Greenfluencers, how to connect plant buyers through influencers

Marketing and communication agencies help companies in the green sector to connect with their public. Among the different tools we use – organic content on client channels, advertising campaigns, email marketing, press office – there is one that we especially recommend for those brands that are oriented to the final consumer: influencers, who in the world of ornamental planting and landscaping are aptly referred to as “greenfluencers”.

The appearance of these content creators is obviously related to the popularity of social networks. But before these, there were already specialized disseminators and communicators in the orchard and garden that addressed a mass audience, mainly through television. For example, Pepe Plana , who since the 1990s has worked on radio and television, conducting programs dedicated to plants and gardening, such as the Bricolocus program on La 2, or Íñigo Segurola , who achieved fame presenting the gardening space of the mythical “Bricomania”.

Subsequently, bloggers who found a more direct way of connecting with the audience on the Internet became popular, with blogs such as Picarona Blog by Ester Casanovas, or El Blog de la Tabla by María José Holguín.

Finally, with the emergence of social networks, influencers began to emerge, who are disseminators who have a vocation to develop their professional lives by creating content for the networks. Some of them have been in the profession for many years, such as Toni Jardón from La huertina de Toni, who created his YouTube channel in 2007. But it has been mainly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic when a multitude of new greenfluencers in the wake of the popularity of plants, mainly among the youngest. A good example of this new generation is Clara Redondo from Plantitiscronica, winner of the Award for the best #greenfluencer of the year 2022 , granted by the Association of Ornamental Plant Marketers.

Advantages of working with greenfluencers
Greenfluencers, or influencers specialized in gardening and ornamental plants, provide three advantages that should be highlighted.

• Scope. These profiles already have a community made up of thousands of followers who are open to receive information and be advised, so brands can easily and naturally take their message to an already segmented audience, which fits with their buyer persona (prototype of client).
• Credibility. The followers of the greenfluencers trust their criteria and this makes the campaigns in which they try to publicize or promote a product more effective. On the other hand, they use a close language that easily connects with the consumer.
• Persuasion. On the other hand, influencers are able to put the name of a brand, or the benefits of a product, in the mind of their audience. It is the traditional word of mouth but conducted through what marketing calls opinion leaders or prescribers.

Types of green fluencers
In the different social networks we can find dozens of profiles of content creators specialized in the cultivation of plants, the orchard and the garden. And all of them can be classified by three criteria.

• Volume of your community. In the world of marketing it is normally accepted that micro influencers are those who do not reach 100,000 followers. Influencers are those with between 100,000 and one million. And macro influencers are those with a community of more than 1 million followers. Within the world of plants and gardening – less popular than other topics such as fashion or sports – it is difficult to find macro influencers, but there are some examples, such as the YouTube channel La huertina de Toni, which has 1,700,000 subscribers.
• Social network. Influencers specialize in Instagram, Youtube, Facebook or TikTok. Even in the cases in which they manage profiles in several networks, they tend to focus more on one of them. In Spain, Instagram is the social network most used by greenfluencers.
• Theme. Some deal with issues related to the garden (cultivation of fruits, vegetables and vegetables) and others on the more ornamental side of plants. In recent years, like the market, content creators specialized in indoor plants have proliferated.

What are the risks of working with influencers?
For the advertiser, there are certain risks when working with influencers, since, after all, the image and voice of a brand is being deposited in a person who is not part of its staff, and who does not know its culture. corporate. In addition, they have their own way of addressing the audience, with their own communicative tone that is often the opposite of the brand's corporate tone.

For this reason, our recommendation is to try to minimize these risks with a previous job of selecting the appropriate influencer based on the objectives to be achieved and the orientation of the campaign so that the influencer knows what he can and cannot do in each case, since be it a product application demo, an unboxing when it comes to products that include plug-ins, a contest to increase brand awareness or a raffle to gain followers.

If you are thinking of doing a campaign with greenfluencers and you don't want to fail, you can hire the services of a specialized marketing agency like Floramedia . Get in touch with us and we will help you .