CONSUMER TRENDS people who are doing those garden center tours of your garden center and comment and engage with them. " Look for your garden center's name; maybe you'll find some people who have already [posted about your store]. If people haven't talked about you, you can do a search - search for the name of your town, the name of your city. Search for misspellings of your name. We have Google alerts for all of our clients, and we have multiple alerts for common misspellings of the name as well because so often - even influencers that we pay to work with - will misspell the name. If you know there's an influencer in your area, go directly and follow that person and then TikTok will suggest people who are like them. " Text Marketing " Maybe I should have said [text message or SMS marketing] was the most surprising trend, " Dubow says. " After the trends report came out, I was at a gathering of green associations, and one of the landscapers there said he's been using text messaging for snow [removal]. He'll text the client when they're about 15 minutes away and he'll text pictures when it's done. And it's all automatic - the trucks are literally texting. He said his customers appreciate it. And it has reduced their customer service times - the time that people spend on the phone with their crews or with their office staff. There are so many applications for this. " Jared [Hughes] from Groovy Plants Ranch also told me that he used text messaging when he had 1,000 banana trees that he grew this past winter and he wanted to presell them, " she says. " He put 500 up for pre-sale and sent out a text on a Tuesday: 'The sale is coming on Friday.' The 32 | LAWN & GARDEN RETAILER | JANUARY 2023