Marketing used to be simple for garden retailers: put an advert in the local, newspaper and the customers would rush to your door.

Those days are long gone and now we have to use traditional marketing to attract the more traditional consumer online marketing to attract the new consumer.

Many garden centres are struggling to adapt these new marketing channels resulting in less customers and decreasing margins and marketshare. It’s time to act!

New gardeners communicate in different ways to previous generations. They rarely read a newspaper, but do get engaged with businesses and their friends via online techniques. The result is that over the last few years we have seen a plethora of new marketing tools at our disposal and the challenge is where and how do you start.

Should you be “liking” ,”tweeting” or sending a text over a smartphone? All techniques that did not exist as marketing tools five years ago. Many garden centre owners a have found it difficult to keep up with the new marketing techniques.

To help garden centre retails get up to speed, John Stanley, John Stanley Associates and Edwin Meijer of Garden Connect have joined forces to provide a E-Book on the basic steps you need to take to develop an online marketing strategy.

They have not written the infinitive guide to online marketing, but a booklet they highlights the ten most effective communicating tools that can be used with the consumer when developing an online consumer engagement strategy. The booklet provides valuable hints and tips on how to develop and improve your marketing strategy.