Maximize Your Earning Potential with a Floral Digital Marketing Strategy
Over the past five years, the market size of online flower shops in the US has grown faster than the economy as a whole. The industry has risen 5.1% per year on average between 2016 and 2021.
What does this mean for your budding floral business? The growth of online floral sales shows the demand is there. It’s just a matter of meeting your customers where and how they’re shopping.
Digital marketing may seem intimidating, especially for traditional florists. Still, with such a broad audience to target, it’s the best way to help drive traffic to your website and increase overall sales.
Explore these digital marketing strategies for florists and learn how you can expand your reach with strategic effort.
1. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads for Florists
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are an excellent first step for online floral marketers. With most paid ads, you instantly see the results and have the opportunity to beat out your competition for highly searched terms.
Why start with Google and Bing ads before diving headfirst into SEO? Since PPC ads show above all organic results in Google search results, it gives you an immediate competitive edge over your competitors.
Google Ads display above both organic and local listings, making it the ideal first step in any digital marketing campaign. On the mobile search results, the PPC results are even more present on the top of the search results – before organic results.
Getting started with paid advertising for florists is often easier than it may seem. To start, you or your marketing firm should create ads for your floral business and bid on keywords that are the most relevant in Google and/or Bing ads.
These terms could be anything from “florist near me” to “wedding florists in Columbus Ohio.” And since you are only charged for the ad when someone clicks on it, you have the opportunity to build exposure for your brand without paying for it just by having your ad display at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs).
As you start to generate leads and conversions from your strategic PPC ads, you can begin to shift your focus to more long-term marketing strategies that support your paid efforts.
2. SEO for Florists
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, involves optimizing your website so that it’s more likely to show up the free (organic) search results.
Why invest time and energy into search engine optimization (SEO)? Owning paid positions in Google search results is beneficial, but owning organic results allows your business to capture traffic from those same visitors without having to pay for the click.
Navigating SEO can be challenging for any business, but if you understand the basics, you can use it to your advantage to drive as much traffic to your floral website as possible. Even small improvements can have a significant impact on the number of organic visits to your floral website.
SEO is a long-term strategy. The ultimate goal is to get your floral business to rank in the top 10 results for several relevant keywords. While various strategies are useful to rank organically for floral terms, below are the most important ones to focus your energy on.
- Target Keywords – Doing organic keyword research is a great place to start. Generate a list of your top 10 most relevant keywords and use those terms in on-page content, in titles, metadata, and alt tags. Be sure you don’t neglect to include relevant locally-modified keywords for the main geographical areas your floral business serves.
- Create Meaningful Content – Without quality content, your site will not rank. Create copy that includes beneficial and informational content for every user, and that is optimized for search by using relevant keywords.
- Claim Local Listings and Solicit Reviews – Claim and verify your Google My Business listing and other similar local directories. Claiming ownership allows you to control your messaging and optimize your local listing in the best way possible. In such a competitive market, it’s also beneficial to use your Google My Business listing to solicit positive reviews and build your authority as a brand.
- Optimize for Mobile – Google uses a mobile-first indexing approach to indexing and ranking webpages. Improve technical SEO issues on your site to speed up load time and improve mobile usability.
3. Social Media Advertising for Florists
Social media presents a huge opportunity for florists. Because a huge majority of your customer base lives on social media, it’s an opportunity to get your message in front of them where they already are.
This is a major advantage of PPC and SEO, which limits your marketing to those that are actively searching for flowers.
The important thing to remember with social media advertising is that, unlike Google paid ads, people aren’t necessarily looking for floral arrangements when on social channels. It is more likely that they may see your ad and feel compelled to click out of curiosity rather than intent.
Many social platforms rely on images to make posts stand out in the infinite scroll of news feeds, and flowers are ideal for eye-catching and engaging imagery.
Aside from sharing blogs, articles, or recent floral creations, florists can also take advantage of paid social advertising to promote their floral business and special offers.
Through the use of paid social advertising, florists can develop retargeting ad campaigns to focus on individuals that have visited the site at some point in time. They can also build lookalike audiences, which target ads to individuals who have similar characteristics of their current customer base.
Some of the most important and relevant social channels for florists are those that are most heavily focused on imagery, including:
- TikTok
4. Floral Landing Page & Checkout Optimization
Simplicity is the goal when it comes to usability. Creating floral landing pages, product pages, and a checkout process that is easy to navigate and flows from point A to point B is the best way to ensure visitors stay on the site and end in conversion.
For eCommerce landing pages, it is best to think of your website in the same way you would think about your retail floral store. Landing pages should focus on the fundamental objective of getting customers to complete a specified goal. In the instance of florists, that goal is to make a purchase.
Be sure to incorporate:
- Engaging headlines
- Clear calls-to-action
- Customer testimonials, reviews, or best sellers
- Content optimized for conversion
The goal during the checkout process is similar to that of landing pages. You want the user to focus on the purpose of completing their purchase. Keep things clean and straightforward, and never block their path to conversion with unnecessary information.
Be sure to do the following:
- Gather contact information first in case of cart abandonment
- Remove unnecessary navigation
- Validate form fields as people fill them out to avoid frustration
- Optimize the checkout process for mobile
5. Email Marketing for Florists
Email marketing is often an after-thought for many businesses. However, florists have a unique opportunity to target customers because of the floral industry’s seasonal nature. While people don’t order flowers for every day or every occasion, reminder emails around major holidays or promotions can help your company stay top-of-mind.
After you capture a customer’s email address, you can keep in touch periodically throughout the year. Some of the best content for floral emails include:
- Birthday promos
- Upcoming holidays
- Major promotions
- Recent blog posts
- Fundraiser opportunities
- New floral products
Florist Digital Marketing Testimonial
Help Your Business Blossom with Digital Marketing for Florists
There are more than 31,000 florists in the United States. If you are ready to start focusing your attention on the potential digital marketing offers for your floral business, we encourage you to reach out to our team at Two Wheels Marketing.
Let us become an extension of your team as we work together to increase traffic to your site and, ultimately, improve your conversion rate. Contact us today to start discussing your goals.