Your garden businesses website is looking good and on-brand, but is it not driving the traffic you had planned for?

Have you been posting relevant, dynamic content that fits your target audience on a regular basis?

If not, now's the time to start. Creating content and answering the questions your shoppers are asking is not only going to attract but is also going to hold your audience’s attention.

Converting the traffic that visits your site to customers and then converting them into brand advocates is how you keep your website working for you.

Read on to learn how to create the foundation to your garden brand’s content marketing strategy.

Return on investment (ROI) is the ultimate goal of public relations for garden businesses. Everyone wants to see tangible results. 

PR firms gather data to demonstrate their ROI using many variables. Measuring PR's effects can often be quantified with hard data. Sometimes, however, it cannot.

Public relations pros are always looking for ways to prove the effectiveness of their strategies.

There are a number of ways to do this, but because businesses are chiefly concerned with the bottom line, finding ways to measure the monetary impact of gardening PR efforts is typically most effective.

However, assigning dollar values with measurement metrics can be complicated.

Communicating positive results is great, but the way those numbers are calculated is just as important!        

Keep reading to learn how to take the complex issue of measuring gardening communication success and make it a bit simpler.

Once you've begun interviewing public relations firms for your garden business, you're getting serious.

Your garden business should be whittling down a list of goals and objectives and honing in on potential public relations firms.

But before you go any further in the process of hiring a public relations firm, be sure you know what not to do. You don't want to be left ripping up your contract in vein like the poor souls on the right.

Below are 3 mistakes to avoid when hiring a public relations.

Public Relations, you know your garden business needs it, but you're not 100% sure why.

Yes, stories will inevitably result from public relations. And, if your business is ever in a crunch, they're there to help you work through a crisis. But, what about the other 95% of the time?

In a nutshell, a public relations firm spends their time building your brand to make your customers fall in love with your company and become loyal consumers who ask for your product by name.

Each Wednesday in August the GROW! Blog will be delving into all your garden business needs to know before hiring a PR firm.

To see if your business is truly ready for a public relations firm, first see what the function of a PR firm is in your business plan--and learn a bit more about the services offered, which go far beyond securing stories.

All the elements for your public relations campaign are now in line: goals, objectives, key media, and target audience.

Your campaign has rolled out across a multitude of media outlets--and audiences are craving more.

Now that you have an action and media plan in line as well as a few media hits, you need to focus on maintaining momentum.

Your garden company cannot blast the same message in the same way year after year. To keep it interesting, add a new twist to your campaign each year.

Let's look at our PR Campaign Case Study on Costa Farms' O2 for You to illustrate the art of shifting the tactics each year while furthering your campaign's goals.

By now, you should have a solid understanding of the basics of a public relations campaign as well as how to define your goals and objectives.

However, you really can't begin to craft your key messages and target media outlets until you determine your key audience.

Today, we're going to focus on the key questions you need to ask about your target demographic and how to translate that to media outlets in your region and on a national level.

Through our GROW! e-Book club, we've been getting oodles of questions about how to measure social media--and for good reason.

In the scheme of public relations and the garden industry, social media is still a new medium. New or now, your garden business needs to be participating on the most relevant platforms for your target audience.

But, how can you tell if the time and energy your garden company invests is worth the return on your investment?

We're going to share an easy way to implement step-by-step processes to measure the success of your garden business's social media campaigns.

Last week, we focused on the steps to creating a public relations campaign. As promised, we've returned to walk you through steps one and two: defining goals and objectives. 

Our spotlight will be on Costa Farm's wildly successful O2 for You campaign from 2008-2012.

Below are our proven to work steps to define goals and objectives for a public relations campaign in the garden industry. 

As promised, GROW! will continue to focus on one case study a month. Plus, at the end of the month, we'll host a Google Hangout for our ebook club. 

Every Wednesday in June, we will be posting about the elements of a successful public relations campaign.

To begin, we're going to detail what a PR campaign is and how it's different than an advertising campaign