Jenny (00:29)
Today we are talking about customers and more importantly, how do you find and attract ideal customers to your flower farm business? First of all, your business's lifeblood is your customers. Your business's purpose is to serve your customers. Without them, you won't have a business. Newsflash, right? I know you probably started your flower farm because...
It was some sort of self -serving reason like you wanted to work outside or you wanted to be your own boss or you're just really passionate about local cut flowers or something like that. But the fact of the matter is your business exists to serve customers. And it can be tough sometimes to find and attract the right customers that you need. The problem is that many of us fail to define exactly what kind of customer we want to serve in our business. And so our marketing gets muddied.
And we ended up attracting either the wrong customers or no customers at all. And it's also really hard sometimes to focus on your customers outside of your actual day -to -day business, because we get so focused on our products, right? We're heads down in the fields, growing our flowers, making sure they're beautiful, keeping pests and diseases at bay, weeding, doing the day -to -day emails and operations. And so.
we get so ultra focused on just creating our products, sometimes our customers get left out of our minds, which is the wrong thing to do because the happier your customers are, the more your business is going to thrive. So the first step in finding and attracting your ideal customers to your business and building a loyal customer base is to know exactly who that customer is.
Do you know exactly who your ideal customer is? Well, let's talk about it. The basis of all of your marketing efforts should lie on an exercise called the ideal customer avatar exercise. And this is where you literally just write down exactly who that ideal customer is and everything you can possibly think about them. This is a classic marketing exercise.
that basically is the number one thing you need when you're marketing anything, no matter if it's flowers or something that's manufactured or literally anything at all. So your ideal customer avatar is a singular person that you envision to be your most perfect, loyal, generous, and amazing customer. It is a single person that you either make up in your head,
or you use someone as you already know as your ideal customer avatar. And every farm will have a really unique ideal customer. Your job as the business owner is to know exactly who that person is so you know where to find them and how to attract them to your business.
you can't attract somebody to your business that would be a good fit for you and your products. If you don't know exactly who they are, what they like, what they're looking for, what they want out of life or anything like that. If you don't know exactly who this person is and what they want, you're just going to be shooting in the dark. So think about exactly the kind of person that would buy your flowers, the ideal person that would buy your flowers.
Now, just because you're defining one specific person, that doesn't mean that you're going to shut off everyone else, okay? You're creating this ideal customer avatar because you want to sit down and talk directly to this person, whether she or he is imaginary or real, whenever you're creating Facebook or Instagram posts or anything on social media, when you're writing your...
a website copy when you're creating your website and you want somebody to land on it and think, my gosh, this person is speaking right to me. Okay. You want to keep this person in mind whenever you're writing your marketing emails or doing any kind of marketing efforts and having this ideal customer in mind is just going to help you market clearly.
and effectively. The more clear your marketing is, the more effective it's going to be. And so when you sit down and have this one person in mind, it makes your marketing super clear and super effective. Okay, and like I said, that doesn't mean that you're going to shut off everyone else in the world that is not just like your ideal customer. I have an ideal customer that whenever I sit down to write any of my marketing emails or work on my website or do my social media,
When I sit down and write, I think about her. However, I have all kinds of people that buy flowers for me. I have men, I have women, I have young people, I have old people. Every single race you could ever possibly think of, all buy flowers for me. And so it's not that you're shutting out everyone else. So please don't worry about that. You're just making it so your marketing is clear and it's not confusing, okay? So.
Let me talk about my ideal customer avatar and it might help you with this exercise a little bit better. I've defined my ideal customer avatar as a single person after my favorite customer ever. So she is a real customer of mine. But before I even had her as a customer, I made up someone that just sounded like someone I want to work with.
But after I had my farm for a couple of years, I revisited this exercise and decided to make Amy my ideal customer avatar. So Amy is a client of mine. She is a 35 ish year old woman who works a corporate job in finance, but loves the outdoors. She's really big into hiking is a total foodie and she loves supporting local businesses in our city, especially the breweries and wineries in town. She loves all the local breweries and wine.
And the farmer's market is her happy place. That's kind of where she goes to like unwind. She does her grocery shopping there every week and She's recently married, has a little dog named Kuma who of course Kuma has her own IG account or an Instagram account. And Amy has a really tight circle of close friends. And honestly, she's one of the happiest people I've ever met. She is.
Absolutely floored. No matter what kind of flowers I give her, she gushes over them. She tells all of her friends about us and she's just such a loyal customer and just an amazing person. So she has a fairly high stakes job that she often feels burnt out from, but she still loves her coworkers. And she has really spent the last probably 10 years of her life climbing that corporate ladder pretty quickly. She's found a lot of success in her career, even though she
is kind of tired and like burnt out from that job. Like she definitely wants to work a few less hours and enjoy her life more. Her job's kind of stressful. And so she's always looking for things to make her happy outside of work. And she obviously loves flowers. She especially loves bringing them into her office, but she also loves chocolate, local wine and beer, like I said before, and she tries to eat organic whenever she can. Amy buys every single CSA subscription we've
ever offered. So we do it by the month. We have like a May, June, July, August, whatever. She buys every single one. She purchases flowers at the farmer's market every time she needs a gift or she's going to a dinner at a friend's house. And sometimes she just buys more flowers just because she loves them. She hired me to design her wedding flowers. And now she also has an obsession with dahlias. And so she buys our dahliatubers every single year, plants them in our garden.
loves growing them. And so she is in our Dahlia CSA, and then she also grows her own Dahlia's using our tubers in her garden. So she's literally my best customer and she's just such a sweet soul, such a sweet person. I love chatting with her and talking to her, not just because she spends a lot of money with us, but because I genuinely like working with her as a person. So she's awesome. And I know that Amy,
Purchases our products because they make her feel happy She loves having those flowers on her desk at work to sort of distract her from her crazy job They give her a fun outdoor hobby to do growing dahlias outside and they really solve her problem of needing Easy great gifts for her friends and her family because she has lots of friends. She goes over to their houses for barbecues and dinners all the time
And so we've solved her problem of needing those gifts to bring to people. We've also solved her problem of needing affordable, but beautiful, sustainably grown flowers for her wedding. As you can tell, I understand Amy so well. I understand her problems, her wants, her needs, her desires, her habits. I know exactly who she is and what she's looking for when she buys our flowers. And regardless of that.
Even if she wasn't buying flowers for me, if this was somebody I made up in my mind, if I didn't have an actual customer to define as my ideal customer avatar, I know that Amy is looking for something to make her happy, to bring her joy and to give her something to focus on outside of her stressful job at work. And so I know that these are the things she's looking for. So I put all of those emotions and values that Amy has into my marketing. I.
Use those words when I talk about my bouquets on Instagram. I say that they're joyous, that they're happy, that they'll bring you peace. I say that in our website copy when I'm doing product descriptions. And so that way, when people like Amy look at my marketing, they'll feel like I'm speaking directly to them and trying to solve their problems and give them something that they desperately want and need and desire. Okay. So when you do this exercise,
Like I said before, you can pick an existing customer or you can make somebody up, but just make sure whoever it is, it's a singular person, real or made up, that when you sit down to do your marketing work, it's like you envision them in front of you. Imagine sitting down at a coffee shop with them or that they're right at your desk with you and you're speaking directly to them. And this is going to work wonders.
in your marketing so you're going to end up attracting the people that have the same values and that want the same things as what you're writing about. So know how old they are, if they have a family, what their favorite things in life are, what are their hobbies, how do they spend their free time, what are their biggest hopes and dreams, where do they shop, where do they go shopping, you know? Who's important to them, their family, their friends, their dog.
their cats, whoever, what colors are they drawn to? And then maybe you should make those your branding colors. Just a hint. What do they value? How do they want to feel? Where do they hang out? Okay, this is a big one. Think about your customers and where do they already hang out? Where do they go to dinner? What social media channels are they on? What media do they consume? Like what magazines do they read? What blogs do they read? What articles?
Do they read what podcasts do they listen to? What brands do they love? What values do they have? And this is something that I feel is really important. What other local businesses that have a similar customer base to you, do they already frequent? That is going to be really imperative in finding new customers like your ideal customer avatar. Now, if you don't know all of these things about your customer, find them and ask them, I didn't
automatically know all of this about my customer Amy, I sat down and I interviewed her and I asked her all these questions like, why do you buy flowers? Why do you like them? You know, what kinds of things are you looking for in your life to, you know, make you happy or bring you joy? And I listened to everything that she said and I wrote it all down. And now that has really helped me to know what kind of people are attracted to my brand.
I know how to attract other people like that to my brand. And it's just so helpful. So if you are struggling with trying to figure out, you know, exactly who your customer is and know all these things about them, go find a real person in your life and interview them and ask them these questions. Ask them how old they are, you know, or maybe just guess that might be like an offensive question to ask someone.
Ask if they have a family, what their favorite things are, what are their hobbies, where do they hang out, what are their favorite local businesses to support. And then offer them flowers or something in exchange for their time. You don't have to pay them or anything. Say, I really just want to try to get to know more about the people who enjoy our flowers and our brand.
I wanna get to know you better and I know it might take some time out of your day and I don't want to abuse that, but I'd love to give you a free bouquet of flowers or a few bouquets of flowers in exchange for your time, just to let me to get to know you better. It would help me a lot with my business and it would help me a lot with my marketing. And most of the time people are happy to do that. They're like, free flowers, heck yeah, sign me up. So if you don't have anyone,
maybe go to a business that's similar to yours and study who's in there buying. That may be kind of hard to do because like I said, we attract all different kinds of people to our business, but it might be a good starting point if you have absolutely no idea where to start. Now you are going to really understand your ideal customer. You're going to know them inside and out. This is the work that you have to do. And it sounds like a really silly exercise, but it's
going to be the basis of all of your marketing efforts. So it's really critical that you do this. And I mean, literally sit down and write these things out. I have a file on my computer that is dedicated to all things around my ideal customer avatar. And when I meet people that I really love working with or customers that I really love, people who are really supportive of me, I actually make a file about them in my computer and I write down things about them.
And I've beginning to see patterns between all of these customers that they all share really similar values. And those values are things that you want to express from yourself and from your business. So you can attract more people like that to you. And now that you understand them and you know their values, finding them gets a lot easier.
Jenny (15:30)
Hey, flower farmer, real quick, do you find that you are wanting to start a flower farm business or maybe you already have one but you're struggling to know if you're doing things right on the business side of things? A lot of beginning flower farmers are really unsure about a few different things. The first one being the legalities associated with starting a flower farm. So things like business structure, business insurance, business models.
The second thing is finances. So basic financial definitions, taxes, common startup expenses, or just like bootstrapping, like how to actually pay for the things that you need when you're first getting started and different funding options. And then the third thing is marketing. So actually finding and attracting your first customers. So if you feel even a little bit unsure about any of these things and you need a little help, I have a totally free business course for you. Yep.
It's free. It is a comprehensive, full business foundations course for flower farmers. And I recommend that everybody takes this free mini course before they sign up for my paid online course, which is six -figure flower farming. But the free foundations course includes several hours of instruction of topics ranging from general tips for success, business structures and legalities, finances, marketing, efficiency, and so much more.
I just see so many people struggling with the business side of things and I want to help as many people as possible. Just get their flower farm business off the ground with ease and without total overwhelm because I've been there and it sucks. And I don't want you to have to worry about if you're like forgetting something or like you shouldn't be going into your business, not understanding taxes or anything like that.
Jenny (17:09)
So do yourself a favor, mark your calendars for October 1st, 2024, because that is when registration is opening for this free Business Foundations course, and sign up to get notified for when registration opens. You can sign up to get notified by clicking the link in the show notes of this episode.
Now registration is only gonna be open for a short period of time. We will not be offering this free business course all the time. It's only gonna be available for a little while go ahead, do yourself a favor.
Mark your calendars for October 1st and click the link in the show notes to get notified. All right. Back to our regularly scheduled episode.
Jenny (17:50)
One of my favorite ways to find and attract new customers is to collaborate with other businesses that my ideal customer might love. For example, I knew that Amy loved visiting wine bars and local breweries in the area. And I also knew that she loved coffee. And so my first few CSA pickup locations that were off the farm in the city where we saw most of our flowers were a wine bar in a fancy coffee shop.
So I went to these businesses and I kind of studied them and their brands and their social media and their websites and saw who their following was and thought, man, their customers are really similar to the customer base that I have right now and that I want to continue to build. So I think that they would be great to collaborate with. So I went to them and I asked if they would be interested in having more foot traffic in their door on a less busy day of the week. And if they would be interested in
being exposed to new customers, you know, my customers. And so we collaborated together to make a mutually beneficial situation where I dropped off flowers for my CSA customers, my CSA customers would go and pick up the flowers. So I would get business from their customers, from them seeing just flowers in their shops, and that they got business from my customers. Because a lot of times my customers would grab flowers, but they'd also grab a glass of wine or a bottle of wine or a...
cup of coffee or whatever. So if you know what social media channels they are on that same page where they hang out, there's gonna be a chance that you can more easily find them online. If there are other local brands that you can do a collaboration with, do that. You could collaborate with them in person, in real life, locally or on social media as well. Or however else you market your business.
The other thing you can do is think about what they're looking for in order to get them on your email list. So this is something called the lead magnet and I should do a whole other podcast on it. But if you are trying to develop a really good marketing base, you should think about developing an email list and to encourage people to get on your email list. Think about what your ideal customer is really looking for and then give that to them. A lot of times it could just be a discount, which I don't do that.
That's not my brand. I don't like doing discounts for things, but it works really, really well for a lot of people. So you could do something like 10 % off your first bouquet with us if you sign up for our email list. Or something that we're doing currently is we do a bouquet giveaway. We give away one bouquet a month, which is like nothing for us. We just use extra flowers we have to give away a bouquet once a month for our email subscribers. So we have a little sign at a farmer's market saying, win a free bouquet, sign up for our email list. And that works super well.
You could also do flower arranging tips or something informational and create like a guide for them to get on your email list. The goal here is that you want to attract your ideal customer with whatever that freebie is that you're offering. Okay. You want it to attract the right people. If you're trying to sell flowers, flower bouquets, you want to attract people who want to buy flower bouquets. You don't want to attract other flower farmers. Okay.
Like if I'm trying to sell bunches of peonies, I'm not gonna put a peony growing guide up on my website to attract people to my email list because I don't really want my customers to grow their own peonies. I want them to buy my cut flower peonies. So I might do something like how to arrange fresh cut peonies or how to make your peonies last longer in a vase or something like that. So you should always be thinking about your ideal customer in mind, what their problems are.
their wants, their needs, their desires, what they need help with, and do whatever you can to solve those problems and attract them in order for them to find your business and align with it and want to buy from you. So think about where they would be if, for example, let's think about if you have a wedding business, if you do weddings, if you're a farmer forest, and you're trying to attract wedding couples, where would they be?
be hanging out, chances are they're probably gonna be talking to lots of other flower vendors, or not flower vendors, sorry, wedding vendors. So go to your wedding caterers, go to your wedding venues, go to DJs or all these other wedding vendors in your area and just cold email them. Say, hey, I'm a new farmer florist in the area, we've been doing weddings, here's.
you know, some proof that I do really good work. If you know of any of your clients that are looking for, you know, beautiful, fresh seasonal flowers, whatever, tell them to give me a call or thank you for, you know, thinking of me. Just introduce yourself or something like that. Go to those, whatever they are, wedding, they have like festivals, not festivals. What's the word I'm looking for? You know, wedding things, events where, brides and, or not just brides, but couples can find.
wedding vendors, you'd probably go to those because that's where they're hanging out.
If your ideal customer is somebody who just loves buying fresh flower bouquets, chances are they're probably going to be at farmers markets, which has like a built in customer base for you already. If you are trying to target people for CSA, CSA customers, you might want to hook up with other vegetable CSAs and do like an add -on thing or try to find their customers. All right. You can always do targeted Facebook ads for people like this too. So.
just think about where they're already hanging out or they're already frequenting and then try to collaborate with other businesses or just getting in their faces some other way. And then once you get in front of their faces, use those tactics we talked about before with using the words that they use on your website, your social media posts to attract them to you. What values do you share that you can convey to them?
Is it family or beauty or happiness, whatever it is. My customer values, relaxation, time and distractions from work, beauty, happiness and joy. So on my website and my socials, those are the words that I use. Like I said, I have interviewed my customers and asked them why they buy flowers. They told me it makes them happy, helps keep their house cleaner. So those are the words that I use. Now this helps customers connect with you once they learn about you.
but you really need to get them to learn about you first, which is why collaborating with other businesses and using the information you know about your ideal customer to go out and find them. It's really quite a ruthless thing when you're starting a business to get your name out there any way that you can. You can collaborate with other businesses, you can go to pop -ups, go to festivals, you could tell wedding vendors you're open for business, you can offer to do
free floral work for exposure. You could do Facebook events. I have found that to actually be really, really effective lately. It's something new that I've been trying, but when we do some, it's not really an event per se, but all put on Facebook that we're having an event, a fresh cut flower market for our farm stand, just to attract new customers. And it has worked super well. So you could do something like that. Do an event on your farm and...
do a Facebook event to attract your local people to you. You can comment on Instagram and other wedding vendors or other local businesses in your area so you can get to know each other. Go to markets just to get your name out there. It is really, really effective. Even if you have a farmers market that is not a huge one, doesn't bring in a ton of money at first, it can be really helpful just to get your name out there.
You could put signage up on the side of the road. You can run ads. You could run a free flower day event just to get eyes on you. You have to do literally anything in your power to get you in front of people's eyes when you're first starting out or when you're trying to grow your business, you just have to get eyeballs on you. And hopefully through your marketing and defining your ideal customer avatar, they're going to align with those values and with the marketing you're putting out and they're going to start buying from you.
If I were to start my business all over again, I would probably do the same thing that I did at the beginning, which was collaborating with other businesses. I did that a lot for RCSA. I also would go to other farms or businesses with similar customers to advertise more. So I actually did things really old school and it was actually really effective for me. I went to...
other local businesses that had customers that I wanted to be exposed to. And I just asked them if I could give them free flowers in exchange for me leaving flyers or postcards and a flower bouquet on their counters or when, you know, on their stands, when you walk in the door and I got some of my first CSA customers that way. I actually went to an ice cream shop that was local to us that I loved and
had similar customers that I wanted to reach and I said, hey, I am a cut flower farmer, sort of new in the area. We are starting this amazing business. We're growing local cut flowers, yada yada. I will give you free flowers to decorate your shop with if I can just leave a bouquet of flowers at the door with postcards for people to pick up. And they're like, that's awesome. Yeah, we'd love to support you. Plus they got free flowers. And I got a ton of my first CSA customers.
just from doing something as simple and old fashioned as that. And so that's kind of where you have to start out, I think, and then you can grow into attracting customers in different ways, like online, using ads, through your website, getting website traffic and things like that.
There's no easy way to get started marketing your business and putting yourself out there and getting your name out there, but you really just need to do everything you can to get your business in front of different people's eyes and define your ideal customer avatar so you can attract the right people to your business. Learn everything you can about them. Go to the places they already hang out, be on the platforms where they already are.
use your shared values to connect with them and get their attention. You don't want to attract the wrong customers, which can be really, really easy to do if you haven't defined who your ideal customer is. You don't want to work with pain in the butt clients. You don't want people to come to your business asking you for, you know, baby's breath and carnations, if that's not something that you grow.
You don't want people coming to you who are unhappy with your flowers because they're not the ones that they see in the grocery store or something like that. You really want to define exactly what your business does, who you are, and who your ideal customer is, and how you all share the same values to connect to them, grab their attention, and align with them so they're attracted to your business. This takes time.
Okay. It takes time to develop a loyal customer base. It takes time to build a customer base. It's not going to happen overnight. Nothing about business, nothing about flower farming happens overnight. It just doesn't. And anyone who tells you that is lying. It is really a process of figuring out who you want your ideal customer to be, how to attract them, getting to know them.
nurturing your customers and getting your name in front of them and keeping them happy as much as possible. So I highly encourage you to go sit down and perform the ideal customer avatar exercise. Write down exactly who your ideal customer avatar is. If it's not a real person, make them up, make them up to be whoever you want them to be, and then give them a name.
And every time you sit down to try to get more customers or, you know, do any of your marketing efforts, think like you're speaking directly to that one person. And I promise that your marketing will become so much more clear and effective. So let me know if you're going to give this exercise a try and how it goes for you. I'd love to hear from you.
In the meantime, if you found this episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast helpful, please do me a humongous favor and go leave me a positive review on Apple podcasts. Those positive reviews are really, really important to me. I love knowing that I'm doing a good job and getting you guys great information. And I put a lot of time and effort into creating these podcasts. And it would just mean the world to me if you go and leave a positive review on the podcast.
Thank you so much for doing that and for being here and we'll see you next time on the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast.
Jenny (31:07)
Hey, one last thing, just a reminder to make sure you click the link in the show notes to get on the wait list for my free Business Foundations course. Like I said, during the episode, I am only gonna be offering this free business course for a very short period of time and I don't want you to miss out on it. So make sure you click the link so you can sign up for our email list so I will notify you when registration is open so you can get registered, you don't miss out and you will get access to this completely free.
comprehensive online business foundation score. So go ahead and do that and then I'll see you next time on the six figure flower farming podcast.
