Want to make more of your marketing budget?

The HTA Marketing Forum is designed to help you hear about different ways to make your marketing budgets stretch further. With competing interests on consumer time and cash at an all-time high, it is ever more important to ensure your business is promoting itself to its full potential.

This one-day event at Chesford Grange, Warwickshire, is aimed at all those involved in marketing and public relations in the garden industry, no matter what size your business. Based around the topic of ‘Tools for Success’, the forum will provide inspiration and top tips on how to maximise your marketing spend. For example, for the cost of one small newspaper, find out how you can make your marketing spend go further...

Laurens Doesborgh, Commercial Director of De Haan Group, discusses how the customer nowadays is more demanding than ever before. They know what they want, how they want it and when they want it. What does this mean for garden centres? Can we still do good by trying to serve all of the people, or do we have to make better choices in who we want as our customer, to better serve specifically them and their lifestyle? This all starts with the question: "Who are you and who do you want to be?"

Covering the high and low points through the first year of operating a Soft Play centre, Boyd Douglas-Davies, CEO of the Hillview Group, will give an entertaining and insightful look into how much they have learnt since opening one at Hilltop Garden Store on 1 October 2014.

John Ashley, Scotsdales Garden Centre, will talk about the hugely successful way in which Scotsdales Garden Centre targets key postcodes, communicating the wide range of products and services on offer and entice the customer to visit and spend money through voucher offers.

Edwin Meijer, Founder & Managing Director at Garden Connect, will help you to create a more personal, mobile and interactive loyalty scheme. How can you change your loyalty card into a customer-generator? How does this relate to changing customer behaviour? How can you make it more personal for your customers? And how can you integrate Facebook into your loyalty scheme? Those and many other questions will be answered during this session.

Garden Radio provides the ideal audio wallpaper to add atmosphere in your garden centre retail areas - but did you know that it can also be your most reliable extra sales person and customer advisor? Trevor Pfeiffer, the creator of Garden Radio, will highlight the unique bespoke in-store marketing opportunities that Garden Radio can deliver.

We will also be joined by Tim Mason, renowned for launching Tesco’s Clubcard Scheme, Tesco Express, Tesco.com and Tesco Personal Finance, and Gerald Ratner, former CEO of Ratner’s Group (now the Signet Group).

To find out more information about this event and how to book, visit hta.org.uk/marketingforum or email events@the-hta.org.uk