Marketing Highlights from the 2014 NEFE
For many years we have heard about the great work done by the Connecticut Florists Association and their main event, the Northeast Floral Expo. We had hoped to be able to participate as a vendor this year but because of some scheduling conflicts (the Great Lakes Floral Expo was the same weekend) we were not able to exhibit.
But supporting the association and the show was more important than exhibiting in the trade fair. With that in mind we sponsored Nancy Butler of Above All Else, a well-known and very successful entrepreneur, to provide some educational content for the show. Nancy, very well known in the Connecticut area, built a very successful business using some powerful marketing strategies that are particularly well-suited to small businesses on a tight budget. It was this information that she shared with florists at the show in two different sessions.
Feedback was very good. Nancy is a perfectionist and so in addition to the feedback cards distributed by show organizers she also circulated her own that she shared with us. When we read the cards and saw how much florists enjoyed her sessions we asked if she would be willing to make some of the content available online.
We reviewed the feedback cards with Nancy and spotted four topics that seemed most to have been the most popular. Nancy then generously agreed to record each as a very short webinar that we could then share on our website.
That content is now available on the video section of our website. It was incredibly generous of Nancy to do this for all of us. As it turns out she loves flowers almost as much as she loves small business and, after learning about just how hard it is for retail florists these days, she really wanted to help as mush as possible. We're grateful to her and hope we can work with her again in the future.
If you missed Nancy in Connecticut we have more content coming your way. Later this month we are sponsoring Tim Huckabee of FloralStrategies at the WUMFA (Wisconsin and Upper Michigan Florists Association) show in Green Bay and Rick Rivers of Florist Bootcamp at the Maine Florists Association show in Bangor. Both of these sessions will be excellent and we hope you can participate.