“Economic” gardening is right for all seasons
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EmailEconomic gardening provides a way for existing businesses to grow.
Spring is the time when gardeners start their gardening projects and sow their seeds. Economic gardening provides a way for existing businesses to grow their business, any time of the year. The Pure Michigan Economic Gardening program is a valuable tool to enhance and support business growth. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation provides this program at no cost to businesses!
This economic gardening service helps CEO’s build stronger teams, identify new markets and sharpen their competitive edge using high-end corporate research tools. Accomplished through conference calls, a national team of business experts helps a business to identify key issues to address, including:
- Core business strategies and management
- Market research and competitive intelligence
- Internet presence and search engine optimization
- Data analysis using geographic information systems (GIS).
The national economic gardening team then delivers an action-oriented plan, depending on the project identified. Michigan State University Extension partner Northern Lakes Economic Alliance (NLEA) has been assisting companies in Antrim, Charlevoix, Cheboygan and Emmet counties to realize the potential of economic gardening. Read more to see how the economic gardening program benefitted Boyne City company- Van Dam Custom Boats.
As a small manufacturing business located in Boyne City, Michigan, Van Dam Custom Boats (V.D.C.B.) was introduced to the economic gardening program by NLEA, to assist with identifying their growth strategy, as V.D.C.B. is currently in a growth trajectory.
Van Dam Custom Boats saw this opportunity as a significant benefit to both their marketing and overall business planning efforts. After a close review of the economic gardening program, V.D.C.B was able to determine that marketing and specifically the modifications they were thinking about introducing to their web site was the area they wanted the economic gardening program to provide assistance with.
One of the strategies of their three year marketing plan was to modify their website to become more relevant to viewers of the web site and to engage with them over time in an attempt to convert the more serious viewers into sales prospects. It is in this area that V.D.C.B. felt the economic gardening program was best suited to assist with their growth strategy.
The economic gardening program was not intended to provide advice to the business based upon their findings, but rather to provide quality research, so that V.D.C.B. was in a better position to make informed business decisions, they determined a set of marketing objectives they wanted to address and provided these objectives to the EG Team.
Business Owner Steve Van Dam stated, “The reports we received and dialog we had with the economic gardening specialists about our web site, viewers, competitors, geographic segmentation, market research and social media were not only informative and confirmed many of the suspicions we had, but also gave us great insight into areas we needed to address to become more relevant to our viewers through our web site modification efforts. The economic gardening program was a valuable resource and we would recommend its services to any small to medium sized business that is in a growth mode.”
Contact the Northern Lakes Economic Alliance to see if your business qualifies for this valuable program: 231-582-6482 or info@northernlakes.net.
