baskets or containers.
• No wastefulness! With the abundant supplies and flowers in the shop, it is easy to get sidetracked and be super wasteful. Everything thrown on the floor that can be used should be. Wasting or throwing out even a good pin or wire is considered money out of your pocket. Please be sure to express this to your employees.

Showcasing

• Gather up all your add-ons and gift items and display them prominently in the store.
• Make sure you re-stock your impulse buys on your front counter to sell in addition to flower arrangements.
• Make sure your flower shop and displays are clean and have an inviting atmosphere.
• Remember: If employees have time to lean, they have time to clean! Breaks are important but it doesn’t take much energy to tidy up.

Work Ahead

• Work a day ahead. Fill any orders for next day the day before. Working a day or two ahead will allow you flexibility just in case there are any last minute orders.
• Place premade orders in a cooler tagged with date of pickup or delivery.
• Mark any time-sensitive orders and bring those to the front of your cooler.

Note: It helps to have a system that works best for you. However, working on orders per day can feel overwhelming, so staying ahead of the game is always best.

5. Take Care of Yourself

It is important to take care of yourself during this busy Mother’s Day week.

• Wear comfortable clothes and shoes. Avoid open-toed shoes, as this can be an insurance liability in some areas.
• Make sure you eat! Breakfast, Lunch, and dinner are important—don’t skip meals!
• Get enough sleep. No one is at their best with lack of sleep.
• Take mandatory breaks.
• Do not sweat the small stuff. Regardless of how hard you try, there may be a complaint here or there. Do not let this get you down. It’s the nature of the business. The world can’t survive without florists!
• Try to enjoy Mother’s Day week by keeping a journal of all the funny things that happen or mishaps that take place to reflect on for next year.

Tip: Bring in extra shoes and store them in your cooler to remedy those aching feet. 

 

We would like to wish all florists a very successful Mother’s Day!

 

Florists, do you have any great Mother’s Days tips to share with our readers? Please post any of your Mother’s Day tips or feedback below.

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Floranext offers great florist software, florist POS, florist websites and florist wedding proposal software. Our florist technology products are built by florists, for florists. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.