Think of your garden center as an escape from a concrete jungle — it stands out with luscious green plants, pastel flowers, and vibrant arrangements that give your business a unique feel.
Effectively marketing your store can be difficult, though — but luckily, we’re here to help. There are several strategies you can implement to boost sales, bring in new shoppers, and keep those same customers coming back.
Understanding the unique aspects of your business can help you leverage your customer base through social media, community events, and even something as simple as your garden center’s point of sale (POS) system — so let’s dive into it.
Why Garden Center Marketing Matters
According to the National Gardening Association, the recent pandemic created over 18 million new gardeners, meaning that garden centers have more opportunity than ever to meet their customers’ needs. But actually gaining those people as customers is tricky, particularly if they already frequent another store similar to yours.
This makes your garden center marketing strategy even more important. Not only do you want to keep your current customers, you want to pry potential customers away from your competition.
The goals of effectively marketing your garden center can vary, but you want your store to be the first place people think about when looking for anything garden-related.
By optimizing your marketing, your store benefits from:
- Higher profits and more sales
- Sustained relationships with your customers
- Increased visibility in a competitive market
Effectively achieving these goals can make your garden center a community staple, so following these marketing strategies could set you apart from the competition.
6 Garden Center Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business ASAP
There are several things to think about when looking at the different ways to market to potential customers — but first, you need to understand the demographics you’re looking to bring in. You’ll build your marketing strategy around these findings.
Only then can you decide which of the following marketing ideas really fits your business. Be sure to choose carefully, but don’t be afraid to try something new. Marketing is all about adjusting to new information.
Try these strategies to help your garden center stand out from the competition and bring in more business.
1. Partner With Local Businesses and Organizations
Partnering with different organizations and businesses is an easy and effective way to increase your brand visibility. This puts your garden center on a platform for people that shop at partnered businesses or volunteer with organizations you could sponsor.
For example, sponsoring a 5k run in your community or a volunteer program that brings fresh, healthy foods to those in need serves two purposes: increased brand recognition and positive public perception.
In terms of businesses, you could partner with a landscaping company, offering them discounts on bulk supplies; then, they would refer customers to you if they need additional or future supplies.
There’s a lot of variety in terms of organizations you could partner with, so get creative with it!
Social media sounds simple, but it can become overwhelming quickly if you don’t know how to utilize it for your garden center. One of the first things you need to do before starting with social media is to decide which platforms make the most sense for your business.
If you’re targeting a younger demographic, you could use Instagram and create aesthetic arrangements to post, or create graphics calling out discounts at your store.
If you have an older demographic, consider posting on Facebook instead, with store discounts, new product arrivals, and anything else you think may be relevant to generating sales and interest.
Social media is also completely free to use, so having an effective strategy for your garden center’s social pages could be the difference in thousands of dollars worth of sales, if used correctly.
Again, it’s important to note that your audience changes from platform to platform, so you shouldn’t have the same social media strategy on Facebook that you do on Instagram or TikTok.
3. Empower Your Staff With Product Knowledge
One of the best ways to generate additional sales is to market to the customers that are already in your store. Arming your staff with knowledge about gardening, products, and customers’ needs allows them to make relevant suggestions to customers, possibly encouraging them to buy additional plants, arrangements, or supplies.
This means that having a happy, intelligent staff is incredibly important. Having the best possible employees for each role that your garden center needs not only helps you make additional sales, but increases the overall quality of your store and customer experience. It’s worth compensating the right people for your store, rather than having a revolving door of not-so-helpful employees.
4. Offer Exclusive Deals and Loyalty Programs
The value of retaining your customers is just as important as bringing in new ones. One of the best ways to do this is through an effective and exciting customer loyalty program.
There are obvious benefits that every store can offer, such as a free gift on someone’s birthday or a five percent discount once a customer spends a certain amount of money. Consider a tiered system, where the first tier sends product announcements and discounts to a customer’s email, and the highest tier receives a 15 percent discount to use in an allotted time frame, plus invites to exclusive community events.
There are many ways to get customers excited about your loyalty program, so make sure it’s something memorable and will keep customers coming back to your store. The goal of your program is to keep your regulars happy to shop at your store.
5. Host Gardening Workshops and Events
If you want to become a staple of your community, one of the best ways to do so is with community events at or run by your garden center. This is your chance to showcase yourself as an industry expert who’s knowledgeable about gardening and landscaping. You can forge personal connections with potential customers.
Something as simple as remembering someone’s name at a workshop could have an impact on where they choose to bring their business.
Hosting community gardening events allows you to become a figure in your community — all while propping up your garden center as a positive, personal shopping experience.
Let’s put it like this: Are you more willing to shop at a certain business if you know the owner? That’s the potential of what community events could do for your business.
6. Invest in an Efficient POS System
This tip might sound basic, but many POS systems have built-in marketing tools that you can leverage to bring in customers.
Powerful POS systems have a variety of features that could help your business, including:
- CRM tracking (with discounting options)
- In-depth analytics
- E-commerce capabilities
Many point of sale options also have email integrations allowing you to reach out to your customer base with ease. Imagine how easy it would be to plan a garden center event or bring in customers with in-store discounts with this feature.
A POS system that best fits your business not only helps with marketing efforts, but also saves money on your bottom line by reducing shrinkage and automating your inventory management experience.
A POS System Build for Garden Centers
Every garden center owner knows that their store has its unique needs. Luckily, Comcash is built with these garden centers in mind.
Comcash has everything you could ever need in a point of sale system, from marketing features to inventory management to CRM capabilities. Your store deserves the best, so see if Comcash is a fit for your business by scheduling a demo with our leading industry experts today.