Long gone are the days when a florist’s toolkit might contain scissors, pruning shears, secateurs, string, adhesive tape and little else. As florists increasingly have to improve their online offerings both in terms of sales as well as to attract new customers, it’s important to stay on top of the best digital tools available. From easy-to-use photo editing sites to setting up alerts on Google, we’ve outlined some of the top programmes and tools we use here at FloomX to stay ahead of the curve.
Pixlr
Need an easy-to-use photo editing site? Pixlr is a free image editing website (meaning no downloads necessary) that strips back a lot of the technical know-how required for photoshop. Here it is easy to resize and crop your images.
Canva
Canva's a creative hub that allows you to easily create social media graphics and images (no expertise needed). We use Canva to quickly create social media posts. You can also create posters, business cards and more.
Trello
It's important to stay on top of your various projects, particularly when your business needs multiple people to complete a project. Trello is a free project management tool that allows you to plan, execute, document and track projects. Trello allows you to assign work to other members, tie it to a calendar for real-time deadlines. You can attach documents to a project, whilst integrating with popular programmes such as Dropbox, Slack and Google Drive.
SEMRush
Boosting your online presence can be tricky, and not all SEO prove to be nearly as useful as they claim they are. But SEMRush shades it for us, with over 50+ tools on SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC and social media. There's also a free version offering all of the important tools needed for a business to optimise its SEO. SEMRush provides a real-time archive of keywords allowing you to uncover millions of national & local keywords that are best suited for your business. A subscription allows users to run technical SEO audits to understand the key areas of improvement your website needs to make to get more value out of search engines. Whilst viewing traffic in tools such as google analytics is useful, SEMRush provides more vital metrics such as visibility and page rank. This can help inform you of how the page is fairing against competitors, and whether the volume of traffic for a page on your site is positive, or not.
Mojo
Mojo lets you choose from 300+ Instagram Story templates; all of them are 100% editable; and in a few seconds you can create a stunning IG story. The free app is highly recommended as a way to incorporate cool videos with your bespoke branded designs and backgrounds.
Google Alerts
It's important to stay in the loop when your business or founders are mentioned throughout the internet. Google Alerts sends you notifications straight to your email whenever keywords are mentioned in articles, social media and other content pieces that are searchable through Google. If you have a website, this is a great way to build backlinks (having lots of external links pointing to your website is important for SEO) by searching for mentions and checking content pieces that are linking to your website. If they're not, feel free to reach out via email to the site owner to request your website is linked within the content piece.