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The website increased on-farm and farmer's market sales. I think it elevated our status a bit and gave customers more confidence in us. Mary Ann Wycoff, Bear Creek Acres. More Testimonails..

farm marketing

Using Craigslist for Farm Marketing

While I was at the Southeast Strawberry Expo in Durham, NC I came across farmers marketing their products via Craigslist. This is an interesting way to market farm products because I normally think of Craigslist as a place to sell a used bike or advertise an apartment rental.

If you are not familiar with Craigslist, it is a simple, free classifieds board focused on a single city or area. It is also one of the largest and most heavily used sites on the web. There are Craigslist pages for most metropolitan areas across the United States and many classified categories from automobiles to lost-and-found notices.

I found this posting on the Raleigh, NC Craigslist site listing "U-pick" turnips and greens:

Though posting your farm products on Craigslist will only work if you serve a metropolitan area, I think it could be a successful strategy especially for time sensitive postings like "U-Pick" strawberries, coupons, or anything that customers can take action on quickly. If you end up using Craigslist to advertise your products, please let us know how it goes.


A Few [Farm] Web Marketing Principles

Some ideas to chew on..Some ideas to chew on..
Working with many farmers with many different website goals, I have come up with a few general principles for farm websites. These have been covered in many other articles in more depth, but I hope it is useful to have them in one place.

Update Often / Make it Easy

A successful website grows slowly over time and gives return visitors something new to read so they will keep coming back and stay excited about new developments on the farm (surprisingly enough, customers are interested in details like chicken tractors and disease control).

Farmers are busy people, so the only way to keep a farm website fresh throughout the year is to make it easy to update, create new pages, or post a blog entry. The best way to do this is to have your website built with a Content Management System (CMS) like Small Farm Central, Drupal, Wordpress, or any other system that makes sense.

Aesthetics

A farm website should be simple and elegant without using unnecessarily flashy elements. There is so much beauty on each farm: capture a bit of the farm with a representative photograph, put it in the header, add a clean navigation structure, and you have a great farm website.

Commerce

E-commerce can be a powerful addition to a farm website from pre-selling goods at farmers markets to selling to chefs to marketing items that will ship across the country, but farmers need to be comfortable with the process themselves and give it time to work.

Customers will not just come out of the blue to order on your website: you need to advertise, tell your local customers, write a regular mailing list, and any other strategy that is available. It is a powerful tool, but not a free ride to extra sales.

Content

Use photographs liberally to illustrate points; take time to write about the passion that keeps you farming year after year; make sure visitors know what is currently available and where they can buy your products; and remember that customers are interested in the details that it takes to grow the food because it keeps them connected. These details are something they cannot get from any other source.

Contact

Make it easy for customers to contact the farm through the website - a link that is clearly labeled "contact" on each page of your site is a good goal.

Blogging

A farm blog can be a powerful way to communicate with customers because it encourages interaction through comments, keeps the site fresh, and is a good place to tell the farm story over the course of a season. It can be very easy: try posting a photo of farm work with a few explanatory sentences.

Take note: either do it right or don't do it at all. A stale blog is detrimental to your goals and is much worse than not having one at all. The time investment will only pay off over time; think years instead of months, so a long term view is needed to successfully use the farm blog.

Community Connections

Getting listed on local food internet directories is important for a few reasons:
  • It increases Google's trust of your own site and will result in higher placement in search results.
  • Interest in local, authentic food is high - eaters in your area are searching for the products that you have and these links make it much more likely that they will find you.
  • It's free!

Patience

Web marketing will not double your sales and customer base overnight.

On the farm, building healthy soil is a long term goal that requires a long-term strategy and consistent effort throughout the year. Success is incremental and difficult to see in the span of months or a season, but very obvious looking back over the years.

Execute your web marketing in the same way; create a strategy that makes sense for the amount of time you want to devote and then carry out that strategy over the long term to see results. Do not give up or radically alter strategy just because results cannot be seen after a few weeks or months.

Email Mailing List

Have one; allow prospective customers to sign up for the list on your website.

Permission Always Beats Interruption


This week we are adding a little theory to go along with the practical marketing advice. One of the key ideas of modern marketing is called "permission marketing" -- most of you are already doing this, but it is a helpful to have a framework and label for what you are doing to keep you on track.

Permission marketing is Seth Godin's term coined in a 1999 book which explains how businesses can effectively market themselves to their best customers without spending a lot of money and by providing value for the customer's attention.

In Godin's words: "Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them."

This is in contrast to "interruption marketing" like television commercials, billboards, spam email, and junk mail which clutter our physical and mental worlds without adding value.

As farmers providing healthful products that add a lot of value to a customer's life, it is easy to get that permission to market to current and prospective customers. Godin says, you are using permission marketing if customers complain when they don't receive your messages. So, do you customers complain when forget to send the weekly newsletter?

Provide value every time you connect with your customers whether it is a story about your experience producing food or practical information that the recipient can use like recipes, product availability, or nutrition information.

An Agrarian Example

Get permission to send a weekly newsletter to your farmer's market customers. Be timely by sending out product availability for the market the night before. Be relevant by splitting up your list for different markets so only the people who go to a certain market get the message. If you muddy the message by including all your markets for the week you are wasting the attention that your buyers are giving to you.

Try to send this message for the first 10 weeks of the season and then see what happens on the 11th week if you forget to send the message. I think your customers will complain!

Further Reading on Permission Marketing


Farm marketing is a year-round sport - communicate with customers this winter

Show customers a side of your farm they never see.Show customers a side of your farm they never see.
As the weather turns fall-like here in Pennsylvania, I've been thinking about how important the next six months are for a farm's marketing approach. You have spent all summer nurturing a strong, consistent customer base and you have formed rapport with each loyal customer. Now they are facing a winter back at the supermarket and they might feel a little lost. I remember customers at the CSA I helped run in western Colorado feeling a little betrayed at the end of season -- especially for the ones that were first discovering "real" food. They felt abandoned.

You won't see that customer for the next six months in person, but you need to make sure that your farm is in their thoughts. When it is Spring-time again, you want them to be excited for the first greens and the first farmer's market -- you want to count on their support again next year. An internet marketing approach with regular email newsletters and a dynamic, well-tended farm website will keep customers engaged and even more loyal next year because they will know about the long months of preparation it takes to bring that cage-free, local egg or ripe heirloom tomato to the market in the summertime.

I know it is a tired time of year and the freeze is sometimes welcomed because it assuages your guilt at leaving the rest of those peppers rotting in the field. At this point in the year, you probably feel like just getting away from the farm and doing anything else. But when you get back from that break, keep in touch with your customers. You did collect email addresses this summer didn't you?

Keep up the rapport: customers will love to hear what the farm looks like and feels like during the winter. What do you do on those coldest days of winter? Do you have big plans for next year? Take winter communication as a chance to clear your mind and write down what you are feeling about the farm -- the future and the successes of last season. It is a great exercise to explain these thoughts to customers because you will often uncover some insights that you didn't quite fully grasp before.

I do the same thing here a few times a week!

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Rats are my best customers and other stories to tell farm customers

Farm marketing requires telling a compelling story about the food you produce.Farm marketing requires telling a compelling story about the food you produce.Organic and other stripes of sustainable farmers have long contested that their foods are healthier than food produced through the conventional food system. I know that many Small Farm Central members and readers are not organically certified, but all of you are producing food that you are proud of and simply because you have to look the customer in the eye when you sell the food, your products are likely raised with much more care than the larger farms.

In marketing your crops and your farm to customers you should make them feel good about supporting your farm because it is a worthy venture, which is a topic that I cover often here at Small Farm Central. Customers can also be motivated by the healthful aspects of your products. As a culture we are already starting to remember the falsity in statements like: "an eggplant is an eggplant is an eggplant." This is made very obvious in the varieties bred for taste that local, small farmers choose to produce. There is now a growing amount of evidence that there is a nutritional difference as well.

In a New York Times article, Harold McGee refers to the work of 40 Swiss rats and their scientist overseers:
As an “integrative method” for assessing quality, they gave lab animals a choice of biscuits made from organic or conventional wheat. The rats ate significantly more of the former. The authors call this result remarkable, because they found the two wheats to be very similar in chemical composition and baking performance.
The scientists are unsure of exactly why the rats choose the organic wheat, but the current theory settles around phytochemical levels:
...plants in organic production are unprotected by pesticides and fungicides, they are more stressed by insects and disease microbes than conventional crops, and have to work harder to protect themselves. So it makes sense that organic produce would have more intense flavors...

Plants sense and respond to any kind of attack by means of chemical signals. Cells in the attacked area first detect telltale molecules from the invader. Then they respond by releasing warning molecules that trigger the rest of the plant — and even neighboring plants — to start producing chemical defenses. Biologists discovered many years ago that they could induce the plant’s defensive response without any live insect or fungus. All they had to do was supply the initial chemical signals — the invader molecules or the plant’s warning chemicals.
McGee goes on to suggest ways you can induce this reaction in your backyard garden. It is worth noting that in blind taste tests people could not distinguish between organic and conventional produce. This is not a problem for local produce of course: we have all the advantages. If the taste test could be between a conventionally grown food and food that was grown on a local farm the results would be much different. You can let the food come to full ripeness; grow varieties bred for taste instead of shipping; and only ship the food a few miles instead of a few thousand miles.

The pytochemical explanation and the anecdote about 40 Swiss rats choosing sustainably raised food is a powerful story to tell your customers and one that will stick in their mind. Maybe next time the choice is between the supermarket and your farm, they will stop by your farm instead.

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