Patch Plants vs Yark Beds: Inbound Marketing
Patch Plants is an online garden centre. Their buyer persona is men and women, primarily middle aged with limited plant knowledge, looking to buy one or more plants and advice on how to look after them.
Their main approach to attracting new customers is through the ‘houseplant course’ via their website. This builds a relationship with the customer, leading to a potential sale.
Other inbound marketing methods used are:
UX/UI — Website is well presented, easy to use with clear navigation buttons. This gives a great User Experience and ensures optimised User Flow.
Call To Action — Customer is invited to sign up to the houseplant course when visiting the website.
FAQ — Provides answers to the customer. Encourages them to stay on the website.
HelpBot — Available to help customers when browsing the site.
Social Media — Active content on Facebook and Instagram.
SEO — In August 2020, Patch Plants had 480,000 visitors to their website. 67.98% of traffic was via Organic search terms. 32.02% of traffic was via Paid keywords (SimilarWeb, 2020).
Yark Beds is an online bespoke bed shop. Their buyer persona is men and women, primarily middle aged with a limited budget. They are buyers who are looking for a bespoke service without paying above the odds for one.
Inbound marketing methods used are:
UX/UI — Website is simple to look at and easy on the eye. It’s very informative with a clear ‘Design Your Bed From £299’ CTA button to start the customer journey.
Call to action — CTA button on the footer of the website inviting the customer to sign up to news and offers from Yark Beds.
FAQ — FAQ section provided for the customer.
HelpBot — Quick fill query form that gets sent to Yark Beds.
Social Media — Active on Instagram and Facebook only. Visually appealing with video content on their Facebook page.
STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES
My analysis of both companies strengths and weaknesses:
WHO IS BEST?
From my research, Patch Plants are best at Inbound Marketing. They have great SEO which this makes the company searchable on Google. They have an excellent inbound friendly website with a clear CTA button to sign up to their free online plant course encouraging customers in.
Yark Beds need to work on their SEO. They aren’t very searchable at present. They have a CTA newsletter sign up button but it’s in the footer of the site out of view of the customer. Their Twitter activity needs to improve to gain more attention.
IMPROVEMENTS
PATCH PLANTS:
There’s a lack of engaging social media content, particularly on Twitter. Twitter is a huge platform for attracting potential customers and I feel they are missing out here. In August 2020 just 3.06% of traffic was via Twitter (SimilarWeb, 2020). To improve this, content should be updated regularly and engaging to encourage customers to the website. Customer success stories or plant tips could improve this content.
YARK BEDS:
When searching for keywords like ‘Bespoke beds’, they don’t appear on the first results page, meaning a lack of SEO. To improve this, they should optimise their keyword search.
Although Facebook and Instagram is regularly updated, their Twitter is inactive with only 19 followers and the last post shared in July 2019. Twitter could target potential customers. To improve this, they should upload content and customer stories linking it back to the website.
Word count: 550 words
References
Patch Plants (2020) Patch Plants Website [online]. Available at: www.patchplants.com [accessed 28 Sept 2020]
Yark Beds (2020) Yark Beds Website [online]. Available at: www.yarkbeds.com [accessed 28 Sept 2020]
SimilarWeb (2020) August 2020 Overview [online]. Available at: https://www.similarweb.com/website/patchplants.com/ [accessed 28 Sept 2020]
