Talk reveals how to sell Christmas Trees with social media
Can you imagine only having three weekends a year to sell your business service? Today Morgan PR were invited to the British Christmas Tree Growers Association annual meeting to talk about how social media and permission marketing can help sell more trees in that short period before Christmas!
One of our public relations clients is Newbury Christmas Tree Farm and this is the second year we have been promoting them and offering consultancy with the objective to simply sell more trees!
It has been good fun working with Newbury Christmas Tree Farm to attract more clients to buy their Christmas trees from the farm near Bagnor, just outside Newbury – no other client had such a short selling season.
However, we have been successful and this is why Sadie Lynes, the owner of Newbury Christmas Tree Farm and a number of other such highly seasonal retail sites, invited us to share our experience with the members of the BCTGA at its meeting today.
Essentially, it is all about attracting loyalty from people! If you can attract people to give you their emails addresses and give you permission to market to them, then you can promote your business to them. We do this through our monthly newsletter – but also through social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
The logic is simple: if they are loyal enough to stay subscribed and at the same time you continue to offer enough value so that they want to be loyal, when they need what you have to offer they will soon come along and ask to buy from you!
When it comes to Christmas trees it is about getting people to buy yours rather than someone else’s and this can be done both through traditional methods of advertising and adding value, but more importantly social media and permission marketing can attract loyalty and ensure more people buy your trees, indeed some may even feel obligated to.
We had some good feedback after the talk and I was particularly proud of a Yorkshire man’s colourful description of the presentation being free of... well, nothing I’d want to repeat online!
The audience had also heard from another local business with Paul Jacobs, The Transport Manager, explaining the perils of falling foul of VOSA if those transporting trees were not familiar with the letter of the law.
There had been a competition with everyone (including me) voting on the best Christmas tree entered. The stakes were high with the winner being invited to provide the Christmas tree for No. 10 Downing Street. I was worried that my amateur eye might lead to a one-vote mishap, but thankfully when the winners of each class were revealed it seemed that I had chosen with the popular majority!
I have been reluctant to get seasonably excited after I got sunburnt a few years ago while discussing a client’s Christmas menu for their pub; it was August and we were sat in the pub garden and it was just wrong, wrong, wrong to be talking turkey in the sunshine! However, being amid so many Christmas trees and such seasonally focus left me, well feeling rather jolly!