Content Strategy for your Cut Flower Business

Are you wondering what a content strategy is and why you need one?

Roz Chandler started her flower farming business ten years ago. She will be covering strategy, marketing tactics, pricing, social media and upscaling your flower farm. No matter what point you’re at in your journey, this podcast will give you the information you need to grow your business. 

In this episode, Roz Chandler shares her top tips on having a content strategy for your flower farm. It is an easy-to-follow step-by-step approach to help you grow your cut flower business.

You will learn: 

• Why you need a content strategy and how to create one 
• The different forms of content
• The benefits of having a content strategy
• Roz’s ten top tips for building your own content strategy

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Pinterest

Connect with Roz Chandler: 

Website 

Join my Facebook group: Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business 

Thank you for listening. I’d love it if you subscribed to the podcast and left a review or rating.

Transcript

Welcome to the Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business podcast. I'm your host, Roz Chandler, a flower farmer for over ten years and thirty years as a business owner and Marketing Director. This podcast is for you if you're an ambitious flower farmer, and looking for hints and tips to grow your business, we'll be covering strategy, marketing tactics, pricing, social media, and upscaling your flower farm. So much more. I'm so excited to introduce you to my amazing guest speakers along the way. All of you will be at different points in your business. Our podcasts will take this into account. We look forward to joining you on your journey. 

Hello there. Today I wanted to talk about content strategy or content marketing and I just want to give you the top ten tips on building your own content strategy. We've all heard for many years that content is king. You either love or hate this phrase. But I still think it's true. I did not know where this phrase came from so I started to google it today. And good ole Google gave me the result. This phrase, believe it or not, came from Bill Gates, whose essay titled ‘Content is King’ was published on Microsoft's website in 1996. Now, that seems a long time ago now. So when I first started my digital agency in 2000, this was our mantra. We used to meet clients and we used to tell them how important content was. And that content was king. And twenty-one years later, it still is. 

So what is content strategy? Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating and sharing consistent, really important that it’s consistent, and relevant, also relevant content. So do keep those words in mind whenever you write content. It's being consistent, and relevant. Today content absolutely everywhere. I just look around my desk. I've got a newspaper, yeah. And old newspaper from the weekend. I can get content online. I can get content on my phone. I've actually got Gardener’s World magazine  I can get content in. I've downloaded some PDFs, I can get content. I just watched videos on YouTube. I mean, it's everywhere. More importantly, everyone can be a publisher. You, your team, your customers, and everybody. It is completely open now. So how do you get through all that noise? And why should somebody listen to you? So I'm going to give you my top 10 tips on building your own content to strategy. 

So number one, why even bother? The first thing you need to do is set some goals that you can align to your business plan. So are you launching a new product? Do you just want to increase brand awareness? Are you starting out? What do you want to say? Great content can only bring written with the end game in mind. So think about why, set some goals and what you're trying to achieve. 

Number two, who is your ideal customer. This may vary in each of your product areas. And you may have several different ideal customers. So we work in four main areas. We have a wedding business, we have a funeral business, we have an online courses business and we also have our buckets and bouquets business. Now, they are all different customers now customers will cross over between the two. But they are a different customer base and should be treated differently. The first thing we do is we write it all down. We get really specific about who that customer would be. We talk about how old they are. Are they male or female? Where do they live? What papers do we think they read? What do they like? What do they dislike and we get a real feel for who this ideal customer is. We name them. You know, we do have unashamedly, a Helen, and Mandy and a Sophie. And they are all different personas within our business. We build personas on Pinterest. And that's really important too because if you're going to do a photo brand shoot for an hour of your business, let's call it weddings, then who is your ideal customer? What do they look like? Really what's their name? And you're going to run that brand shoe aimed at those people. And any content you write is going to be written in such a way that is relevant to those people. Get some images from Pinterest and build your personas. I really, really recommend you do it. It really focuses the mind. And if necessary, then make them screensavers on your laptop and you know that will really help you understand. And every time you write something, look at that persona and think, does this resonate? Is it relevant to them? 

Number three, what problems will you be serving? So for us, for instance, you know, we might have a big audience, well we do have a big audience for brides who get married in marquees, is one of our top venues for weddings with that we organise. So we may decide to write an article on the top ten marquee venues in Northamptonshire, which might help brides in their planning. So if we write that and we write it as a blog and we might ask for comments. Or we might do it as a downloadable PDF, where we ask for their email addresses before we give them the content, we know the people reading that are our audience. And that's really important. 

So number four, review your competition. Now please, please don't get hung up about this. It’s really important. You stay in your lane and think about your business. But do look at their content and what channels they're delivering in. And then look at you. Look at your stories. What is it about you? We have discussed in a previous podcast, the why? Why are you in business, what is your story? And your story and my story will be very different. But people like to know the story, they need to know a little bit more about you. And that's what they buy. Don't ever forget that they don't buy the product. They're buying you. 

Number five, of course, a strategy has no value unless you take action. In my career as a marketing director working with SMEs across the whole of the United Kingdom in lots of different sectors, lots of companies spend a lot of time preparing, writing, getting graphics, writing beautifully illustrated marketing strategies and they're not really actually having the time to implement them. Because by the time they're written, they're out of date. The market moves really quickly now and you have to be really agile. And we need to take action quickly. So I do think you should have a marketing strategy, absolutely. But don't get too hung up on it without taking any action. You know, you take today for instance, with the new Clubhouse app. If any of you haven't heard, do get an invitation to Clubhouse. It's brilliant but it does absorb a lot of your time. But for instance, Clubhouse is another way of getting content out. And you know, if you'd asked me about clubhouse two months ago, three months ago, I wouldn't really have heard of it, because it's still in beta testing. So you've got to move. That wouldn't have been in my marketing strategy, to have a clubhouse strategy. So you've got to be quite agile in today's business world. 

Number six, remember that quality is better than quantity. One benefit and one of the major benefits of writing really good content, is increasing your search engine optimisation on your website. So getting up the Google rankings. So if you're going to write a blog, obviously, look at all your keywords, and what the heading of your blog is, and all of that. And we can talk about your search engine optimisation in a number of different podcasts we'll be doing, but be conscious when writing that it really helps your SEO. It's another reason for writing really good content. 

Number seven, think about your stories which we've touched on, and write about these. 

Number eight, what form, what format, will your content take? Will it be a poll? Will it be questions or a survey? Will it be a PDF? Will it be a blog post? Will it be a podcast like this one? Will it be a video? Will it be an infographic So a nice graphical illustration of something you're trying to get across? Will it be an ebook? Will it have case studies? Will it be testimonials? Or will it be all of those, because once you have a content strategy, and you've decided this month, you're going to talk about x, you can use that content throughout lots of different channels. 

So number nine is about what channels you'll use. So write these all down and think about how you're going to distribute your content. So there is social, there is web, there is email, there is PR, and that's just a few. So where is your audience? And how are you going to talk to them.

And finally, number 10. measure your success. By not doing this, you don't know what content resonates with your audience and gets you the best results. Look at your Google Analytics. Look at social media insights. Don't overcomplicate it. Just have a little dashboard and pull your results together and know where to distribute your content and what sort of content to write that actually resonates with your audience. So all the best with your content strategy. Content is king, as Bill Gates said in 1996. Thank you. 

This has been your host, Roz Chandler. If you'd like to know more about growing your cut flower farm, do join our Facebook group. It's called Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business. Many thanks.