There are no better advocates for your brand than your customers.

The fans who love your brand the most are always gushing about your products to their friends in person and to their digital followers online.

Messages from customers have the power to greatly influence.

Why? Because messages from brand advocates hold weight: they're genuine and people trust them.

Below are the 6 essential tips to create a stellar and sustainable brand advocacy program--and detail why setting up a formal program like this is so important to your garden brand's reputation.

Today's Garden Center is showcasing Garden Media Group's six major consumer shifts along with several lower level trends that will impact garden purchases in its 2014 Garden Trends Report.

The overall theme, the report says, is finding balance. Each Thursday GROW! will now showcase and delve into a new garden trend of 2014.

Be sure to download the 2014 Trends Report to learn the details and forces behind each trend--and how your business can integrate the 2014 garden trends to grow your business.

Content marketing is the future of the industry.

Instead of telling you what to do and what to know, content marketing inspires you to listen by providing your target audience with information they're craving in an arary of formats.

Content marketing connects instead of isolating. Typical advertising and marketing can actually have an adverse effect on your target audience. By bombarding them with irrelevant information, you isolate them from your brand while content marketing connects by answering key questions on their own time.

Below discover why content marketing, also known as inbound marketing, is the future of the industry as we know it. 

In the gardening world, the print catalog has always been a standby.

But, they're expensive and often sent to a broad list of people, who frankly throw it in the trash. 

Instead for your garden brand to gain true, meaningful traction, you need to provide interesting content to the people who crave it.

Enter the new digital, social catalog of 2013--and beyond. Read on to discover how you can create your own innovative, green catalog.

This week, I'm at Hubspot's Inbound Marketing Conference in Boston and am loving every second of it! Don't worry, I'll share more knowledge and content marketing wisdom when I return.

But, I could not wait to share Seth Godin's insights on how "we are all inbound now." As you probably guessed, seeing and hearing "America's Greatest Marketer" was absolutely amazing!

So amazing in fact that I could not wait to run back and blog about it--in typical content marketing fashion!

Read on to discover Seth Godin's tips and tricks for navigating the world of marketing that he shared at Inbound 2013!

Content marketing, brand journalism, inbound marketing, blogging. Call it what you will, but the concept is all the same. Creating content by your garden business about relevant topics for your target audience.

No longer are you reliant on traditional media sources to tell your garden brand's story. With content marketing, the power is in your hands.

Creating your own content is one of the best ways to connect with your audience, increase engagement, and improve SEO.

When investing your time in your content marketing plan, make sure you're doing it as best as you can. Creating killer content takes time, so be smart about your execution and promotion.

Read on to discover 5 ways to improve your content marketing in less than 10 minutes.

Sit straight! No elbows on the table! Look at me when I'm talking to you!

Mothers across the country will be happy to know that their constant "advice" to help you better present yourself is actually incredibly valuable.

93% of our communication is nonverbal, and it actually matters very little what you say, but how you say it. Only 7% of our understanding is from spoken words.

Body language is something that is often subconscious because we instinctively position ourselves how we're comfortable. It's time to take it a step further. Use your body language to your advantage in the garden industry.

Integrate these 6 easy, quick, and most importantly, influential body language tricks to appear more confident, in control, and trustworthy.

Building brand recognition to many small companies means slapping their logo and tagline on absolutely every item that leaves their office.

While logos are certainly one of the most important aspects of creating brand recognition, what happens when people already recognize your brand?

Unbranding is the newest public relations and marketing trend in 2013. It's essentially going beyond the logo and relying exclusively on an image of your product for marketing.

For unbranding to be successful, your garden business first needs to have a winning logo.

Below are our tips for creating a stellar logo to last for the long haul--and tips to go beyond it once your brand has national awareness.

Facebook debuted Graph Search after a long holiday weekend to millions of U.S. users.

By now, you've probably heard of Graph Search since Facebook started a soft launch of the new product in January.

Facebook's Graph Search is going to allow users to search through old posts, mentions, and photographs. Basically, Graph Search is like a Bing search on Facebook--and they've even partnered with Bing to allow Web results to emerge.

Here are the ways your garden business needs to modify your Facebook page to optimize for the new Graph Search.

During the month of July, Garden Media Group is continuing our GROW! e-Book club series.

For those of you who are just joining us, our e-Book club has three steps:

1. The actual e-Book to download 
2. A blog post expanding on the e-Book topic of the month every Wednesday
3. A Q&A Google+ Hangout to talk through your questions at the end of each month.

In July, GROW! is shining the spotlight on launching a new product customers will love by examing how we helped RESCUE!(R)' its famous Stink Bug Trap.

Before we share all of our insider public relations secrets, your garden business has to make sure you're ready to launch a product.

Below, we're detailing the three steps your garden business has to follow before launching a product successfully.