Farmgirl Flowers is a San Francisco-based startup that’s bringing simplicity back to buying flowers. By selling just a handful of distinct arrangements sourced exclusively from local growers, the company is able to offer flowers at lower prices, while also reducing its environmental impact and supporting farmers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Christina Stembel, Farmgirl Flowers’ founder, first turned to Facebook back in 2011. “We were still handing out fliers in coffee shops,” Christina says. “I wanted an easier way of reaching more people and I thought Facebook might be a good place to start.”
Since then Facebook has become increasingly central to Farmgirl’s marketing efforts, driving an average of 10% of all traffic to the Farmgirl Flowers site and delivering a 12X return on ad spend. Christina also uses Facebook to help hire extra employees during the busy Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day seasons.
Below, Christina explains how a few basic steps have helped Farmgirl Flowers grow its business through Facebook.
Know your goals
For us, brand awareness is huge. Flowers are often an impulse buy or a last-minute purchase, and we really want people to think about us when they’re going to place an order for flowers. Because a lot of our customers are on Facebook every day, it helps us reach them every day, so we can stay on their minds.
Like any other business, we ultimately want our marketing efforts to drive sales. Because we don’t have a storefront we don’t get the foot traffic that a lot of florists get, so we have to use marketing channels that will bring people to our site. With Facebook, we spend about an hour a week managing our campaigns, and are able to drive 10% of our total traffic. To be able to drive such a significant portion of traffic with such little investment of time is huge for us.
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Think mobile
We mostly manage our Page through the Pages Manager app, which makes life a lot simpler. I can be anywhere and respond to comments on a post or answer a customer question. It helps us offer a really high level of customer service.
And we also advertise to people a lot on mobile News Feed. We’ll run pictures of our daily arrangements or pictures of orders that have just shipped, and because people have their phones with them all the time, our work can become a little part of their day. Because the content we share is really nice to look at, we think it’s OK to be more active with our ads. They’re adding a little bit of beauty to peoples’ lives.
Branch out
We also use our Page as a feedback channel with our customers. We run polls to see what people would prefer from us — for instance, we recently asked our customers whether they’d prefer vases that were made from recycled glass, or from glass made in America. The direct feedback is wonderful, because it can offer instant guidance for future decisions.
We’ve also done a lot of hiring through Facebook for key holidays. For Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, we’ll just put one post up saying that we’re hiring, and in a few hours a hundred people will have reached out to us looking for work.
Go custom
Custom Audiences are great for us, especially because we advertise to a very local audience, and focus a lot on holiday sales. For instance we can run ads to people that bought flowers from us the previous Valentine’s Day, and it enables us to reach them without just being another spammy email in their inbox. Or we can create lookalike audiences to help us reach people that are similar to the folks that have already bought from us. It’s another way for us to spread the word about our flowers and our mission.
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To learn more about the results Farmgirl Flowers has seen with Facebook, check out our latest Success Story. And hear more of Christina’s story here.