Digital dynamite

After 30 years in the industry, Mark Bolin understands how nursery owners think. He’s done everything on the supply chain, from running a garden center, to selling plants for wholesale nurseries. Now, he owns and operates The Site Gardener, a company providing web design and digital marketing for the nursery industry. It began as a part-time side gig, but business has exploded. He’s redesigned websites for nurseries in Oregon and garden centers in California.

“This is the new yellow pages,” he says. “For a lot of younger people, that’s how they go searching.”

And if you want to be found, you need a strong presence in that world.

Here are a few tips that any nursery owner should consider to improve the business’ digital presence.

Realize you’re living in the future. Bolin says the main reason the industry has been slow to adopt new technology is simple. The older generation of nurserymen doesn’t spend a lot of time on the internet. So they think no one else is.

“That’s the problem — they think everyone’s thinking like them,” Bolin says. “It’s just not the case. They’ve always been outdoor people. They think if someone is sitting in front of the computer that they’re not doing anything. That’s the mentality in this industry. They have to get past that. Just because they’re resistant doesn’t mean their customers are.”

For example, some nurseries have switched from printing and mailing a full plant catalog to a digital version online at a fraction of the cost. Bolin says customers have accepted this switch very well.

Get your inventory online. Tools are available to password-protect this information, so browsing customers can’t see pricing without logging in, but Bolin says this should be a priority for any nursery’s website.

“Today, people are so impatient,” he says. “They’re not going to call you. No one wants to make phone calls anymore. They just want instant access to information quickly.”

Bolin’s company offers several industry-specific tools, including an availability tool. As an addition to a nursery’s website, the availability tool lets customers view current inventory and filter by type of plant or material size, among other options. Customers can also click on a particular type of plant to learn more details about it. All the nursery needs to provide is an Excel spreadsheet. The program takes it from there.

Digital marketing takes time and effort. When you give the social media responsibilities to the youngest member of your staff just because he or she understands Facebook, you can’t expect the same results as you’d get from hiring someone from outside your company. When the nursery gets busy, your post frequency will drop if that digital marketing manager or social media coordinator is weighed down with other tasks. When it’s February 15 and your most recent post is about pumpkins, it makes your site — and by association, your business — look bad.

If you don’t have the resources to devote one full-time employee to digital marketing, Bolin suggests using the tools available through Facebook or social media dashboards like HootSuite to set up automated posts months ahead of your busiest times. If that still seems like too much of a timesink, you can hire a company to handle it for you.

For more: thesitegardener.com