3 reasons why you should have relevant news on your website

At Garden Connect, we are proud to say we post 2 to 3 news items on every garden centre website we host. This keeps the websites of our customers up to date, relevant and saves our customers a lot of time. But why is it important to have relevant news on your website? And what content do we provide to garden centres?

I would like to show you why we’ve been doing this since 2002. After reading this blog, I am sure you understand why it it important to have relevant news on your website too.

 

1. Gardens are ever-changing

You’re operating in a very seasonal business and every month, almost every week, something’s going on. You need to prune, fertilise, plant bulbs, cut plants, mow the lawn and so on. There’s a lot to explain to your customers.

We post news items 2 to 3 times a week on the websites of our customers. Why? Because there’s always something to share with your website visitors!

In case you’re worried we publish something unconnected on your site: all customers receive a notification about 2 weeks in advance before items are published. You’re free to edit, change or remove the items. Even advanced marketing teams use our content as a starting point to update their website. It’s just a lot easier to have something you can edit than coming up with an article from scratch.

 

2. Repeat news on social media

One of the many things our customers are doing is to re-use content on social. They use images we provide on Instagram, use the news on Facebook and share it on Twitter.

It’s always easier to re-use existing content rather than creating new content. We’re not saying you can throw your social media strategy out of the window, only that this will probably help you keep your channels up to date and save you time.

Having said that, many centres only post a single link to a news item and leave it at that. But on Facebook, maybe only 10% of your followers will see those links. So why not create several posts per article? Each with different titles and images? It saves a lot of time, keeps you relevant and helps to stay in touch with your customers.

Isn’t this overdoing it? Not at all. At Garden Connect, we create about 3 posts per news item and you might have clicked on one of those 3 to open this article. Not bad, isn’t it?

 

3. Add it to you e-mail newsletter

Another way of using the news items we provide is to add them to your newsletter. Some garden centres only send out offers and events via their newsletters, but why wouldn’t you cheer up your newsletter with some non-commercial content?

We see that many centres want to add all the content to their newsletter. However, it’s better to tease recipients first and to let them click to your website to read the entire article (or to access all offers).

Many of our customers use the news items we provide to inform their customers about what’s going on in the garden and importantly, statistics show people love to read them.

 

How do we come up with good content?

So do you wonder how we help garden centres to keep their websites up to date?

We have got a team of experienced writers with a horticultural background writing articles. There’s a mix of fancy articles about deco, trends and lifestyle (think about houseplants for a second!) and we have a range of articles focussed on gardening, without making it too complicated.

All articles are non-branded so we will tell people to prune their apple tree, but won’t tell them to use Fiskars or Gardena tools for it. Some centres add this information themselves to make the articles more relevant and personal. Every article has at least 1 photo and comes with a short text which can be used on Facebook or other social media instantly.

Apart from the generic content, our team creates a lot of bespoke content for individual garden centres: blogs, product descriptions, newsletters and Facebook posts. It’s up to you!

 

Bonus tip: duplicate content?

In case you’re worried about duplicate on your website: stop worrying. We recently wrote a blog about duplicate content and why it’s nonsense to think Google will give you a penalty. If you would like to know more about this then please feel free to take a look yourself.

So now you know why it’s important to have relevant news items on your website every couple of days. If you are interested we would be happy to help you get this setup. Even if you are running your own website you can still use our news content. Of course, we do prefer having your website business as well.

Feel free to contact us via info@gardenconnect.com if you want to learn more about our content marketing services.