Hand-held marketing BY COLIN BECKINGHAM
As online traffic moves briskly to smartphones, landscape companies are working to compete in the mobile ecosystem
In 2016, worldwide mobile Internet usage exceeded desktop usage for the first time. Should landscapers, nurseries and garden centres in Canada sit up and take notice? While mobile usage world-wide has made this dramatic step, desktop access is still dominant in Canada. However, its share is declining and that of mobile devices is rising. Some landscape professionals are not yet dependent on the Internet or are just in the process of adoption. Paul Cooper, landscape designer and contractor in St. John’s, Nfld., says, “I’m an old-fashioned guy, I used to get most of my business from Yellow Pages, side-of-the-truck and wordof-mouth advertising. But now I have been forced into developing a website.” Others have invested in capable websites, including versions friendly to mobile devices, only to find that little business comes that way. Ellen de Carmaker of Eternal Seed in Powell River, B.C., comments “Our site is already mobile enabled. Not a lot of difference in sales though.” Yet others find their online presence invaluable. Tereska Guessing of Urban Seedling in Montreal, Que., says “We estimate 80 per cent of our business comes through the Internet; it is an essential tool for us because we have a specific agenda.” Line Plante of Robert Plante Greenhouses in Navan, Ont., says, “We were not active on the Internet in the past — we could not take care of the site properly. But now with our young people on staff, who make a wonderful contribution, we are getting incredible feedback every day.” The Internet is important to the landscape trade. On the one hand a website might only be a source of institutional advertising, getting the phone number before potential customers. On the other hand, the Internet allows much more detailed and customized access to information such 22 | APRIL 2018 | LANDSCAPE TRADES
as inventory. As Kevin Hill of Potter’s Nurseries in Kingston, Ont., notes: “Our website is currently under constructon, to update it and particularly to provide more information on the material we carry on a normal basis.”
How does it look on mobile? Maintaining a website, particularly with a rapidly changing inventory to report, is time consuming. Back in the early days of the Internet some landcapers and nurseries, particularly small family businesses, launched themselves onto the Internet by providing simple static pages which worked well. These early adopters had fun capturing a small but growing part of the market with their clever use of basic HTML (HyperText Markup Language). And when mobile devices first appeared some were even clever enough to build in cascading style sheet instructions to respond intelligently to the different display screens of mobile devices. They achieved this in-house by hand coding or using a design tool to create the code viewable on a browser such as Chrome, Firefox or Safari. One landscaping company that uses a webpage Strong Landscaping site, displayed on 5.5-in. diagonal screen in portrait mode.