How to Market Your Floral Business – as part of the expert series by GeoBeats.
I had wanted to have my own business for a really long time and so I had to figure out real quickly, being in the basement and being in this environment, how to market?
I was really lucky to have a brother of a friend of mine who was really good at marketing. He knew nothing about flowers but he was very good at marketing. He was the one who said, you know, you have to choose one specific category that you are going to specialize in, and he said ‘I don’t care what it is, if it’s funerals, if its events, its whatever, but that is what you want to do, then you can focus on connecting with people into industry, networking, etc, etc.’
So, I thought that wedding sounded a lot more fun than funerals. So I got going on that and did a lot of cold calling to connect with people into industry. And so I would cold call them and then basically say that I was new in the business and would they have a few minutes to meet with me at a coffee shop so we could exchange business cards.
No body ever turned me down. It was really pretty fabulous how response of people always were. So I would bring, I had a small portfolio at the time and I would bring my little portfolio and business card and I always brought a bouquet of flowers. And those people in the industry became my first referral base and then it kind of went from there.
source
