[Hua11.com Original] Have you noticed that for those of us running flower shops, the cost of online promotion is becoming increasingly expensive?

On major platforms, you need to pay a deposit before you can start, and there's no guarantee that your promotion will be effective. If you make a sale, a high commission is charged. Additionally, there are endless consumer reviews. If you receive malicious negative reviews, there's nothing you can do to remove them, even if you offer money.

This creates a very tough business environment for merchants, where bad products can drive out good ones. On these platforms, genuinely good products can be overshadowed by those with no ethical standards, poor quality, and low prices, eventually forcing the good products out of the market.

So, when it comes to online promotion, are we at the mercy of these platforms with no other options? This article aims to explore this question.

Next, let's break down the entire process of attracting customer traffic and find the best method for you.

1. Offline Regions

Before online shopping became popular, most chain businesses had the concept of "regional protection": China was divided into regions (such as South China, Central China, North China). Different franchisees of the same business could only operate in their own regions and wouldn't compete with each other.

Since people are spread out, each region ensures a certain amount of natural foot traffic. With this natural traffic, as long as the market isn't saturated, the business can continue to survive.

2. Taobao

When online shopping became popular (specifically, during the Taobao era), people realized that traffic was no longer divided by region but funneled through one entrance (the Taobao entrance).

So, businesses that were previously only competing within their regions now had to compete with businesses from all over the country at this single entrance.

At the same time, they were also competing with themselves (franchisees from different regions all had to compete for traffic at this entrance).

Due to the ease of search and comparison, consumers increasingly gravitated towards leading businesses, while many others struggled to keep up. (Whether those who excelled could make money is another question. Refer to: [Hua11.com · Marketing Advanced Series 1] Analysis of marketing channels for Taobao, Tmall, and JD.com (platform logic, customer quality, etc))

Will the same situation occur on foreign platforms? I believe it will, but it may not be as severe as in China. One important reason is that domestic businesses often produce very similar products. When everyone enters through the same entrance, fierce competition is inevitable. Even if your product has clear advantages and differentiation, you still need to put in a lot of effort to rank higher.

However, foreign businesses tend to focus more on brand and quality or create new categories. As long as the positioning is different, the competition is relatively less intense.

3. Meituan

Everyone is competing for traffic from these platforms, leading to a worsening situation... until the rise of mobile Internet based on smartphones.

The rapid growth of smartphones has led to the creation of many mobile Internet platforms, such as Meituan. These platforms have divided the traffic from a single source into region-based sources.

For example, if you are in Guangzhou, you will first see merchants in Guangzhou.

For merchants, competing regionally is much better than competing nationally. Therefore, merchants in various regions rush to join.

However, as more merchants join, the competition becomes more intense. Since the total amount of regional traffic is relatively constant, the traffic each merchant receives decreases.

Thus, a bottleneck similar to the previous unified traffic entrance of the Internet emerges again.

4. Upgrade and Evolution of Meituan: Grouping

To address these issues, the Meituan upgrade strategy represented by the "Flower 24 Hours" alliance (the official account [Flower 24 Hours]) was introduced: Grouping to join Meituan.

By joining the alliance, you can share the samples and sales of the entire alliance (displaying the sales of the entire alliance externally, not just a single store). This results in a higher regional ranking for the store, and an increase in customer inquiries and conversion rates.

Due to the unified command and operation of the alliance, it is expected that the effect of grouping will be much better than competing alone.

(Refer to: [Hua11.com · Marketing Advanced Series 2] Should I join group-buying APP platforms like Meituan? Understand paid vs. organic promotion)

5. Communities

The above methods involve obtaining traffic by leveraging other people's platforms, which typically attract "new traffic." However, for flower shops, reusing "old traffic" (existing customers) is the most cost-effective way to gain traffic.

As online marketing platforms, methods, and costs evolve, a long-standing but previously underappreciated marketing method is now being re-emphasized and elevated: community-based marketing.

What is community marketing?

Simply put, it involves marketing to your existing customers through one-on-one interactions on WeChat or one-to-many interactions by forming WeChat groups.

This method has been around for a long time: Flower shop customers learn about you through various channels (including the online and offline channels mentioned earlier), add you on WeChat, and then you communicate and make transactions through WeChat. After that, customers quietly remain on your WeChat and "sleep."

Community marketing aims to reawaken these "sleeping" customers by repeatedly providing services and value, generating new transactions, and even attracting new customers through them. This is a lower-cost and more effective approach than constantly seeking new customers.

Since these customers have already interacted with you, their trust in you is higher than in other merchants, making it easier to close deals.

Statistics show that the average cost of maintaining old customers and generating repeat transactions is 1/5 of the cost of acquiring new customers.

The outstanding advantages of community marketing are:

- Precise targeting (customers who have already made transactions with you)

- Controllable costs (entirely under your control, with no need to rely on third-party platforms except for necessary Internet tools)

- Flexibility to adopt various marketing methods (such as emotional marketing, community group buying, etc.)

- Ownership of traffic (a closed marketing environment, significantly reducing price comparison and homogeneous competition)

Because of these advantages and the rising cost of online promotion, community marketing is receiving more attention than ever before.

We can leverage these characteristics of community marketing to regain our competitive advantage.

Let's look at the successful experience of Hua11.com students (this student has been running a store for over a year):

As long as you focus on floral art and prioritize maintaining old customers, your customer base will grow, and the business prospects of your flower shop will improve.

Starting now, please begin the process of maintaining old customers.

However, since community marketing requires significant effort to maintain customer relationships, you may need some automated tools to assist you.

So, what Internet tools can we use to increase your marketing efficiency and improve customer satisfaction? Please read the next article in this series: [Hua11.com · Low-Cost Entrepreneurship Practice Series 4] Flower 24-hour mini-program 1: One-click copy of work templates and sharing.

Copyright Statement:

This article is an original creation by Hua11.com and is included in the “How to Run a Flower Shop and Floral Studio” Ebook. The content of this article may be periodically updated and is initially published on the Hua11.com official website blog. You can find the article at this link: https://hua11.com/blog/4680.html.

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