The Heirloom Garden Blog

by Mina Palencia

A small busi­ness owner should know that mar­ket­ing is very impor­tant to ensure growth. But mar­ket­ing should not always be about expen­sive adver­tis­ing over tele­vi­sion, radios and bill­board spaces. For your gar­den­ing ser­vices busi­ness, don’t try to con­quer those ad spaces just yet if you don’t want to end up clos­ing out after a few years. What you have to do is to focus your efforts in restruc­tur­ing your busi­ness plan. How­ever, it is also not healthy to have no mar­ket­ing at all. Resort to low-cost mar­ket­ing strate­gies to get the word out about our busi­ness instead. Here are 5 tips on how to get your busi­ness noticed with­out spend­ing tons of dollars:

5 Budget-Friendly Mar­ket­ing Ideas for Gardeners

* Dis­trib­ute cheap mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als. You can have fly­ers and brochures for this — both are cheap to print and easy to dis­trib­ute. Hav­ing pro­fes­sion­ally designed busi­ness cards will also help. Now, the ques­tion is how cheap is cheap? Just because you are hav­ing bud­get con­straints doesn’t mean you have to make do with crappy printed mate­ri­als. These prints would be a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your gar­den­ing busi­ness and thus, should be impres­sive. Try look­ing for print­ing ser­vices that are easy on the bud­get but still gen­er­ate great print­ing results.

* Go for direct mail mar­ket­ing. Post­cards and greet­ing cards are your best mate­ri­als for this one. You don’t have to sell out right with your post­cards. Instead, you can send out these prints to inform or remind prospects; exam­ple, reminders about sea­sonal plant­ing or what gar­den plants are going to be lovely on a par­tic­u­lar grow­ing sea­son. As for greet­ing cards, send­ing these can be a way to show your appre­ci­a­tion for the trust that your clients are giv­ing you.

* Give­aways, dis­counts and pre­mi­ums. One way to gen­er­ate new clients is word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing. If your cur­rent ros­ter of cus­tomers is happy with your ser­vices, they will tell their friends or fam­ily about your busi­ness. Now, one way to keep them happy and loyal to you is reward­ing them with pre­mium items, give­aways and dis­counts for their con­tin­ued patron­age. You can use sim­ple items like gar­den pots, acces­sories, and small plants.

* Join trade shows. Events like these are great for your busi­ness. You get expo­sure and you get the chance to show­case your prowess when it comes to tend­ing to a gar­den. Make sure you have plenty of mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als to hand out to event guests — fly­ers, busi­ness cards and brochures would be great.

* Pro­mote online. This is the trend. Everyone’s going online to search for just about any­thing. Cre­ate vis­i­bil­ity for your gar­den­ing busi­ness online. You can have a web­site, a blog or join gar­den­ing forums.

You see, mar­ket­ing your gar­den­ing ser­vices need not always mean hurt­ing your bud­get. There are a lot ways for you to estab­lish your busi­ness and spread the word about the ser­vices that you offer. Explore these pos­si­ble avenues, do them right, and you’ll see your small busi­ness grow.

About the Author

Mina Palen­cia is a writer who resides in Lan­caster, LA. She has expe­ri­ences writ­ing for online mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, writ­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments for online audi­ences and loves blogging.

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