the seeds gardening factory zollinger is a family-run business. my parents founded the company in 1984. our products differentiate themselves from standard commercialised products, in terms of taste and quality. our customers are amongst others a lot of home gardeners, top chefs and market drivers. the particularity for our business is that we are dependend on seasonality, so we especially sell our products between january and may, because most of the plants are grown at that time. during this time period, we need to target our advertisement to our customers. we need to be able to react quickly to market changes, for example, when the weather is nice, we directly see that we have more orders,
and we need a marketing tool that is flexible enough to meet this characteristic. since 2008, we have a website where customers can purchase our products online. and ever since a few years, we use google adwords to advertise our website. this is our only online marketing channel. google adwords is very successful, because more than half of our customers come through the ads that are shown on google.ch. i did not have a clue at the beginning, i did not really know how to start. the first step was to generate a keyword list and then i applied a small budget
i realized very quickly that this was very successful. one function that i specifically appreciate about google adwords is conversion tracking. this tool enables me to see how many people that clicked on our ads, actually make an order. another advantage is, that you can start experimenting with a small budget. you simply invest the budget, create a new campaign and create a new ad text. while continously optimising my campaign, i could reach a considerably good clickrate. i calculated that our return on investment in q1 2012 was 1:11. my experiences tell me that "adwords works", at least for us. the risk is very small
and with a small budget, you can start with a very specific campaign, which can be modified, optimised and adapted depending on the success. i would recommend everyone, to simply try it out in order to see if it works for them or not.