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.

Some ideas to chew on..

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

• A recent blog entry from Seth Godin's blog explaining the tenets of permission marketing.
• Want to get really deep into the subject? Read A Comprehensive Analysis of Permission Marketing.
• Some good practical advice on how to get permission and how to approach contacting the customer.
  

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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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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