San Francisco Flower and Garden Show March 20, 21, 22, 23, & 24, 2019
At the Cow Place in Daly City, CA.
For more information about this event please visit the San Diego County Flower & Plant website.
Is it time to continue your education to upgrade your skills and expand your knowledge?
Have you registered for the classes that will enhance your design ability and profitability?
If not then you should do it today!
We have amazing talent again this year excited to share their knowledge with all of you!
Please act now and register as prices will soon go up. Don’t forget to register for the grant, competitions.
We look forward to seeing you very soon!
For more information on this event, please visit the Illinois Florist Association website.
Let the people you elect into office understand the floral industry and you need support!
March 11th – 12th, 2019
For more information, please visit SAF website.
Let the people you elect into office understand the floral industry and you need support!
March 11th – 12th, 2019
For more information, please visit SAF website.
Save The Date!
Spring Convention
Sunday, March 10, 2019
Cedar Shore Resort | Chamberlain, South Dakota
For more information, please visit the South Dakota Florist Association website.
Information TBA
For more information about this event, please visit the Floral Association of the Rockies website.
99 Years of Floral Mastery…Educating, Inspiring, Collaborating
For more information, please visit the Michigan Floral Association website.
These days it may seem as though flowers are becoming a vintage luxury that only older generations seem to care about or can afford.
Currently, the trend among Millennials seems to be houseplants. Their charm is that they require little maintenance to thrive, a tempting proposition for people who live busy and fast-paced lives.
The virtual spaces that we now inhabit changes the landscape of living, requiring businesses of all kinds to quickly adapt their products and marketing strategies. If you haven’t, it’s time to begin thinking of ways for your business to reach young people.
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The touchstone of the Millennial generation is the Internet, enabling people to be connected wherever they may be in the world. This makes the Internet one of the best tools of communication, and of course, marketing. Knowing how to fully utilize the Internet to make an impact with your brand is fundamental to letting yourself be known to your target audience.
Image via Shutterstock
Social media platforms are by far the most visited websites and tools in today’s society, and florists should take advantage of that traffic to bring attention to their brand. Although it is good to have an account with all the large social media platforms, the most critical are Instagram and Facebook. Their impressive support for images (which you should rely heavily on) and extensive ad programs make them the go-to for almost any business.
Your shop’s Facebook page is going to be the face of your business, so take your time tailoring the page’s picture and cover photo. For any other day, you can use a default design, but you can also utilize these photos when running campaigns or promos. Usually, the profile photo can be your logo.
The content of these profiles will be the most important. Whether it be on Facebook or Instagram, your posts should endeavor to tell a story. Millennials are loyal to brands they trust, and they trust brands that tell their stories.
Image via Shutterstock
Millennials are DIYers and reliant on gathering information on the Internet, thus you should take this opportunity to consider putting up a blog, where you can teach people how to take care of flowers, content about which flowers can be useful for specific occasions, how-to/DIY guides, and much more. Putting up content is both a service to your customers and a boost to their loyalty to your brand (besides being good for your search engine ranking!). Once they find your content helpful and useful, they can learn to trust you over time.
A trend that you can also ride on nowadays is the do-it-yourself trend. People believe that when they can do it themselves, not only can they have potential savings, but they can also have the satisfaction of having done it themselves. In order for you to fully utilize this trend, you should have good DIY content, where you teach people how to set up flowers and maybe even teach them a few tricks in floral arrangements. For people who might be apprehensive in the DIY approach, give them a flexible option that lets you do it but still gives them control over the flowers. The key here is customization: give people a way to express themselves through the flowers, and try to give them more options to give more customization!
After gathering a following, you should engage with them! You should excel in customer support: dealing with errors in orders and delivering, helping provide information on the flowers, and even helping them out pick the right flowers for specific events. Going over and beyond, you should also learn to engage with your customers in the social media platforms. People appreciate replies to questions they ask about your service or product.
Part of relating to them is talking with them when they share their own experiences. By encouraging people to share their own stories, then commending them and appreciating their effort, they are more likely to interact with your brand more, earning yourself a potential customer. Don’t force people to do so, though; let them come to you naturally so you can ensure that they will stay.
Through these interactions, you can also get feedback as to how to improve your products further. Letting them voice their opinions and recognizing them can be great in knowing how to make your service better for them.
Convenience is one of the millennials main focus when choosing or purchasing a product. Anything that could cause any brief delay will detour this generation in finding a competitor.
Just like in other industries, you might be also interested in setting up subscriptions and or loyalty programs. Subscriptions are perfect for the floral industry and can entice newcomers since they will be bound to be changed every so often. You can feature flowers every month and have them sent to everyone who subscribed, with complimentary brochures on how to take care of them, information on the flowers or advertisement of your upcoming events or classes.
Loyalty programs can be less effective than subscription, but they can help add more incentives to customers who frequent your place, which will keep them returning.
Marketing to Millennials and the younger generation may seem too much work, a pain, or even frustrating. However, simply following some of the recommended marketing tactics above can help increase a younger clientele and will help increase profits and allow your business to bloom in the future!
Florists, what are you doing to reach young people? Please share your comments below!
Search Engine Optimization or SEO refers to the process used to improve a website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs) on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Having an SEO strategy for your floral business can help draw customers to your website and grow sales and revenue.
Working on SEO can sound like a headache, and there are a lot of myths about SEO, but once you understand the basics you will be on your way to starting your own SEO strategy. Let’s take a minute to review the basics of SEO and understand how search engines like Google rank your business website.
Web search engines are the software systems we and our customers use to surf the Internet. The top search engines are Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google commands the largest share among the three, with consistently over 90% market share globally in 2018.
The goal of a search engine is to provide the information you or your customers are looking for and ranking them in order of quality and relevance. There are hundreds of factors that are involved when search engines rank websites in an organic search.
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Here are some important components to use on your floral website that will help rank your website higher on search engines.
First off, as with all search engines like Google, they implement a web crawler/algorithm, that goes around the web. It “crawls” around the web, catching keywords to determine the topic and understanding the content of the page and seeks out links in the page, then checking if that linked page is a “reliable” one.
It can be concluded that if a page links to a reliable page, it has a reliable source and is thus relatively reliable too. It gives a score to this page from that linking. The crawler then goes through all the links in that page and does that scoring until all links are exhausted. After that, the algorithm gives the page its PageRank in that specific keyword. The higher the PageRank, the more likely it is for the page to appear in the first parts of the search engine results pages.
on a side note, Google search results may show some variances depending on browsers and devices.
Image via Shutterstock
Getting placed on the first page of a Google search doesn’t happen overnight or in a few days, but you can passively accrue traffic to your website by being present in the top 5 searches for your keywords. Your SEO strategy needs to be a continuous process by staying on top of your SEO strategy and make sure that it is up to date.
Your SEO strategy Not only needs to be focused on your current customer base, but potential Customers will be able to find you and your business easily when looking up relevant information that pertains to your business. A good rule of thumb to keep on top of your SEO strategy is to research the tactics used by your competitors.
Florists, Do you have a SEO strategy in place? What do you do to increase your SEO? Please share in the 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 florist, you have a good idea of what makes a beautiful floral arrangement, and how to communicate with types of flowers and their placement.
The next step is to achieve awareness of your floral brand. You need to look different, striking, and eye-catching to rake in these customers just like your floral arrangements. The question now is, how?
There are many options for graphic design out there, and fortunately he great thing about them is that you can go about it in many different ways, from DIY (Doing It Yourself) to hiring professionals to design your shop’s look. Here is a guide – a set of design resources for florists.
image via pexels
You should understand that doing the design yourself means more than just thinking of the design. You also need to know the technical skills required in using the tools and software needed to make the design. Luckily, these tools are getting easier to learn and use.
Design and photo editing software Adobe Photoshop is powerful but the user interface of the program can be overwhelming to first-time or inexperienced users. Thankfully, the Internet is bustling with easy graphic design software:
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The upside of these sites is that they provide templates from which you can start building upon. There’s a huge array of choices available from their catalog, each designed for specific purposes and with modifiable text and/or images. These websites also provide extra graphics assets readily at your disposal. With a theme as flowers, you are sure to have a template or two ready to be edited!
The downside of these is that you have limited control over the assets; most of these websites do not have the full breadth and robust tools that something like Photoshop has. With a badly done design, this can be a disaster. However, you can do most of the work that you want to be done on these sites. Also, free members and guests might need to attribute the design to the website, with some watermark that you don’t want to have. These websites are great for simple work that can be done with a template, and they do it really well.
These websites usually offer these services in memberships, likely in two tiers, a free one and a premium one. Needless to say, free members get limited access to templates and assets, while premium members can access their entire library and even ask for professional help in the website.
image via pexels
If you are confident with your editing skills, you probably wouldn’t be here. However, if you are willing to expand your skill set, you can take a swing at learning Photoshop or Illustrator (a similar program, used to open most assets from design sites). You can actually get decent work done after a few YouTube tutorials or so.
Of course, Starting from scratch is a monumental task. You can take a look at several graphic design sites like Freepik and Creative Market and see some templates that you can modify. Graphical assets like icons are also readily available in these sites. You can download these files and modify them in the program, making it into the design you want.
This can be the most taxing option available, because of the nature of these programs that are aimed at professionals. Plus, just like the maker websites, you will need a premium membership to access all their assets. This option is certainly not for quick jobs, but if you want to really do it yourself, then you can just make it yourself.
Image via Shutterstock
In all honesty, we don’t have the luxury of time to actually do the design ourselves. Plus, the design can easily go horribly wrong in the hands of inexperienced users. Hiring professionals for graphic design services can be quite the number in your financial account, but for the sake of exposure and gaining customers, this can be a worthy exchange.
image via Shutterstock
The easiest way to hire professionals is to go to a freelance website and scroll from the long list of freelancers willing to do your bidding in a heartbeat’s notice.
Consider using a freelance platform like:
Upwork and Fiverr have a healthy population of freelance graphic designers that would jump at your job posting. Behance and Dribbble also have designer portfolios, though are harder to navigate. The positive thing about hiring freelance graphic designers is that the price can be relatively cheap, and you can state that they do not hold any rights to the work done.
However, revisions with freelancers are usually also paid, unless stated otherwise beforehand. You need to talk with your freelancer before getting the job done.
The first thing to look for in a freelancer is their portfolio. Freelancers usually have them posted in their profile, and you can also ask for samples during the interview phase. This helps you identify the right freelance graphic designer whose style that you prefer, although most professional designers should be able to do what you want to be done.
Because freelancers work in contracts, hiring them is great for designing quick things like posters for an upcoming promo. Turnaround times are also good because the competition in the market is rather tight.
Image via Shutterstock
This is as professional as professional design can get. These teams offer packaged deals in graphic design, like getting a logo, poster templates, and business cards done for one payment. These deals are also usually very flexible, like letting you order just a logo, or letterheads and business cards. They also allow revisions of the design, in case you didn’t like the first designs.
Out of all the options presented, this one is the one that you can get the most professional designs from. With design teams, one person may be doing the design, but then passed on to another for quality checking in order to maintain a standard set by the team internally.
Well-established teams also have great customer support, in order to create a positive reputation around themselves. Having a design team make your creative works also makes any design to be done, with little to no effort at your side. Of course, this convenience may come at a high price.
Design teams usually have a dedicated website, and you can easily scroll their portfolio to see if they are a great fit to your job. They are great for having work done about your brand, and they can produce design materials like templates that you can use for the future. Plus, you hold all rights of the designs, so you need not to worry about copyright.
What do you need to be designed? For a field as varied and subjectively beautiful as design, you need to clearly delineate your requirements and express what you want to see in your design.
If you have a particular design in mind, clearly communicate this with your graphic designer:
The idea here is that you explicitly told them of what you expect from them; this helps build a clear understanding of your end-goals.
image via pexels
We hope our how-to guide on floral design resources was useful – there are lots of tools now to design it yourself or hire a professional. But more than ever, for the floral industry branding and design are at the heart of a businesses’ success!
Florists, what are some ways you use graphic design in your business and what options do you use? Please post 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.
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