Where to start with marketing, and how to market a new farm business

TEXT CREATED AUTOMATICALLY/NOT BY A HUMAN

So where do you start with marketing your farm or your craft food business? Welcome to Small Farm Nation Academy where we’re gonna teach you what you need to know about how to market your farm or any craft food business.

Now, I recently got two questions, and there are almost identical questions. One was where do you start with marketing? A marketing is a little bit overwhelming that this person… Where do you start?

And another question I got, which I think can go in the same category. So M-loving these together is what’s the best marketing approach for a new farmer. Now, you know I talk about farmers all the time, in my videos, but the truth is, all of these marketing tactics work for pretty much any business, anyone doing digital marketing. They was building a local business.

These are all applicable.

So where do you start?

I wanna give you four things to focus on.

The first is, let’s say that you’re starting a brand new farm business and you have very limited resources. And he is something what to do.

The first step is always gonna be tactical gorilla marketing. This is as simple as you’re telling your family, you’re telling your friends, you’re telling co-workers, people used to work with you, go into your local community you’re going to the Chamber of Commerce, you’re going to rotary clubs, you’re going to schools, or whatever, maybe people that you know in your community, you’re telling them, but here’s the mistake that people make and is something I want you to think about.

You’re not going to them and trying to sell a product. This is the mistake people make.

Hey, I’m starting this farm by a pack a gram Be by my tomatoes or whatever.

What you want to do is you want to infuse these people, with your passion, why you’re doing this and you want to solicit tribe members, you’re trying to recruit members who really like what you’re doing, they believe in your vision, they believe in your mission, obviously they’ve got other jobs, so they can’t do what you’re doing, but they wanna support you, they wanna live vicariously through you, they want to be there for you in the long term, that’s what you want, it doesn’t do you any good to start your farm and get somebody to buy a pack of ground be for a pack of pork chops and then never buy from you again, ’cause you’re gonna be looking for the next customer next time.

So, all marketing is to start with the community, but going along with Gila marketing is that you have to start by clearly articulating your vision, your passion, your mission. This is why I talk so much about this and all the lessons and video courses inside small formation academy wanna talk about brand building and understanding what you’re in business for because you have to recruit people to support you in the long-term. So that’s number one girl market test number two.

You gotta tell people about yourself, you gotta… Marketing doesn’t work unless you tell people who you are.

What you’re trying to do here, is tell people who you are, what you’re doing, why it’s important and how they can participate in the journey that you’re going on.

This is really important. Now, when I say tell people I am generally talking about blogging, it can be podcasting, it can be social media, whatever, but I really need to start with a blog for a lot of reasons, One is if you have your blog on your website, and start with that, you will earn the SEO benefit of whatever you’re talking about.

It’s gonna be there, it’s gonna be a book on your website with all the chapters of all your blog posts, obviously you should take those blog posts and distribute them to a show. Social media, create a nice image to a caption put it over there, but you don’t get the SEO benefit when you do post on Facebook.

Now, it is true that you can be found on Facebook through search engine optimization on your About section of your page or whatever they can find your business name or your farm name on Facebook, but when you do the detail of a specific post on your page you don’t get the benefit of that on Facebook. So it’s really important to do this in blogging. Blog consistently, can be weakly can be a couple of times a month, but this is where you wanna tell your story and you wanna send people back to your blog.

Now number three is you wanna have a great website.

I’m not gonna get into what great means. It certainly doesn’t mean spend 5000 on a website, but think about the people you’re trying to attract, what is there a normal user experience when they go online to their brands, maybe they buy from whole foods, maybe they shop at Amazon, of course, a shop in a good eShop at so, but think about what they’re used to seeing and then you want a website that looks good on all devices, that’s easy to use that loads quickly, that uses imagery and compelling text, not just some labors that You slap up there, but really good text that inspires them and gets them to take action.

This is what copywriting is this, why I have a whole course on this in the academy, it’s really really important because people buy based on the words they read. Don’t tell me you don’t read the reviews on Amazon of course you do, and this is why words are really important. So the words on your website, and in your marketing materials, are really important.

So you wanna have a website you wanna do gorilla marketing, you wanna tell people who you are, through blog posts and social media posts that start as blog post and you wanna have a great website. Now, why do you wanna have that because your website is your hub.

It’s great that you get engagement on social media but I… Do you sell anything? Social media, no. Do you take your CSA subscriptions in social media? I doubt it. What you do is you try to get people back to your website, that’s where you sell your product, that’s where you take subscriptions that’s where you try to get people to convert from learning about you to actually buying from you and putting money behind their support for you.

The fourth thing that you wanna do that’s really important and I’m surprised sometimes how fundamental this is that some people don’t understand this, but it’s building your email list. And when I say I’m surprised I’ve got a number of people recently, who said, to me, they didn’t really understand what MailChimp was or how to use it or whatever. Then Google that stuff, and figure it out because it’s fundamental, and it’s basic but you need to have an email service provider male Chimp Mail or lie many others are free. I use convert it, you can use active campaign, you can use Constant Contact you can use drip there’s a lot of services that you can use, that’s not what’s important right now, what’s important when you start is having an ability for someone to sign up for your email list and then having a compelling reason for them to sign up for your email list because what you’re gonna wanna do is communicate with your tribe, frequently and drive them back to your website. Otherwise they’ll never come back to your website. Why would they? They forgot about you, but your emails drive them back to your website, where they see an opportunity to purchase on your product line up for your next CSA of subscription or whatever it may be.

So in terms of how you get started with marketing, those are my four tips. Grill, a marketing at first. Tell people who you are articulate your vision, your mission, your passion, get people into your tribe have a great website and then build your email list, and most of those or free are pretty dang cheap to do if you wanna learn more about the specifics of brand building and copywriting in website design and email this building and all these things, join us a small form nation academy dot com you’ll learn all of this, or if you need a great website, for your former crap rough business head over to small form nation dot com..