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Gardening has always been a part of my family.  For as long as I can remember, my mom has had a garden; and for as far back as she remembers, her mom has always had a garden, and so on.  Granted, the further back you trace it, the more likely gardening happened due to necessity; however, now it is a stress relieving hobby that provides both rewarding and delicious benefits.

The type of garden my family had depended on the location of our home.  Location played the largest role in choosing the garden type.  We moved around a lot while my dad served in the Navy, so my mom usually kept small gardens of flowers, but when he retired and we stopped moving, mom’s garden horizon blew wide open with possibilities.

It started out with some general landscaping, including some flower beds around the house and around a couple of the bigger trees in the yard.  Then, she started the vegetable garden.  It began as a small plot behind the shed, growing just a few corn stalks, pepper plants, tomato plants, and cucumbers. Now, it has grown to take over a quarter of the yard (at least!).

The more my grandma and my mom tell me about their gardens, the more parallels I start to see between what they’re doing and what I’m doing in digital marketing.  I may not have a thumb as green as the generations before me, but I’m starting to find I definitely have one all my own.  So, whether you’re growing and maintaining a garden or creating and implementing ecommerce marketing strategies, here are some tips for a stronger yield.

Research

Define your business goals & the environment necessary for your business to flourish.  – Before starting a garden, you need to decide what you’re going to plant and what type of soil specific plants need to grow.

• Solid keyword research will provide opportunities around which you can build keyword categories and areas of focus.  Your results here will help you plan what kind of content to produce.
• Before jumping in, know what types of content are going to be your focus in a marketing strategy.  Will it be mainly blog posts?  Or will you expand into infographics, video, eBooks, etc.?
• Plan out your products and product categories.  Is your platform set up to help you succeed?
• Dig into data & analytics to build your customer personas.  How can your business provide something they need or solve their problems?

Determine what your business needs & how often you’ll need to implement strategies. – Flowers, trees, and vegetables all need feeding.  Some require early spring feeding, like azaleas and fruit-bearing trees, while others are fed after blooming.

• Use an editorial calendar to determine blog post topics in advance and how often you’ll be posting.
• Think about the types of content you’ll be creating.  What kind of outreach strategies should you have in place?  How often should you conduct outreach or will it be ongoing?
• Consider your customers – what do they need?  How many touchpoints should you have to help create & build a loyal customer base?

Consider timing & context. – Flowering plants need some kind of mulch (shredded leaves, pine needles, store-bought, etc.) spread around them for added protection during the winter.  Growing zones differ.  Collards, for example, grow much better in the south than in, say, West Virginia.  You can grow them in the north, but they’re not as big or as flavorful.

• Will any of the posts be larger content pieces that need a little extra effort for more exposure?  Worthy of a press release, perhaps?  If so, you’ll need time for the extra outreach & effort.
• Relevant content pieces will usually yield a much better return for your business than something thrown together without data backing it up.  
• Ensure you’re in the right “growing zone” by conducting keyword research to uncover topics your audience will find valuable & interesting.

Preparation

Prepare your platform correctly.  – One of my grandmas used to put dirt from outside into a large pan and bake it in the oven for sterilization before planting her seedlings.  It allowed her to start with a fresh, clean foundation and gave her more flexibility during cultivation.

• Your platform needs to be able to handle your site and your goals for it.  For an ecommerce site, having the right shopping cart can mean the difference between a successful e-store and one that doesn’t sell.
• Make sure your site is optimized for mobile users.  Even if some customers might purchase from you on a desktop, many of them will browse on mobile devices.  If they’re already browsing, why not make it as easy as possible for them to buy while they’re there?
• Ensure tracking is installed properly.  You want to be able to track & analyze results as your business grows for better, more informed decisions.

Understand potential results & be realistic about expectations.  – Once, my mom planted an annual flower expecting it to come back the next year; she needed a perennial.  For trees, you need to know which ones grow fast, get bushy, flower, spread, etc.  You don’t want to have to dig it up a couple of years later because it took over the area.

• When launching a campaign, set goals and expectations, but be realistic about them.  Are you trying to go viral or create something that builds value over time?  The short-term goals & expectations for these will be different.  
• Make sure your site and your hosting company are ready for influxes of traffic from big campaigns.  Increased traffic to your site is useless if it crashes your site and no one can get to it (although that would make a great press release, series of blog posts, etc.).
• If you’re link building, be mindful of best practices.  If your campaign brings you tons of irrelevant, spammy links, you risk receiving a manual penalty; if you really go overboard, your domain could become so burned that you would be better off starting from scratch on a new domain – the right way.

Maintenance

Don’t set it & forget it. – My mom’s first tomato plants ended up dying or giving poor yield because she dug a hole, planted the tomato plants, and left them alone.  Along with regular maintenance, it’s also important to keep your garden free of grass and weeds by hoeing or tilling between rows.

• Your site should be a living entity with fresh content updated regularly.  A blog helps achieve this; so does launching new products.
• Don’t be afraid to switch up strategy as you go.  Even if you start with good soil, you will still need to amend it if necessary to ensure results.  
• Check your site regularly for errors & fix them.  Website analysis tools can help make this process more efficient.

Implement a lead nurture program. – Till soil loosely to aerate, keep it tilled until planting time, and ensure you’re feeding at the right time & intervals for the type of plant.  Do not overfeed; otherwise you end up with too much plant and no fruit. 

• Not everyone who comes to your site will purchase from you right away.  Implementing a lead nurture program to keep them interested throughout the buying cycle is critical.
• Whether you’re doing outreach for yourself or nurturing potential customers, you have to get the timing & amount of contact right.  If you don’t have enough valuable touchpoints or have too many, contacts won’t convert.

Make the most of available resources. – In the early 1900s, outhouses were still very common in rural areas.  When it was almost full, the outhouse was moved and the remainder of the hole was filled in.  Oftentimes, these areas became a small garden plot, thanks to free fertilizer.

• Don’t be afraid to redesign your site for a fresh, more effective storefront. Just make sure you take the time to get your redirects set up correctly; you already have a good foundation for growth, so make sure you utilize it.
• If thin content is a problem for you (I’m looking at you ecommerce sites), work with what you have.  Get creative and tell a story to fill out thin product descriptions.   
• Rework old content pieces with updated information to help them become more robust and valuable.

Gather data (and use it).  – My mom now keeps yearly gardening notes about the types of vegetables grown, their yield, size, taste, what fertilizers worked the best, etc. to determine the methods that would yield the best results; it’s something  that, if she could do it all over, she would have done from the very first garden.

• Ensure you have some kind of analytics installed and use the data to make informed decisions: obtain baselines, set benchmarks, see which channels are performing/underperforming, identify areas for improvement, etc.
• User experience is everything; testing and improving it becomes much easier when you have the data to back up your choices.

Be patient. – You can’t rush Mother Nature.

• The same is true for marketing.  It takes time & effort, and in most cases, results need to build over time.
• Most marketing strategies are not quick fixes; they need time to build momentum and deliver big results.  Make sure you’re giving them a chance.

Consistency is sustainable. – If you plant a crop of corn, then plant another batch 2-3 weeks later, the second crop will start yielding as the first crop runs out.  This is how you can “eat corn till the end of the growing season,” as my grandma says.

• Produce content consistently in order to reap rewards consistently.  Blog, have a weekly podcast, monthly webinars, etc., just do something to provide value to your audience on a regular basis and it will start to pay off.
• Pairing consistent pieces of valuable content with outreach and re-sharing can help build momentum further and continue growth.

Maintain & support with other efforts. – As plants start to grow, start “hilling up” dirt around them for added protection and stability.

• As campaigns and content pieces grow, support your site with other marketing efforts & other pieces of content, like a podcast, webinar, eBook, infographic, slidedeck, etc.
• Adding product reviews are a benefit too.  User-generated content can be some of the most useful, especially when it comes to selling products.

Whether you’re starting a garden or marketing a website, research, preparation, and maintenance are imperative to success.  It’s a continuous cycle of growth that can provide rewarding results throughout the whole process.  Whether your “green thumb” is in the real world or in the digital realm, by implementing these tips and strategies, you can cultivate a stronger, more bountiful yield, both online and off.