Seeking New Ideas and Inspiration

By: Rachel Newcombe - Updated: 9 Sep 2012 | *Discuss

 

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As time ticks on, your gardening business could run the risk of becoming stale and stagnant. In order to keep the interest of your new and existing customers, it may be necessary to generate new business ideas and draw inspiration from current trends to help your business thrive and take it to the next level.

To help your business grow and evolve over time, you need to keep up with what’s going on in the world around you, especially as far as gardening trends go, and be prepared to move with the times. Even if your business has been successful and everything has gone well, there are still advantages to be gained from moving forwards and trying out new business ideas.

Keeping up with the trends and ideas going on in the world around you is one key way of finding new business ideas and inspiration. In some ways, this is much the same as doing your market research when you first started and it helps to look in many of the same places. For example:

• Reading trade and consumer gardening publications.
• Looking around trade and consumer gardening shows to see the types of products being sold and being bought.
• Talking to other gardening sellers and producers, to see what new things they’re working on.
• Keeping up with the news and views of expert gardeners, for example through reading their books or reading their website or blog.
• Attending gardening demonstrations and workshops as a gardener, to see what’s being taught.
• Watching relevant gardening TV channels to identify new ideas and trends.
• Watching gardening podcasts online.
• Reading gardening forums and gauging what gardeners want.
• Carrying out market research amongst your existing client base.

During your inspiration hunting sprees, you may well come across new product ideas or trends that you think could overlap into the gardening arena. Sometimes it’s a case of taking a chance with products or ideas, as it’s hard to know what will be successful, so you’ve got to weigh up the pros and cons of each idea. You don’t need to go mad and buy up loads of new products – a small selection to test the market may be sufficient for you to tell if they’ll be successful.

Keeping Up With Technological Advances

It’s also useful to keep up with new technology and examine the ways in which you could use technological methods to enhance your business. For example, over the last few years many gardening businesses have utilised technological advances such as blogs, podcasts and social networking.

Blogs are great for keeping in touch with your customers, as you can let them know what you’re up to, what new products you stock, any special discounts or events you’re running and provide project and gardening ideas. But they only work if you promote them and build up a regular readership, which is where the hard work comes in. Likewise, social networking can be used very effectively for promoting your business and you can add in links to your website or blog to any mail or forum signatures.

The advent of podcasting has brought with it heaps of benefits that can be used well with gardening business. With the ease of producing and uploading a video onto the web improved greatly, you can now – if you have the motivation and enthusiasm to give it a go – create videos of live gardening demonstrations and upload them to your site or public video sharing websites, such as YouTube.

If you’re not proficient enough with technology yourself, or feel it would take you too long to learn how to use the techniques, then consider employing someone who’ll get you started with it all. It could be money very well spent.

Next Page

The Importance of Setting New Business Goals

Learning from Mistakes and Experience

How to Build Your Business From Year-to-Year

Developing New Market Opportunities

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