Making our Mark
Social Media, Website, and Branding
We have a facebook page, but it is moribund. I'm not convinced that an FB page is effective for small business. (What purchases have you made based on a company facebook page? Me neither.) I do find however that participating in local plant and garden oriented groups is effective. However it's time consuming, and Facebook prevents automated tools from posting to groups, so there is a shortage of tools to help.
Experiment 2018: I have joined a lot (over 60) buy and sell groups in Alberta and Saskatchewan. I try to post 3 ads a week. The ad format is fairly simple: Either a list of stuff I have/can get with pricing, or a blurb about it, and a link to a web page. The latter works well. and typically in the 24 hours following a post we get 500 visitors. The effect on the bottom line is harder to quanitfy, but we have gotten orders and inquiries.
Twitter, Instagram, etc.
So far I’ve not bothered. These are streams that flow through our lives. It’s not clear to me how effective they are at marketing trees, and I don’t need the distraction.
Newsletter
Newletters are HARD to do well. We have a mailchimp account -- at present free. And we have a mailing list. I need to send out more newsletters.
I hate newsletters that are ‘Buy,buy, buy!’ To me a good newsletter has three components: * A folksy message about what we’re up to. Just a bit of our lives related to the tree farm. * One or more bits of advice about trees, land stewardship. * One or more bits of stories about trees. * Info about a product.
Newsletters should not be more often than once a month.
Lots more work needed.
Website
The website is entirely created and coded by us. It is simple, static with no flash, no sizzle, but with (mostly) clear high quality content. While there are good web designers out there, our website routinely garners praise and enthusiasm from our customers. A blend of advice, humour, and information makes this an excellent marketing tool. If you are comfortable with Markdown, Perl, and CSS, or are willing to learn, updating the website is an excellent winter project. The website is under a home grown content management system. Adding/modifying a page is done with a simple text editor. Most of the html coding is hidden where you don't need to see it.
However it is not sufficient:
Our website should have a blog. Blog and newsletter should be integrated so that people can get the same content on site, or reading in their inbox, or reading it on our Facebook or Google+ page. Blogs should be discussable, even if that means a fully moderated forum. Ideally the discussion is ported between the various channels too.
Be very wary of SEO mechanics. If they need to change the web page, you no longer have control of it. SEO is a mugs game. Google makes it very clear: Have good content. Search for "Swedish Aspen" with no qualifications, and our page on columnar poplar comes up usually around 10th place. Go read the page. My goal is to have a whole website with this quality of content. Try tree farm edmonton. We're almost always on page 1. We aren't on the map, because Edmonton's map isn't big enough to include us.
Lodgepole Pine in our front yard.
Share