Originally published March 2008, Today's Garden Center

Content is still King…
Creating a dialog with a well designed website

Whether you know it or not, you are in the content business. Wrong, you say, we sell plants. Wrong! Supermarkets sell plants, box stores sell plants – and for that reason too many plants have become just a commodity. Wrong you say, we’ve got hundreds of varieties of well … Heuchera! But for most customers a Heuchera is just another plant with a name they can’t pronounce. However, it becomes more than just a name when you tell the story. They become meaningful when you explain, teach and inform. So if you are still selling plants, you are missing the bigger picture. One of the main reason people come to you is (I know, you've heard it before) to either solve a problem, or to seek escape (a more beautiful life). Either way they need your help. Your help is the years of experience, plant knowledge, and design ideas, etc. that make you different from your competition.

The experience you possess doesn't amount to anything unless you are able to share it. However, years of patterned behavior (newspaper ads) has put too great a distance between you and your customers. You see advertising and marketing is the process of telling your story. I know, we all get caught up in the 'story' part, but the 'story' is an encapsulation of what your business is all about. Unless you are encouraging a response from your customer (what ad does that?) you are just talking to yourself.

This type of monolog has been going on for years, or at least since the ‘70s
But it isn’t the seventies is it? These days newspaper readership is down and retailers are looking for better ways to connect with consumers. Websites are one of those rare opportunities to create a marketing message that 'interacts' with the audience. You publish information on your website and people can point and click, mouse and move, email and better yet, even buy stuff.

So if your website is still being managed by that friend of a friend, or buddy, or best customer or whatever, it is time for you to get involved. What separates a good website from a 'so-so' one? You guessed it - content!

So when you take a close look at your website, there are a few points to concentrate on:

Content. The reason why people will come to (and come back) to your website is how fresh it is. Is it current? Up to date? Does it have information, or access to information, that might be helpful? Your website is a great way to establish yourself as the expert. Think about contributing an article or editorial to your site. Look at it this way - you can talk to one person at a time, or you can put it out there for tens of thousands to read.Does your website create opportunities for visitors to interact with you? Can they ask questions? Get directions? Make it easy for people to contact you. In many respects you are your business. Initiate an "ask the expert (you).” Respond quickly to questions. Add a sign up form for follow up e-mails.Images. Let's face it - a picture is worth a thousand words, but a great image is priceless. Websites need a careful blend of information and eye candy. People are inspired by beautiful photos of beautiful gardens. Where do you find them? With the number of stock photo websites it is easier than ever to get access to great imagery and graphics. Digital cameras are great, but you might want to get a few pointers to make sure you are presenting your best self.

E-Mail Newsletters. A monthly email using a tool such as Constant Contact will keep your customers in the know about your latest business news and will drive traffic to your website and blog. Make sure you create as many opportunities for readers to link back to your site.Blog. This is one to think about down the road. You see, spam filters are going to continue to impact e-mail deliverability. The answer is rss (reader subscriber service) feeds. Ultimately people can 'subscribe' to feeds that will automatically update them when you publish a post to your blog. Of course you can also post video feeds, audio tracks, etc. When you think about it you can create your own tv and radio ads directed to your customers. You have to think about building visitors and readership now! This will create the most important way for you to reach your customers in the future (not that far off). Check out the Sunrise Marketing blog at www.sunrisemarketing.com/blog.

Blogs are a great way to establish a casual, more comfortable dialog.Fast. People might read blogs, but scan websites. They see with their mouse. Careful use of bullet points, bold fonts, color, but be careful with underlining (can be confused with links), can help your readers get to the good stuff. Keep your visitor moving; make the navigation simple and easy to understand.When you look under the hood (the techy stuff)….

Keywords. Create a list of words and phrases important to your site. The best way to find out which words are important you can take a look at the source code of sites you like (on your browser go to 'view'; 'page source'. Within the first paragraph or two will be a listing of keywords, descriptions and meta tags. Take your list and then run them through a tool such as WordTracker, the Google keyword tool or Yahoo Overture Keyword Selector Tool to see what the volume of search activity is and find alternative phrasing to add to your list.

Searchability. Key words are important in tags, but the important part is to make sure that the keywords you select are represented in the content of your page. That means the title of the page; plants.html rather than annuals.html; (nobody searches for 'annuals', they want 'plants.' They should also appear in the headlines (specified headlines) of the page and of course in the content of the page. You can also increase the relevance to keywords by titling your images - echinacea_plants.jpg rather than per_18.jpg. Alt tags - photos and graphic descriptive terms (another code item).

Of course, there are probably a hundred other ideas that you could come up with. Of course one of the benefits of a blog! Read Kurt’s Blog and then you can tell me what you think?