Picture this: You purchase a beautiful plant from your local garden center to spruce up your living room. Even though you place it in direct sunlight and water it as much as you think you should, the plant starts to wilt and loses its color in less than two weeks.
If this has happened to you before, you’re not alone. But the problem isn’t that you don’t have a green thumb — it’s that you haven’t cultivated it yet.
With a strong focus on connecting with its customers, MasterTag launched MyGardenLife.com (My Garden Life) in 2012 to help garden center shoppers choose the right plants for their home and garden and keep them alive.
This is a prime example of effective content marketing. Beyond selling plant tags and labels, MasterTag established a strong online presence that guides customers through their gardening journey from the moment they purchase a plant until after it’s planted in their backyard. The key? Prioritizing quality, educational content over making a sale.
“We want our garden center shoppers to continue to buy plants and take care of them properly,” says Judy Stout, content management specialist for MasterTag. “It backs up the statement that we lean on, which is creating the tags and labels that sell plants.”
Meet My Garden Life
The purpose of My Garden Life is to help gardeners grow plants successfully, engage with other plant enthusiasts on social media, and inspire gardeners to do more with their plants. But it didn’t start out that way.
In the early 2000s, before MasterTag launched My Garden Life, Stout was assigned a project to create a library of online records that supported tags for The Home Depot Canada’s plant product line. Realizing that MasterTag had the resources to develop similar digital plant libraries for other projects, that initial job opened the door to creating a much larger online resource.
“Starting the plant library for MasterTag opened the door for digital work for us,” Stout explains. “The most common way people find our site is through the plant library, so it’s a really important segment of My Garden Life.”
The Plant Library is an extensive online database that offers information on all kinds of different plants, helping gardeners choose the right ones for their yard and take care of them successfully.
Each entry includes essential information about the plant, including how tall it grows, what color it is, and how much light it needs. The library currently has more than 4,500 common garden and houseplant entries, with more being added every week.
Over the last decade, however, the website has become so much more than a plant database. The website includes weekly articles on popular plant and gardening topics, including how-to projects, solutions to plant pest and disease problems, and garden design inspiration
MasterTag’s team of designers also assists with developing infographics that help simplify more complex concepts that readers can download and share.
“In 2018, we got more involved with content development. Now, we have an entire editorial calendar,” Stout says. “We start content planning about three months in advance. I’ll write some articles myself, I’ll work with other horticulture professionals on content, and we also oversee social media.”
Managing the editorial calendar, however, is no easy task.
My Garden Life’s Content Strategy
Before anything else, My Garden Life focuses on creating content that its audience would like to see covered. To do this effectively, Stout explains, she fields questions sent through the site.
“One of the biggest questions is people asking what’s wrong with their plant,” Stout says. “We’re getting questions about this from people all over the world.”
While most of My Garden Life’s audience resides in the U.S., 44% live in other parts of the world, spanning from Canada all the way to Australia.
This puts My Garden Life’s editors in a hard spot. What topics should they cover, and when? Setting a content calendar isn’t as easy when your audience lives in different hemispheres and growing zones.
For Stout, the solution is to focus on the website’s core audience (American garden center shoppers) while also answering questions from readers across the globe.
“Right now I’m getting off-season questions because it’s spring going into summer in the southern hemisphere,” Stout says. “But with it being winter here in the U.S., I’ll do more content around houseplants because people are spending more time inside. I try to be intentional about what season we’re in here.”
It’s a tough balance to maintain, staying relevant to My Garden Life’s central audience while also being helpful to web visitors around the world.
From the Garden Center to the World Wide Web
While it’s a website, My Garden Life’s impact can be felt inside garden centers as well.
One unique service MasterTag offers is making My Garden Life accessible by including QR codes on its plant tags at garden centers. By scanning the code with their phone, shoppers can go directly to the Plant Library entry that states everything they need to know about the plant in question.
“This leverages a whole new avenue for customers to get all the information they need before purchasing and caring for a plant,” Stout explains. “They just scan the code with their phone, and it will take them directly to the plant library entry on My Garden Life.”
Organic traffic to My Garden Life has gradually increased year over year, with 45% of it coming from the plant library. And while publishing SEO-friendly articles and utilizing QR codes plays a part in that, MasterTag believes that producing educational content is the catalyst.
“It has everything to do with accuracy and ensuring that our audience is getting correct information about plants,” Stout says. “There’s a lot of junk on the internet right now, and Google can spread it around quickly. By including our experience and knowledge on our site, we can make sure we’re not a part of that.”
Putting Readers First, Always
On top of creating content that’s educational and informative for gardeners, MasterTag made sure it’s easy to find.
“There are no ads and there’s no monetization happening on My Garden Life,” Stout says. “The website isn’t cluttered, which makes it easier for readers to locate the information they’re looking for.”
MasterTag’s content marketing approach inspires gardeners at all levels to grow healthy, happy plants and share their love for gardening with others. Through this, it helps people become successful gardeners and encourages successful gardeners to buy more plants.
Check out MyGardenLife.com to see this philosophy in action, follow My Garden Life on Pinterest and Facebook, and drop Judy Stout a line if there’s a specific question about your plants that you’d like to see answered.
