April 2010
Tweet Your Way In By Kimberly Bird

Connecting to customers and building loyal relationships is an important element to grow sales. Can it be done 140 characters at a time?

The ways to connect with customers continue to expand in this age of rapidly evolving communications. How do we string together the warm, meaningful smile and greetings we can offer customers in our stores with the messages they hear from us outside our store? And while we’re building these relationships and creating loyal customer advocates to spread the good news about our passion for plants, how do we proactively and directly acquire new trials? I don’t know about you, but these are just a few of the questions that keep me up at night.

We all know it’s more costly and time consuming to get trial from a person who’s never been to your store and isn’t familiar with your product and staff. So in addition to advertising, public relations, brand building, promotions, community involvement, floor planning, customer service training, signage, customer relationship management, in-store communications and meaningful events, we must look for cost-effective and efficient ways to bring new customers in as we keep existing customers coming back.

And how do we do it on an independent garden center’s marketing budget so that each investment delivers the best return?

The electronic labyrinth makes up a growing part of the communication and marketing mix in 2010 and offers new opportunities. The upside to the splintering of communication channels is that there are new tools that can help us gain exposure and build connections to expanding existing relationships and build new ones with real people who can impact our business.

As Mark Saidnawey from Pemberton Farms and Garden Center pointed out in the first article of this series, “Twitter is quick and convenient.” These are important benefits. But another great benefit Twitter offers is scalability, which is important for a communications tool in an industry where many of us operate during a very tight season and must be flexible, quick and dynamic in responding to an array of factors. To achieve success means efficiency with streamlined processes, quality staff in all areas of the business and nimbleness, both in planning and responding. Communications is important but having the staff, time and resources to put together a plan and a program can present a challenge depending on your resources and talent pool.

Twitter has a low cost of entry; in other words, you don’t need to invest in software, hire a person or pay for placements — at least, not at first. You can get started for next to nothing, and your risk is low because your initial audience will be small. So if you make a few mistakes during the learning curve, there’s a bit of built-in damage control.

Building Blocks
So what exactly can Twitter do for your business? How do you get started? What do you do next, if you’re already using Twitter?

First, let’s look broadly at what Twitter can do for your businesses. With Twitter, you can:

  • Listen and respond to customers, thus improving customer service
  • Connect and engage with existing and new audiences
  • Build online networks and “friendships”
  • Create customer advocates
  • Attract more followers
  • Position yourself as an expert
  • Communicate and promote your events
  • Market and sell products and services
  • Build your brand
  • Develop customer, opinion-leader and media relationships
  • Get media coverage
  • Tap into opinion leaders’ ideas
  • Research branding, product and service ideas
  • Increase traffic to your website, social media pages and, most importantly, your store
  • Create new business partnerships and strengthen existing ones

This is a fairly long list of Twitter uses. Some of them could require a good deal of time or significant staffing. Now that you know some of its broader uses, let’s look at how to get started.

Getting started is easy: Sign up for a free account at www.twitter.com and start tweeting. It’s important, however, to pause for a moment and determine your desired outcomes. Think about where you want to go with Twitter and write it down, even if it’s on a paper napkin.

Make a Plan
Here’s one way to pull together an initial plan for a quick start:
Plan. Determine three clear objectives and a simple plan for each. These objectives can evolve over time, but to avoid getting distracted or sucked into the vortex, approach Twitter with an initial vision to help you cut through the clutter. What are the top three things you want to accomplish initially? How will you do that? Do you want customer feedback? What do you plan to get feedback about, and how often and how will you ask? Do you want to communicate more frequently with an important segment of your customers? What information will you share with them? Think about what efforts and connections will generate the best initial results. In other words, what’s the lowest-hanging fruit that you can harvest from aninitial effort?

Reach. How will you build your audience? Do you have an e-mail list that you can use to invite followers? What’s in it for them if they choose to tune into your tweets? What about existing customers? Could you use signs, receipts, stickers, handouts and employees to invite existing customers and tell them why they should follow you? Do you have relationships with community groups, garden clubs or moms groups that might benefit from your tweets? Who will you pursue and how will you reach them?

Communicate. With each tweet you write, think about who’s following you and what messages and information are meaningful to them. Use your tweets to drive them to information on your site that might be interesting to them. Retweet information that you believe they would want to know. Consider your audience then listen to, connect with and serve them.

Connect. Twitter can be powerful on a very basic level. Present your brand in a way that expresses your business, including your page background and profile photo. Whether you get a designer to help you or you use the provided template, create a space that represents your brand entirely. Personally welcome your followers if you can. Respond to your followers when they send you questions. Comment on garden-related tweets. Search for garden groups, garden gurus, media representatives, bloggers, and other groups that might be interested in what you offer and follow them. Repost tweets others have written (“retweet”) that are meaningful to your business.

Like most aspects of our business, there is no silver bullet. The perfect recipe requires a delicate balance of ingredients and factors to generate presentable and palatable cuisine. Sometimes it seems like we’re looking for the stars to line up — those we can put into their place and those we have to hope will cooperate. Even if we have the right message at the right time to the right audience, if the weather is a wash it’s a setback that’s out of our control. Here’s where a tool like Twitter can help as a tool in the marketing tool box. Twitter is quick, cheap and scalable. To summarize, there are a variety of ways Twitter can work for your garden center. The tool is free and fast. Because it’s scalable in terms of frequency of use, customers reached and integration into your overall business your usage of this tool can readily grow and expand. With focus good planning and sound execution, you can get a good return from what you put into your efforts using Twitter as part of an overall marketing mix.

A Calloway’s Example
Last summer, we started a program called Callie’s Kids as part of a vendor partnership with Greenleaf Nursery’s 02 Planting for the Future promotion. The monthly program, aimed at providing earth-friendly activities and information about the benefits of planting trees and caring for the earth, took place on the second Wednesday in June, July and August. The activities were promoted within our existing media mix. The first event went well; however, despite our efforts, the second event dipped in attendance. We wanted to get the program back on track for the August event at all the stores, with a particular focus on our three newest locations (stores 123, 124 and 125). We used Twitter to connect with a popular “mommy blogger” in the area of store 123. This blogger had connected with us before; she retweeted our information and blogged about us. We also connected with an “about town” website that covered the area of store 125. This local site posted an article about the event and retweeted our information. Using established lists of people in relevant interest categories, we sent personal messages to opinion leaders who we thought would be interested in the event.We targeted micro-groups of Twitter users focused on gardening, savings, kids’ activities, parenting or connecting mothers and neighborhood media contacts. We asked them to share information on our free event through their channels. A lot of them were happy to help us. And several of them made an even bigger impact on their blogsand websites.

The results for the August Callie’s Kids event? We had a 268 percent increase in attendance company-wide, and the stores we targeted saw even greater increases. It worked! It took about four hours’ time for our marketing specialist, Kara Roberson, and me working together, but we got the word out and moved people to action. And we created some connections with some micro-groups that we maintain today with occasional but meaningful interactions. Twitter can support and enhance your overall marketing mix with a little planning, strategy and effort.

Kimberly Bird

Kimberly Bird is vice president of retail marketing for Calloway's Nursery. She can be reached at (817)222-1122 or [email protected]