Are you creating value-added products and selling them in your farm business? After hearing this episode, you may decide to get started! "Value-added" refers to any agricultural products that have been processed or enhanced in a way that increases their market value. This could involve transforming raw farm products into something more convenient, shelf-stable, or unique, thus making them more appealing to customers. For example, turning fresh vegetables into pickles, making jams from fruit, or creating bone broth from animal by-products are all considered value-added because they offer more convenience, flavor, or functionality compared to their raw form. These products often allow farmers to increase their profit margins and diversify their income streams. In this episode, Kendall Ballantine from Central Park Farms dives into the world of value-added products and how they transformed her direct-to-consumer farm business into a thriving operation. Discover how these simple innovations can create new revenue streams, support business growth, and help farms stay afloat during the off-season. Tune in to learn: How Kendall turned chicken bones into bone broth, chicken pot pie, and over 40 other freezer meals for her online store. Where to start with value-added products. How to come up with value added product ideas. Creative marketing tips to entice buyers to buy your value added products. Common mistakes farmers make when they first start out with value-added. How to price your value added so you remain profitable. This conversation is packed with actionable insights to inspire your own farm business! Today's Guest: Meet Kendall Ballantine. Kendall is a proud farmer and the business owner behind Central Park Farms in Langley, BC Canada. She grew the annual revenue of her small scale farm-to-table business well into the six figures, all through the power of digital marketing and without spending a dime on ads. After many failures, lots of learning, and a heck of a lot of successes, she is excited to share what she knows to help other farmers reach their ideal customers and grow their businesses online. Follow Kendall's marketing tips at www.instagram.com/marketingforfarmers Her website: www.onlinemarketingforfarmers.com Workshop: Increasing Revenue with Value Added Products Workhorse Collective, Kendall's Coaching Program Podcast Sponsor: This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important parts of your marketing system: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, writing great weekly email promotions, nurture emails, onboarding emails, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Subscribe and Review in Apple Podcast I’d love for you to subscribe to my podcast! I don’t want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe in Apple Podcasts!

With the holidays coming, are you preparing any farm promotions to finish Q4 strong? If not, this episode is for you. I've invited my friend Christina Marbury (the marketing director of Taste the Local Difference -- a marketing agency for farmers) to share her expertise in building holiday promotions that sell. Christina has the advantage of working with hundreds of farms across the Midwest on their marketing strategy, and she has seen the types of offers that work well for the Thanksgiving/Christmas seasons. Your consumer is "trained" to buy this time of year. Between gift giving and the big three holiday feasts (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years), there is ample opportunity for farms to pitch their products. In this episode, Christina will share what types of products and offers work well for this time of year. She also gives tips on how to set up your online store so that more people will buy those offers. AND, we talk through some marketing pointers so that your customers find out about those great offers living on your e-commerce platform. My challenge for you is to listen to the episode with your key decision makers and then brainstorm a holiday offer (or two!) that you will pitch this season. Let us know how it goes! Who is Christina Marbury? Marketing Director at Taste the Local Difference At Taste the Local Difference, Christina and her team support farms and other local food businesses to reach their goals with specialized marketing services designed just for those businesses. From website design and e-commerce system setup to graphic design to strategies and implementation for social media, email marketing and search engine optimization, TLD aims to make marketing work efficiently and effectively. Christina fell in love with local food while attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and has since spent her career working with and supporting local food businesses of all types. From farm work to bakeries, retail, and food service - she's been in the thick of it, which brings an understanding of these businesses to her work in marketing. When Christina isn’t working, you can find her in her garden, boiling maple syrup, baking up a storm, and soaking in the incredible waters and landscapes near her home in Leelanau County, Michigan.   Podcast Sponsor: This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Download the Guide we mention in this episode: E-Commerce Optimization for Farms here. It's an overview of the key elements of this episode, put together by Christina for you! Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important parts of your marketing system: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, writing great weekly email promotions, nurture emails, onboarding emails, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Early Bird Campaigns that Convert --  In this week's episode, I mentioned that I am currently in my final week of the CSA this season. In fact, I'm in the middle of my "early renewal promotion" to get my CSA members to sign up again. IF you want to learn my system for how I do this every year, I offer my step by step online course to help you get it done. This course will teach you how to build a compelling offer that gets your current members to decide to renew during your promo campaign. I show you the emails to write, the posts to create, and the ENERGY you need to generate in the week before you launch. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers!You'll find my video trainings for the Early Bird Challenge inside here for a few more days. Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer Subscribe and Review in Apple Podcast I’d love for you to subscribe to my podcast! I don’t want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe in Apple Podcasts!

Are you a CSA farmer that has to get their members to "renew" every year and it always feels like a STRUGGLE? I've got you, my friend, because in this episode, I share my process for setting up my CSA early sign "renewal" promotion every fall in the final week of my CSA. I give them only 7 days to make up their minds. I've used the same sales system for the last 7 years, and I consistently get 75-85% of them to renew.  Here is an overview of the steps that I walk through in more detail in the episode. Use this as your checklist for running your own campaign: Set the three key dates. Review any changes you might want to make to next year's products/sites/fulfillment. Confirm with vendors and site hosts. Build your irresistible offer. Set up your online store/POS -- the tech! Build the content strategy map. Map out the key messaging points on a calendar, day by day. Write the email onboarding sequence. Build social media post graphics. Write the email marketing sequence. Schedule the emails and social posts. Build the "master checklist". Test the funnel on 1-2 customers who are let in early to find any bugs. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy Library -- this is my digital cooking resource library that I provide for my CSA members to help them learn how to become a better home chef and cook the CSA way. It includes a Beginner's Guide to CSA mini-course, Vegetable University (A to Z video tutorials for every veggie); Canning Club (canning videos); Exit Strategy videos; Instant Pot tutorial, and my Recipes and Resources pages (with weekly CSA box recipes and unboxing videos). Farmers can subscribe for a monthly fee to have access to these resources to help them support their own CSA members. Early Bird Campaigns that Convert -- In this episode, I mentioned how I would be building my CSA Early Bird Renewal Promo campaign this month. IF you want to learn my system for how I do this every year, I offer my step by step online course to help you get it done. This course will teach you how to build a compelling offer that gets your current members to decide to renew during your promo campaign. I show you the emails to write, the posts to create, and the ENERGY you need to generate in the week before you launch. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! You'll find my video trainings for the Early Bird Challenge inside here for a few more days. Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

In this episode, we dive into the powerful psychology of consistency and how small commitments can lead to bigger, lasting customer actions. Inspired by Robert Cialdini’s principle of consistency from his book Influence, we explore how getting your customers to take small, meaningful steps—like participating in social media posts or attending a farm event—can prime them for bigger purchases down the line. We’ll also discuss how this principle helps customers claim an identity and align their values with your farm, creating a loyal, committed base. Tune in to learn how to leverage this strategy to boost customer engagement and drive sales! This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Influence by Robert Cialdini - I reference this best-seller in the show. It teaches the psychology of sales. This is not an affiliate link. Join my CSA Academy Library -- this is my digital cooking resource library that I provide for my CSA members to help them learn how to become a better home chef and cook the CSA way. It includes a Beginner's Guide to CSA mini-course, Vegetable University (A to Z video tutorials for every veggie); Canning Club (canning videos); Exit Strategy videos; Instant Pot tutorial, and my Recipes and Resources pages (with weekly CSA box recipes and unboxing videos). Farmers can subscribe for a monthly fee to have access to these resources to help them support their own CSA members. Early Bird Campaigns that Convert -- In this episode, I mentioned how I would be building my CSA Early Bird Renewal Promo campaign this month. IF you want to learn my system for how I do this every year, I offer my step by step online course to help you get it done. This course will teach you how to build a compelling offer that gets your current members to decide to renew during your promo campaign. I show you the emails to write, the posts to create, and the ENERGY you need to generate in the week before you launch. Episode 119 How My "CSA Giveaway Challenge" Experiment Built Some Major Brand Identity - listen to this challenge to get some ideas for questions you can use in a Daily Challenge, designed to build commitment! Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

Fixed Price discounts. You've seen them. "Save $5 when you spend $25!!" Percentage off discounts. You've seen those too: "Get 20% off when you spend $25 or more!" But which one is more effective? If you were going to build a coupon code in your online store, or offer a promotion at your farm store -- which one will lead to more sales? Well... it depends. As it turns out, there are best practices surrounding the use of the fixed price v. the percentage off discount. And it all revolves around sales psychology.  Our brains just "feel better" when we use one over the other -- in certain circumstances. In this episode, I share with you what conventional marketing wisdom says about when to use a fixed price discount over a percentage off discount. Test these out in your farm marketing and see what works best. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy Library -- this is my digital cooking resource library that I provide for my CSA members to help them learn how to become a better home chef and cook the CSA way. It includes a Beginner's Guide to CSA mini-course, Vegetable University (A to Z video tutorials for every veggie); Canning Club (canning videos); Exit Strategy videos; Instant Pot tutorial, and my Recipes and Resources pages (with weekly CSA box recipes and unboxing videos). Farmers can subscribe for a monthly fee to have access to these resources to help them support their own CSA members. Early Bird Campaigns that Convert -- In this episode, I mentioned how I would be building my CSA Early Bird Renewal Promo campaign this month. IF you want to learn my system for how I do this every year, I offer my step by step online course to help you get it done. This course will teach you how to build a compelling offer that gets your current members to decide to renew during your promo campaign. I show you the emails to write, the posts to create, and the ENERGY you need to generate in the week before you launch. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

When it comes to selling raw milk to the public, farmers face legal and health challenges that make it really hard to provide this product. Luckily there is a work-around. It's called the "herdshare." The problem is, it's awfully hard to explain. In today's episode, I'm interviewing a second generation dairy farmer, who is moving her product line to raw milk. She has faced these communication and sales hurdles head-on, and she shares her unique sales strategy that is slowly but surely getting new customers in the door. We discuss: the public perception of raw milk the obstacles she has to overcome when it comes to messaging this product what types of customers want raw milk the unique questions she must answer in order to make someone ready to buy legal restrictions -- what you are and aren't allowed to do when it comes to selling raw milk how a herd share works her scrappy, brilliant sales method that closes the deal almost 100% of the time what she focuses on in her messaging to drive sales mistakes she's made along the way Even if you  aren't ever going to sell raw milk (raising my hand here), you'll hear some great beginner-farmer marketing tactics. Katie may not realize it, but she has built a few pieces of a marketing machine that will eventually be able to scale. Come take a listen and see where you can find your story in hers. Who is Katie Miller? Katie Miller is the owner of Positively Grown Farm in the small town of Hopkins, Michigan. She’s a 4th generation Dairy farmer following in her dad’s footsteps who has been farming for 35 years. She is the first to pursue the Raw Dairy industry and have one successful year under her belt with no slowing down in sight. When she’s not milking cows she enjoys riding her Harley with friends, going to Festivals and being a mom to 4 Emus, a duck, 3 cats and her Lab/Pit Ruby This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy Library -- this is my digital cooking resource library that I provide for my CSA members to help them learn how to become a better home chef and cook the CSA way. It includes a Beginner's Guide to CSA mini-course, Vegetable University (A to Z video tutorials for every veggie); Canning Club (canning videos); Exit Strategy videos; Instant Pot tutorial, and my Recipes and Resources pages (with weekly CSA box recipes and unboxing videos). Farmers can subscribe for a monthly fee to have access to these resources to help them support their own CSA members. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

September 18, 2024 What if you could brainstorm your personal marketing strategy for a new enterprise in a 1:1 call with another farmer? Well, that's exactly what happens in today's podcast. You get to be a fly on the wall, listening in on my monthly Farm Marketing School Zoom call, that turned into a 1:1 coaching call with one of the members. This month, Allan Laird was in the hot seat, and he and I work out how to build up a clientele for his goat's milk soap line. This is a brand new enterprise for him and he wasn't sure how to get started. So we built out his short term game plan in under an hour, so he has clear marching orders. If you've ever wondered what should you be working on first, second, third -- this is an episode for you. You'll hear the familiar themes from this podcast showing up in this case study. It's also loaded with tons of little nuggets and ideas that you can surely apply to your farm enterprise. By the way, I help farmers put these kinds of strategies together in Farm Marketing School. Join me inside my monthly membership this fall and winter as we decide what your strategy will look like, and then start buidiing the different parts of your machine so they all work together. Get your marketing machine DONE! Podcast Guest: Who is Allan Laird? Allan Laird returned to his farm roots after retiring from a 46-year career in public safety. Together with his wife, Sue, he now tends to 10 acres where they raise Highland cattle, various poultry, and maintain sustainable pasturelands. Committed to sustainable farming, they render fat by-products from their hogs into lard, which they use to craft goat milk soap. What began as a hobby for friends and family is now evolving into a promising business venture. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Hit play and let's get started! Listen to this episode on Stitcher. Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts Listen to this episode on Google Play Listen to this episode on Spotify. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy Library -- this is my digital cooking resource library that I provide for my CSA members to help them learn how to become a better home chef and cook the CSA way. It includes a Beginner's Guide to CSA mini-course, Vegetable University (A to Z video tutorials for every veggie); Canning Club (canning videos); Exit Strategy videos; Instant Pot tutorial, and my Recipes and Resources pages (with weekly CSA box recipes and unboxing videos). Farmers can subscribe for a monthly fee to have access to these resources to help them support their own CSA members. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer Subscribe and Review in Apple Podcast I’d love for you to subscribe to my podcast! I don’t want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Now if you’re feeling extra loving, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on Apple Podcast, too. Those reviews help other people find my podcast and they’re also fun for me to go in and read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you! My hope is to feature guests periodically on the show. If you know someone who is innovating in the area of marketing as a farmer, please send me an email at [email protected]. Right click and save as to download this episode to your computer.

What do I post on social media? If you're a small farm in your first 3 years, you're likely spending a fair percentage of your "marketing time" doing social media. But are you using that time wisely? Social media has its place in the marketing funnel, but only if it's strategic. In this episode, I share with you the 5 "goals" for social media, and I list of 10 different categories of post content that should regularly be in your monthly social media rotation. If you're doing social, start off by scheduling these 10 styles of posts in your Business Suite, so you know they're covered. THIS is the "strategy." Then, use your discretionary time during the week to pop in additional "bonus" posts as inspiration strikes. Sure to become a classic episode! Grab my Social Media post ideas PDF guide here. It will give you other suggestions for the kinds of topics you can post about to drive traffic, and get leads. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Episode 274: Scaling Your Marketing: What Farms Do Differently at Each Level - Interview with Andrew from Local Line - Andrew and I discuss the three "levels" of farm business, and what farms do differently in each one. This is a great episode if you want to know what you should be working towards as you scale. Episode 275: Tips for Using Video in Your Farm Marketing - Getting Started - This will show you ways you can use social media VIDEO in your marketing Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy Library -- this is my digital cooking resource library that I provide for my CSA members to help them learn how to become a better home chef and cook the CSA way. It includes a Beginner's Guide to CSA mini-course, Vegetable University (A to Z video tutorials for every veggie); Canning Club (canning videos); Exit Strategy videos; Instant Pot tutorial, and my Recipes and Resources pages (with weekly CSA box recipes and unboxing videos). Farmers can subscribe for a monthly fee to have access to these resources to help them support their own CSA members. Early Bird Campaigns that Convert -- In this episode, I mentioned how I would be building my CSA Early Bird Renewal Promo campaign this month. IF you want to learn my system for how I do this every year, I offer my step by step online course to help you get it done. This course will teach you how to build a compelling offer that gets your current members to decide to renew during your promo campaign. I show you the emails to write, the posts to create, and the ENERGY you need to generate in the week before you launch.  Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer Subscribe and Review in Apple Podcast I’d love for you to subscribe to my podcast! I don’t want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Now if you’re feeling extra loving, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on Apple Podcast, too. Those reviews help other people find my podcast and they’re also fun for me to go in and read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you! My hope is to feature guests periodically on the show. If you know someone who is innovating in the area of marketing as a farmer, please send me an email at [email protected].

September 4, 2024   Today's podcast guest Sue Miller shares her inspiring story of how she built a thriving farm business in rural Tennessee from growing simple hydroponic butterhead lettuce on her windowsill to serving hundreds of families in her community through CSA, farmers market, wholesale, and online store. And it all happened in just 5 years. We cover marketing principles like: finding your unique niche identifying and leading with your gateway product cultivating vendor relationships to offer more products listening to your customer to build out your business sharing your passion creating community with your customers practicing patience as you coach your customers to new buying habits inspiring your customers to turn into VIPs and super buyers Sue's strategy isn't full of bells and whistles. It's actually pretty simple and elegant. Learn how she does it, and what some of her "marketing lessons" were along the way. Remember, if you need help building this piece into your marketing system, you can take over 10 marketing projects inside of Farm Marketing School. I coach you through the step by step process for how to create each piece of your marketing sales machine, from lead magnet creation to weekly emails, promotion planning, website home page design, testimonial pages, offer builds, and more. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Meet our Podcast Guest: Sue Miller Sue Miller is the co-owner of Blackberry Pond Farm located in west TN that specializes in growing fresh and delicious vegetables hydroponically. They are in production year round and offer a CSA box quarterly. They are Organic Certified by OnMark Organic Certification with the USDA. The farm started in 2015 in the kitchen windowsill. This was a small hydroponic system to grow herbs and salad greens for Sue’s use in the kitchen. They expanded to the porch with 3 gallon buckets to grow cucumbers and lettuce. Eventually they built a greenhouse, followed by MORE greenhouses, and the rest is history. Currently, they run a quarterly 100 member CSA from January-November, sell at the Martin Farmers market, wholesale to chefs and run a roadside stand from our 7 greenhouses and 2 fields of crops on 36 acres in Martin, TN.  We are involved in community education about the impact of food on health. The farm is truly a family affair! Drs. James and Sue Miller who own and started the farm are physicians. James is a full time hospitalist at the local hospital and designs and trouble shoots the hydroponic designs. Sue is a full time traveling ER physician who does all marketing, social media and customer service for the farm.  Much of the planting, transplanting, daily care harvesting and delivery is done by sons Chris and Junior and daughter in law Chelsea. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - Want to work with me? Join my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. New projects added regularly so we keep you up to date. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

So you're creating videos in your farm marketing. Wonderful! Now how do you get the most mileage out of them? If you're like most businesses, you spend a lot of time making the video, recording it, posting it, and then it falls into the black hole -- never to be seen again. But what if you could re-purpose that content and have it do double-or-triple duty for you?  For example, you film the process of packing your CSA shares in the pack shed for an Instagram story. Well... what if you took that series of clips an sticthed them together into a reel? What if you then uploaded that reel video onto YouTube and added it in your CSA sales playlist on YouTube? What if you took that YouTube URL link (along with a thumbnail image) and dropped it into email #3 of your sales email sequence for all those people who have signed up for your CSA lead magnet? Or what if you embedded that video onto your CSA sales page on your website? See what I mean? That one video got re-used in other places in your marketing sales machine. Suddenly, the idea of making strategic content videos doesn't seem like such a waste of time, does it? In today's episode, I'm sharing 10 different ways you can take the SAME piece of video content and re-use around your marketing strategy. Take some notes and let this one inspire you! By the way, I help farmers put these kinds of strategies together in Farm Marketing School. Join me this fall and winter as we decide what your strategy will look like, and then start buidiing the different parts of your machine so they all work together. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy Library -- this is my digital cooking resource library that I provide for my CSA members to help them learn how to become a better home chef and cook the CSA way. It includes a Beginner's Guide to CSA mini-course, Vegetable University (A to Z video tutorials for every veggie); Canning Club (canning videos); Exit Strategy videos; Instant Pot tutorial, and my Recipes and Resources pages (with weekly CSA box recipes and unboxing videos). Farmers can subscribe for a monthly fee to have access to these resources to help them support their own CSA members. Searchie -- this is the online platform I recommend if you want to build your own digital resource library. (This is an affiliate link) ConvertKit - I use Convertkit as my email service provider, to build out all my email marketing campaigns and write my weekly emails. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

Are you doing video in your farm marketing? If not... why not?! Video is my go-to content creation method. Perhaps it's because I'm a natural public speaker, but I find it to be the easiest and fastest way to communicate with my leads and customers. It's also the best way to build connection and trust, to grease the wheels and move people towards buying. And yet, for many farmers, video remains an elusive skill. It feels scary and the fear of looking unprofessional is real. In this episode, I'm sharing some of my best practices when it comes to video, including my list of "gear" (it's not very long), and my short list of "must have videos" to film for your brand. I also show you where to get started if you're a little nervous. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Wireless Microphone (Links to Amazon)  Goosehead Bed Phone Holder (Links to Amazon) Best Video Editing Software: I don't actually use one, but I do have InShot on my phone! Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

Today we're talking scaling. I've always wondered "What does an established farm do differently than a beginner farm --when it comes to marketing and sales?" If you could break up the development of a farm business into stages, what would be the key identifiers? How do those business owners practice business differently? Do they think differently? Do they believe certain things that are hard to believe early on? Are they doing certain things that they didn't do in an earlier level? If being an entrepreneur means breaking a glass ceiling every now and then, what does that ceiling look like? As I've matured as a farm entrepreneur, I can look back at my early years and see how far I've come. I can see the progress, the systems I learned to build, the key decisive moments where things shifted, the actions that really mattered. THAT's what this podcast episode is all about -- sharing these insights to help you transition and grow into your next phase. How long does it take? What do you need to do? How do you get there? To get to this data, I called in a favor from my podcast sponsor Local Line. I asked them if I could talk to someone who would be able to look inside the thousands of Local Line accounts, analyze the patterns and trends and simplify a few key principles to help us grow through each stage.  In this episode, Andrew Meehan is sharing the three "levels" of farms he sees, the identifying markers of each, and what behaviors and mindsets those farms manifest while in that stage. I think this is a helpful conversation, because you'll be able to identify where YOU land, and what you need to do, think, and be to graduate to the next level.  Remember, if you need help building this piece into your marketing system, you can take my testimonial project inside of Farm Marketing School. I coach you through the process of finding 5 quality testimonials and tell you where to put them in your farm sales messaging sequence. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Meet our Podcast Guest: Andrew Meehan: Andrew has worked in agriculture for the past decade, operating a market garden for seven years and more recently working as a sales rep at Local Line. In his role at Local Line, Andrew collaborates with farms and food hubs to optimize their sales process by integrating scale and industry appropriate software solutions.  Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

A few weeks ago, I drove my two boys up to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for their annual weeklong Air Show. The EAA Venture Air Show in Oshkosh is the largest air show in the world, and for seven days, it also becomes the busiest airport in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people visit this air show every year. We first discovered the event a few years ago when my son Jed first started getting into aviation. Everyone told us, "You need to go to Oshkosh." Well, they were right. If you're an aviation enthusiast, you eventually end up at Oshkosh. In fact, I would argue that it's almost the equivalent of making a holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  Our first trip to this aviation experience was other-worldly. It was so over-the-top, and it turned us into rabid superfans of aviation. In fact, it was SO powerful, I remember thinking, "I need to do a podcast about this. The brand culture here is so potent." The thing about Oshkosh is that there are some very specific principles at play that are creating community and turning us plane nerds into superfans. In this podcast, I wanted to point them out to you. I show you how you can take these same principles and put them to work in your farm business, so that you create a community among your customers. Because people come for your vegetables. They come for your meat and your flowers. But they stay for the community. As a farm, you must learn how to build a community to achieve longevity. Oshkosh (and this podcast) will show you how. This turned into a great episode! This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Episode 203: How to Build a Glamping Enterprise on Your Farm -- Everything You Need to Know with Kasey Marshall - I mention our vacation to Canada to see the Cold Lake Air Show, and our hosts Kasey and Renaud Marshall at 350Farms! Kasey was on my podcast last year to talk about their glamping operation. If you want to learn how to set up a glamping operation, THIS IS THE PODCAST to listen to. Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

Are you in that stage of business where you are aggressively looking for new customers? Here's something important for you to know: New customers need to know that your product works before they buy. They need proof. Period. You HAVE to have a social proof element in your marketing system somewhere in the messaging sequence. As a marketer, our job is two-fold: to increase desire and possibility and remove doubt and fear. The social proof piece is what does this second part.  In this episode, I share 10 ways you can show social proof in your marketing system. You don't need to do them all. And none of them are hard to implement, although some are more powerful than others. I want you to listen in and see if any of them are in place in your farm business. Then... your homework is to pick one or two of these social proof ideas and put them into place. I am willing to bet good money that you will see MORE new clients when you add this piece in. Remember, if you need help building this piece into your marketing system, you can take my testimonial project inside of Farm Marketing School. I coach you through the process of finding 5 quality testimonials and tell you where to put them in your farm sales messaging sequence. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Episode 203: How to Build a Glamping Enterprise on Your Farm -- Everything You Need to Know with Kasey Marshall - I mention that my family is going on vacation this week to Canada, and we are glamping  at Kasey's place this month! If you want to learn how to set up a glamping operation, THIS IS THE PODCAST to listen to.  Episode 151: Creative Badges for Your Product Descriptions - want some ideas for product badges to use for social proof? This is a great episode, plus I share a cheatsheet of popular badge labels you can use on the show notes page. Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

How much do you spend to ACQUIRE a customer? This is a powerful question you should know the answer to. In this episode, we dive into one of the KPI's (key performance indicators) in your farm business, namely Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). I explore its significance in evaluating the efficiency of your marketing strategies and the overall health of your business. We'll break down the key components that contribute to CAC, including marketing and advertising expenses, salaries, commissions, and other direct costs. Then I'll walk through my CAC for both my CSA and my online store customer. This was an eye-opening process for me! Your homework is to calcuate your CAC for your different key product streams. I'm hoping this will empower you to make data-driven decisions and enhance your marketing effectiveness! This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

Last week, I shared 3 ways to increase the average amount a customer spends in a transaction with you.  One of those suggestions was to create an "order minimum."  But how do you decide what that order minimum should be? Well... you look at the numbers. Which numbers? That's what this episode is all about. I share 5 key metrics you should review to help you figure out your order minimum, AND I share the formula to plug those numbers into. Your homework this week is simple: calculate what your order minimum should be, and then go set it up! Test it out for 2 weeks and see what happens. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

July 3, 2024 Recently, I've been looking for ways to increase our weekly online store revenue in our Local Line store. I noticed that we had a LOT of 1 or 2 item purchases last year. Those are quite frankly a real drag to pack. The amount of time it takes me to print the pack slip, pack the order, pay for the bag it goes into, and hand deliver it -- begs the question, "Am I making any money on this?" I penciled out the numbers and realized I'm barely breaking even with those orders. I needed to make a certain "average order value" to make it worth it to run online sales. So I decided to raise the minimum order last week, and BOY did see a difference! My AOV went up quite a bit, and my bottom line showed it. In today's episode, we talk about "Average Order Value" or "AOV" for short. Knowing your average order value is absolutely key in business. One of the easiest ways to increase revenue in your business is to simply increase the AOV. So how do you do that?... I share three of my "best" and easies strategies to get it higher. This is going to be a classic episode! This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy and learn how to support your CSA members Use my resources!! Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Beginner's Guide to CSA Guide -- Use my Canva template and share it with your CSA members in your fulfillment process. This quick read guide shares the quick tips from my CSA master members, for how to be successful as a new CSA member. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/csasuccess Get my A to Z Vegetable Storage Guide and use it as a lead magnet -- This is my MOST successful lead magnet ever. I've used it for 5 years. I'm sharing the Canva template with you, and you have full rights to use it as-is, or change it for your farm. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/atozguide Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

I still remember the first day of our first week of CSA this season.  It felt electric! I woke up with so much excitement. I had a big to-do list, and not enough time. But I was excited to get started. My crew was out harvesting super early that morning, and with so many different things to harvest, I had a chance to tell so many visual stories in my CSA Facebook group, on IG stories, and newsletter.  It's always exciting when we start something again, isn't it?  I could tell my customers were feeling the excitement too.. They have been looking forward to seeing us again for months. I loved feeling the brand energy soar. Marketing felt easy. This week, on the podcast, I talk about these periods throughout the year when you might experience a burst of organic brand energy. I share 4 different places I typically see them. I want you to LOOK for these moments, and capitalize on them! Don't just let them go by. Milk them for all they're worth. They can catapult your brand energy, and you'll ride that wave til the next one. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy and learn how to support your CSA members Use my resources!! Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Beginner's Guide to CSA Guide -- Use my Canva template and share it with your CSA members in your fulfillment process. This quick read guide shares the quick tips from my CSA master members, for how to be successful as a new CSA member. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/csasuccess Get my A to Z Vegetable Storage Guide and use it as a lead magnet -- This is my MOST successful lead magnet ever. I've used it for 5 years. I'm sharing the Canva template with you, and you have full rights to use it as-is, or change it for your farm. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/atozguide Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

Today's episode is inspired by an email I received from a farmer and podcast subscriber. It was a question about how many emails to send each week when you have different segments of audiences? This farmer has three different "groups" of clients -- the 2024 CSA buyers, the 2023 CSA buyers who still haven't renewed, and the "cold" audience (people from previous years).  Do you write weekly emails to all of them? Is it the same one? Are all subscribers created equal? Are all subscribers as valuable? What about those folks who haven't bought my stuff in years?... Essentially Jodi wanted some guidance on how to talk to the different groups in her audience, and whether it was worth her time to do so. I have a LOT to say about this question, including my definition of a "cold" audience member, as well as what value your email list has for you (even if they stop buying for a while). How do you keep your list alive? Find out some guiding principles to keep your weekly email workflow from overwhelming you!! PS: I have an ENTIRE 30-day project inside of Farm Marketing School called "The Weekly Email Challenge." It is AMAZING at teaching you some writing do's and don'ts. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy and learn how to support your CSA members Use my resources!! Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

This podcast is for all of you who go to farmer's markets!! Do you want to walk away from the market feeling like you did everything you could to maximize sales that day? Here's a fact: You're going to sell more at the farmer's market if you do a little bit of preparation in the sales strategy department. In this episode, I'm sharing my checklist of "things to make sure you do" before you hop into the truck and head to market. Things like: create a weekly special offer. Print this checklist out and create a workflow each week to check them off. The more of these you can do, the more revenue you will drive. Promise. To get them all in a nice tidy checklist, subscribe here. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/saleschecklist This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe The FREE Coupon Code Challenge -- This is a free 4 week challenge where I teach you two coupon code styles every week, and challenge you to use one of them to build an offer for your clients. You'll test out which codes deliver for you, AND you'll learn some creative ways to incentivize other positive customer behavior besides buying. I share a short video training in 4 weekly emails with all the instructions. It's free. It's low-key. It will make you money. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/couponcode Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, using coupon codes, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy and learn how to support your CSA members Use my resources!! Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Beginner's Guide to CSA Guide -- Use my Canva template and share it with your CSA members in your fulfillment process. This quick read guide shares the quick tips from my CSA master members, for how to be successful as a new CSA member. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/csasuccess Get my A to Z Vegetable Storage Guide and use it as a lead magnet -- This is my MOST successful lead magnet ever. I've used it for 5 years. I'm sharing the Canva template with you, and you have full rights to use it as-is, or change it for your farm. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/atozguide Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

This episode is PART TWO of a series all about "ways to use coupon codes in your online store." If you have an online store, these are a great way to entice your customers to come on over and buy. I also love that i can run a report of my coupon codes and see how they performed. This gives me the ability to TAG clients who use certain coupon codes, RETARGET them, and EVALUATE how effective my offers were.  I recently heard from Local Line (my ecommerce platform) that they would adding coupon codes as a basic feature at the end of May. This compelled me to find 15 different ways I could test coupon codes this summer in my store. I'm sharing the last 8 with you here. (The first 7 were in Episode 264 -- go listen!) Get ready to write these down. And commit to testing at least one of them in the next few weeks! See if it helps you make more sales. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Be sure to listen to Episode 264 for Part 1 of this series on Coupon Codes! I share 7 other ways you can use them in your online store. Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy and learn how to support your CSA members Use my resources!! Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Beginner's Guide to CSA Guide -- Use my Canva template and share it with your CSA members in your fulfillment process. This quick read guide shares the quick tips from my CSA master members, for how to be successful as a new CSA member. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/csasuccess Get my A to Z Vegetable Storage Guide and use it as a lead magnet -- This is my MOST successful lead magnet ever. I've used it for 5 years. I'm sharing the Canva template with you, and you have full rights to use it as-is, or change it for your farm. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/atozguide Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

A few days ago, I had a spontaneous idea...  I needed to set up my coupon codes in my e-commerce store. (Local Line recently announced that they were adding coupon codes as a free feature to the platform). But I was dragging my feet to get it done. "I know!" I said.  "I'll create a challenge for farmers. That will make me do it!" And thus, the 4-Week Coupon Code Challenge was born.  The goal of this challenge is to expose you to different coupon code styles that you can use in your farm marketing, and get you to experiment with them this month as you build your offers. This is a live challenge, running during the month of June, 2024. Each week, I'll send you an email with a short video inside that focuses on TWO new coupon code concepts. Your job is to choose ONE of them, build an offer around it, create the code, and market it to your clients that week. Then... seee what happens! I'll also share the tech videos for how to build out the featured coupon codes in Local Line -- since that's my platform of choice. Some of these coupon code styles work really well for weekly offers to drive sales in your store. But some can be set up inside of your email or text automations --  a one-and-done kind of setup that drives revenue forever. By the end of this month, you'll have a pseudo-coupon-code-strategy running in the background of your business, making you money.  To join the challenge (which is totally free), subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/couponcode. I'll send you your first marching orders a few minutes later!  Get excited with me. This is how we get stuff done. Together. Let's go.

COUPON CODES!!  Are you using them? If you have an online store, these are a great way to entice your customers to come on over and buy. They're also a great way to turn prospects into buyers.  I recently heard from Local Line (my ecommerce platform) that they would adding coupon codes as a basic feature at the end of May. This made me jump for joy and throw a party. AND it made me research different ways coupon codes have been used to drive customer behavior.  There are SO many great ideas I found -- 15 to be exact! I'm eager to share the list with you. I've broken this episode up into 2 parts. I'll share the first 7 this week, and the rest of them in episode 265. Come to this episode with a pen and paper so you can jot down the list! Although not ALL of them will pertain to you, I'm sure you will be able to use a few of them in your sales strategy this season. (I also share a tip on how to NAME the coupon code). This episode is very actionable and full of creative ideas! This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. (And they offer coupon codes now!!) Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Join my CSA Academy and learn how to support your CSA members Use my resources!! Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Beginner's Guide to CSA Canva Template -- Use my Canva template and share it with your CSA members in your fulfillment process. This quick read guide shares the quick tips from my CSA master members, for how to be successful as a new CSA member. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/csasuccess Get my A to Z Vegetable Storage Guide and use it as a lead magnet -- This is my MOST successful lead magnet ever. I've used it for 5 years. I'm sharing the Canva template with you, and you have full rights to use it as-is, or change it for your farm. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/atozguide Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

May 22, 2024 Are you using SMS in your  marketing? SMS is "code" for text messaging. It stands for short message service. And in today's podcast, my guest, Ari Memar, is going to give us a basic tutorial in how we can be using texting in our farm marketing strategy. Turns out there is a LOT of money to be made when we leverage this tool, because the open rates are ridiculously high. But it can also be used for customer support and onboarding. Ari is the founder of FarmHand, a virtual assistant for small farms. And one of the tools it offers its customers is weekly texting. Ari shares how Farmhand uses this feature to guide new clients to buy and help his farmer clients make money. This conversation made me want to go out and buy a texting app!! (He recommends Twillio and Text Magic by the way). Podcast Guest: Who is Ari Memar? As a hobby farmer in Sebastopol, CA, Ari Memar knows farming is more than just a job–it's a way of life. As stewards of our nature and local community, small farms are critical to our local community and food system but often overmatched by the resources available — technology, equipment, sales & marketing teams, back office staff — to larger farms. So, in partnership with local family farmers,, Ari founded Farmhand to equip farmers with the technology and services they need to win back local share of the food dollar, and support a thriving local food system. To learn more about Farmhand, click here. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Join my CSA Academy and learn how to support your CSA members Use my resources!! Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Beginner's Guide to CSA Guide -- Use my Canva template and share it with your CSA members in your fulfillment process. This quick read guide shares the quick tips from my CSA master members, for how to be successful as a new CSA member. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/csasuccess Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

Raise your hand if you want to find more farm clients... I often hear farmers lamenting that they can't find enough customers. Maybe the people you are attracting don't live in your local area, or they DO live in your area, but they aren't buying. You have an attraction problem. If you're a new or younger farm business, this is one of the earliest challenges you will face -- growing your audience. But even as a seasoned farm, there should be a system to make sure you're pulling in new eyeballs to your brand. In marketing, one of the first "stages" of the customer journey is the attraction phase. We need to capture the eye of our ideal clients and get them to take a second look.  So how do we do that? What do we SAY to attract more farm customers? In today's podcast episode, I share a place you can go to find the answer -- your Google Reviews. I'll walk you through what specifically to look for in your client testimonials, and what to do with them. This practice will give you TONS of ideas for what to talk about -- in many cases, it will give you the exact words to use.  This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Join my CSA Academy and learn how to support your CSA members Use my resources!! Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Beginner's Guide to CSA Canva Template -- Use my Canva template and share it with your CSA members in your fulfillment process. This quick read guide shares the quick tips from my CSA master members, for how to be successful as a new CSA member. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/csasuccess Get my A to Z Vegetable Storage Guide and use it as a lead magnet -- This is my MOST successful lead magnet ever. I've used it for 5 years. I'm sharing the Canva template with you, and you have full rights to use it as-is, or change it for your farm. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/atozguide Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

May 8, 2024 This week, I have two farm projects that feel like a heavy lift. And because these decisions feel hard, I'm not taking action.... (Does this sound familiar?) I feel like I need more information. I'm worried I'll make the WRONG decision that will upset clients. And finding a solution would require several hours of time that I don't have right now. I want it to be the BEST solution possible, and the current options just don't feel right. So I do nothing. Today on the show, I'm exploring something I call the "One Best Right Way" myth. This thought tells us that there is one, best, right way to do something, and that we better wait until we know exactly what it is. It's the thought that tells us we better not take the WRONG turn because it will set us back. It's the thought that is afraid to make a mistake, hurt some feelings, or waste time. It's the thought that there is one "ideal way" to navigate life, and we better not screw it up. What if there isn't "one, best, right way" to do something? What if "the way" presents itself only when we do ___________. I share 3 metaphors in today's episode that I think will help you push past your fear, and get you taking action -- even if it's imperfect. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Join my CSA Academy and learn how to support your CSA members Use my resources!! Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Beginner's Guide to CSA Guide -- Use my Canva template and share it with your CSA members in your fulfillment process. This quick read guide shares the quick tips from my CSA master members, for how to be successful as a new CSA member. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/csasuccess Get my A to Z Vegetable Storage Guide and use it as a lead magnet -- This is my MOST successful lead magnet ever. I've used it for 5 years. I'm sharing the Canva template with you, and you have full rights to use it as-is, or change it for your farm. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/atozguide Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

When I first started learning about farm marketing years ago, there was SO MUCH. I felt overwhelmed. I really wanted a framework to help me stitch it all together and give it a rhyme and a reason. Then, one of my mentors shared an acronym that I found really helpful. That acronym was: TLC. Here's what it stands for: T = Traffic L = Leads C = Conversion I later added the letter "F" for Fulfillment, because I found that this element was one of the key drivers behind customer retention. Today, I'm going to teach you this TLCF method. The goal is to build a mechanism or system in your farm business for EACH of these areas. When you do, your ideal customers will stream right through and turn into super buyers. In this episode, I define each of these elements and give you suggested steps for what you should be doing this spring in each area, so that you have them all covered. You can optionally decide to use Farm Marketing School to help you build some of these systems this summer too in my 30 Day project builds. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Webinar: Maximizing E-Commerce Success: Crafting Offers to Boost Farm Sales -- Join Corinna Bench from My Digital Farmer and Nina Galle from Local Line on March 25 at 12:00 PM EST/9:00 AM PST as they explore the elements of defining a great offer. Topics include: - Why offers are crucial for your sales strategy, acting as a powerful lure to lead potential customers to the point of sale - Corinna's comprehensive framework on building offers - How to seamlessly integrate offers into your e-commerce platform - And, five impactful examples you can experiment with this season! Join my CSA Academy and learn how to support your CSA members Use my resources!! Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Beginner's Guide to CSA Guide -- Use my Canva template and share it with your CSA members in your fulfillment process. This quick read guide shares the quick tips from my CSA master members, for how to be successful as a new CSA member. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/csasuccess Get my A to Z Vegetable Storage Guide and use it as a lead magnet -- This is my MOST successful lead magnet ever. I've used it for 5 years. I'm sharing the Canva template with you, and you have full rights to use it as-is, or change it for your farm. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/atozguide Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

April 24, 2024 As life would have it, I've been in a season of long-term illness this winter. These health issues have been so distracting, that I've had to pare down my farm marketing to the absolute bare bones. What's interesting is that I haven't noticed a huge difference! I'm often asked by farmers, "If I only have 2 hours of time a week for marketing, what should I be doing with it?" I feel like I can answer that now because I'M DOING IT. My circumstances forced me to decide what the most critical revenue-driving activities were for my business. I share them with you in this podcast. Keep in mind, I'm in my 16th season of farm business, and I have a lot of the other marketing assets in my  machine built. That may not be your situation. But once the machine is built, these 2 activities are the ones I chose to spend my precious time on when I was ill.  This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Join my CSA Academy and learn how to fast-track your CSA members to CSA success. Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

Is your online store confusing? Last month, I was doing a one to one coaching call with one of my farmer Accelerator members. They came to me with a problem: "Help us figure out why hardly anyone is buying from the online store." They had recently received a boost in traffic to their website thanks to some free media/press. They had hoped it would translate to many new buyers and sales. Unfortunately, the conversion rate was abysmally low, and they wanted to know what was wrong. As we sat down together and reviewed their website AND store setup, I noticed a few pretty key elements that were missing and/or confusing. And i suspect this is the reason they aren't seeing sales from  new buyers. Remember: Old buyers who have figured out the ropes will navigate their way through these issues. They know how it works. But NEW buyers will NOT enter into a state of confusion. In today's episode, I'm talking through what we uncovered in this online store audit, and I'm challenging YOU to take a look at your own website/online store, to see if you can take this list of improvements to optimize your store conversion. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Join my CSA Academy and learn how to fast-track your CSA members to CSA success. Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer  

Every one of your farm products has a conversion rate. The question is: do you know what it is? I used to scream and rail and raise my fists to the heavens in frustration, when I couldn't get more people to buy my CSA box. What was wrong with me? Maybe nothing... It just has a lower conversion rate. Today, I want to introduce you to the concept of the conversion rate, and I want you to start TRACKING what they are for your most popular (and signature) products. How can we get our conversion rates to go higher? This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Join my CSA Academy and learn how to fast-track your CSA members to CSA success. Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

April 3, 2024 Do you have a customer retention problem? If so, I bet I know one of the major factors behind it. In this podcast, we take a deep look at the critical customer management system that should be firiing RIGHT AFTER a person buys. It's called "customer onboarding." I know. Not very sexy. But if you're missing this piece, a lot of confusion is happening for your customer as they get your product. How do I get it? What do I need to do to prepare? What do I watch out for? What do I do first? You need to be ready with answers to questions like these, to help them get results. You need to point them to the "Yellow Brick Road" that gets them to Oz. If you don't, they'll wander around aimlessly, burn out, get lost, experience failure, feel disappointed in themselves, and never buy your product again. Yes, my friend. I know you don't want to hear this... But you can't just grow the product. You have to guide them to success, too.  In this episode, we'll talk about what topics to cover in your customer onboarding, as well as where/how you can put this system to work. Lucky for you, it's not that hard to build this element in your sales machine. But you do need to have one. Let's start today, shall we?... Podcast Sponsors: This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Canva Template: Tips and Tricks for CSA Success -- The Beginner's Guide to CSA Success. This is a beautiful, well written guide you can give to your CSA member rookies to teach them the "secrets" to becoming a great home chef faster using the CSA way of eating. Purchase this template and use as-is, or switch out pictures or pages to suit your farm. Ideal for vegetable CSA onboarding. Get my CSA Handbook template --  This is my 2023 CSA handbook. Handbooks are a great form of customer onboarding. If you don't have one yet for your CSA, use mine to help you figure out your sections and then change out the wording to suit your far! To get the handbook template, subscribe at: https://shared-legacy-farms.ck.page/c8cc81f21a Join my CSA Academy and learn how to fast-track your CSA members to CSA success. Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. (After that, the price increases to $19/month). Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to see what’s included with the monthly membership. You’ll get access to the ENTIRE resource library I use to help support my CSA members and get them to CSA mastery fast! Use the templates inside to help you build your own customer onboarding and/or training curriculum this summer. This is a MAJOR shortcut to figuring out your onboarding process!! So valuable! Cancel your membership anytime. Episode 252 How to Monetize Your Farm's YouTube Channel for Passive Income- I share ideas for playlist topics in here Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer Subscribe and Review in Apple Podcast I’d love for you to subscribe to my podcast! I don’t want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe in Apple Podcasts! My hope is to feature guests periodically on the show. If you know someone who is innovating in the area of marketing as a farmer, please send me an email at [email protected].

Today it's time to review the marketing basics. When I was a volleyball coach years ago, I used to say, "We spend 80% of our time focusing on the basics." If you can't serve a ball over the net, you'll never score points. If you can't bump the serve into the air to pass to the setter, you'll never score a point. The basics matter. The same is true in farm marketing. There is a FRAMEWORK on which ALL of marketing is based, and you need to know what it is! If you don't have the basics in place, you will lose points! In today's episode, I'm going back to the basics to share with you the 8 stages of the marketing system framework. When you know the stages you need to build in your farm marketing, you'll find that leads move seamlessly through your brand and turn into customers and raving fans. I want you to listen to this episode through the lens of your own farm business. Pay attention! Do you have a marketing element for each stage to move people through the pipeline? Or are you missing some? Perhaps you have a lot of marketing in ONE stage, but hardly any in the later parts of the customer journey. Use this episode to audit your own marketing strategy and identify what areas you need to shore up this season! This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime.= Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

How do you market a flower subscription CSA? That's the topic of today's podcast, which is actually a recording from ANOTHER show I was on last week. I was interviewed for the Dirt on Flowers podcast, and the episode turned out SO good that I asked if I could share the recording of the episode with MY podcast audience.  Tune in as co-hosts Shannon Allen from Bloomfield Farm and Lyndsay Biehl of Wildroot Flower Co. grill me on how to find the perfect customer avatar for a flower farm, what kind of marketing content to make to attract leads into your farm business, and how to pitch your offer so that people want to stick around from year to year. We get REALLY practical, and I drop all kinds of ideas to try.  This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers.  These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: The Dirt on Flowers Podcast -- Today's interviewers are the co-hosts of this awesome podcast. If you are a flower farmer, make sure you subscribe to their podcast. Every week, cohosts Shannon Allen and Lyndsay Biehl talk farm business, marketing, and growing techniques to help you create the farm of your dreams. https://www.thedirtonflowers.com/ Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe My Digital Farmer Podcast Episode 209 Selling Inspiration - My Interview with Lyndsay Biehl of Wildroot Flower Co. - my interviewer from today's podcast was on MY show a few months ago. Listen to her awesome advice on how to build a brand following. Webinar: Maximizing E-Commerce Success: Crafting Offers to Boost Farm Sales on March 25, at 12 PM EST -- join me and my cohost Nina Galle from LocalLine, as we teach how to create offers that will drive traffic to your online store and get them to buy. Learn what makes a compelling offer, and share some examples of what's worked well in your business with our guests.We'll also show some ways you can configure your store settings to make it more likely someone takes your offer.  Register for free at www.mydigitalfarmer.com/offerwebinar- Recording will be available to anyone who registers. Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer Share a Review in Apple Podcast Now if you’re feeling extra loving, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on Apple Podcast, too. Those reviews help other people find my podcast and they’re also fun for me to go in and read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you!

Have you ever thought about offering a Spring Plant Sale to your customers? You grow veggie startup plants for them for their garden. They pre-order them in early March, you get the revenue in the bag, and then deliver them when they're ready? This has been one of our most popular promotions and offers every year. I've gotten several requests from farmers to "show them how we do it." So this episode is a deep dive into our step by step process. How we set up the offer. What we charge. How to get a higher Average Order Value. What veggies to sell. How we promote it to get lots of buying on the first day. One of the resources I offer in this episode is my Canva file for my Plant Sale Price List. https://shared-legacy-farms.ck.page/f49a438962 This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work.Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Subscribe to the I Spy an Offer Challenge. Learn how to get better at making offers in your business by playing along with me! Dates: March 18-22, 2024. To be successful in sales, you need to get good at making offers. This is a skill that takes practice and learning the "formulas" of offers that will appeal to your customer. To help you learn, I'm hosting a 5 day "I Spy an Offer" Challenge. It's easy to play. Just subscribe below and every day starting March 18-22, I want you to put your eyes on and LOOK for a type of offer in the big wide world. It can be anything in any industry or media. For example: "Kids eat free on Tuesdays..." Each day, I'll send you an email with an offer I spied, and what I learned from it. Once you train your eye to see offers, you'll get better and incorporating some of them into your own marketing. If you see this after the challenge is over, you can still play! Subscribe and I'll send you the offers I spied each day for 5 days after the fact. You can still play along in your own time. Subscribe at: https://shared-legacy-farms.ck.page/b8eb611e7d One of the resources I offer in this episode is my Canva file for my Plant Sale Price List. https://shared-legacy-farms.ck.page/f49a438962 My Digital Farmer Podcast Episode 236 How to Raise Your Prices (and Make More $) Using Price Anchoring -- This is SO SO good! Make sure you learn about this powerful pricing strategy used EVERYWHERE, because it will help you make more sales! Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer Subscribe and Review in Apple Podcast I’d love for you to subscribe to my podcast! I don’t want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe in Apple Podcasts!  

March 6, 2024 Have you ever thought about monetizing your farm's YouTube Channel? If you already have subscribers and videos on your channel -- this may as easy as 15 minutes to set up. I recently flipped the switch to make monetize my channel, and it's SO COOL to see passive revenue coming into my business every month. In this podcast, I share my journey on YouTube, including how I used the platform to help me build brand awareness, grow my email list, educate my potential clients, and support my CSA members with a CSA Success path. We'll cover YouTube basics, what is required to monetize, and my recommended first steps for getting started on the platform. See my YouTube channels for both Shared Legacy Farms and My Digital Farmer. You can scroll those channels to see what content I've created, and see what's been getting more views than anything else. (Get some inspiration for content you could create, too!) https://www.youtube,com/sharedlegacyfarms https://www.youtube.com/mydigitalfarmer This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch.  Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work.Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Start and cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Join my CSA Academy and fast-track your farm customers to CSA success. Try it out for the first month for $1 using coupon code TRIAL. Go to www.mydigitalfarmer.com/academy to enroll. You'll get access to the entire resource library I give to my CSA members to support them as they learn how to become a home chef! Watch cooking tutorial videos for every vegetable. See the catalog of "cooking exit strategies" we teach to our members. Download my veggie e-guides, worksheets, and use them with your own customers. Or just scroll the table of contents for inspiration on how you can build your own Sucess Path for your farm clients. It's a goldmine of information and a shortcut to content creation each week. Cancel your membership anytime. Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

February 28, 2024 In today's episode, I share a case study of one pasture-based livestock farmer, who has spent the last 9 years slowly scaling her business in a way that hasn't required her to take on debt, while also having time to homeschool her two kids. I ask her: "How'd you get here?"  Dana shares the transition process and lessons she's learned along the way. She discusses how she markets her product each week to attract new customers and get her current ones to buy more. We talk about the strategies that are doing most of the heavy lifting. We talk about the mindset work she's had to do to help her take risks and not give up. And we talk about the deep commitment we both have to running a fun business that doesn't kill our body, mind or spirit. If you're starting out your business, there are some really great gems inside of here. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Meet My Guest: Dana Workman Stacy Today’s podcast guest is Dana Workman Stacy. Dana and her husband Jesse along with daughters Eliza and Brynn operate Grass Powered Poultry & Meats, a pasture-based livestock farm in Highland County, Ohio. Over the past 9 years their farm has grown from a few chickens in the front yard to fill their own freezer to raising lots more pasture-raised chicken, pastured pork and grass-finished beef. In 2019, Dana left her career in agricultural lending to focus on the farm and her family and hasn’t looked back. As a first-generation farmer, building a profitable and sustainable farm business hasn’t been easy, but the journey has been incredible. In addition to raising amazing food, Dana is passionate about building community and supporting the growth and success of rural businesses. Visit her website: GrassPoweredPoultry.com Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Join Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work.Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. Find my Facebook group for farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

February 21, 2024 Are you a farm business that uses social media to sell your product? Then today's podcast is a  must-listen. One of the delicate balances of posting on social media is making sure you also honor the rules of the platform. I'm constantly reminding myself that people aren't coming to Facebook or Instagram to shop for my stuff. They're there to engage with friends and family. So how do we post our content without it feeling like an "intrusion" into their world? The answer is the indirect post. In this episode, I share the difference between "indirect" and "direct" posts on social media, how they're both necessary, and how to craft them so they BOTH get you traction. I'll give you some examples of what they look like in practice.  This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Cancel your membership anytime. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Get my Social Media post templates - Looking for ideas on the "categories" of posts you could create on your social channel? This guide will give you 20 different examples of post styles, from the "question" post, to the FAQ post, to the Lead Magnet post. Use this to break the logjam when you're racking your brain over what to talk about on social! Find my Facebook group for farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

Today, we talk about the importance of creating habits around your product.  This month, I saw a sign at my local meat/butcher in town. It showed the Daily Lunch Deal for each day for the next 3 weeks.  It was new, so it captured my attention. Tanks Meats hopes that by showing me the "schedule" of daily lunch meals, they will draw me back multiple times in a week -- increasing my frequency of purchase. If I'm already the type of person who buys lunch out 1x per week, I can look ahead and "plan" to come back to Tanks on Wednesday, too, since I love Reubens. Now I've just increased my customer value by a factor of two. Tanks can also follow the sales data from this after a few months, and figure out which meals are making the most money. Then optimize their menu. In today's episode, I want to show you the importance of creating buying habits around your product. Sometimes that means you need to create a "rhythm" and pattern that your customers will come to know and expect. I cover all kinds of examples of what this can look like. It's full of practical examples. One small tweak might mean a big shift in revenue for you. Are you showing up at the "trigger moment" for your customer to make them think about your product? This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. Subscribe and Review in Apple Podcast I’d love for you to subscribe to my podcast! I don’t want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Now if you’re feeling extra loving, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on Apple Podcast, too. Those reviews help other people find my podcast and they’re also fun for me to go in and read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you! My hope is to feature guests periodically on the show. If you know someone who is innovating in the area of marketing as a farmer, please send me an email at [email protected].

February 7, 2024 Do you have a signature product you're trying to get your customers to buy?  I often ask farmers: "Where are you taking people?" Your Answer: All roads in your business lead to ___________? If you answered something like "CSA membership," subscription, side of beef, or some other big ticket item, then I want to introduce you to a powerful marketing asset called the "email sales sequence."  This is a series of emails you write in advance and load up into your email provider as an automation. It "drips" out to a subscriber once a certain trigger fires (like downloading a specific lead magnet or after completing a nurture email sequence), and it PITCHES YOUR PRODUCT. I built one of these to pitch my CSA membership many years ago, and every year, I tweak it and make it better. Between this asset, my regular social media, one formal promo launch to my wait list (and a few referrals and word of mouth), I sell 400 CSA memberships a year. It's a work horse for me. What's great about these is that you spend the time to build them ONCE, and then they keep working for you on auto-pilot behind the scenes, pulling in new customers. And even if they don't pull in customers the first time, you can re-use the same sequence once or twice a year "live" as you broadcast your email list. I'm often asked, "But what do you talk about in them?!!"  That's what this podcast episode is all about. I share the 6 email "topic map" you can use as a general guide when you build your own sales sequence. Use it as a framework to get started. And if you need more step by step help with building this, join my Farm Marketing School membership for a month and take the "Promotional Email Sequence" Project Build. (When you take that project, I also share my own CSA promo sequence with you so you can see the framework in action). Be forewarned: your first attempt at writing this sequence will still feel weird. That's normal. Do it anyway. It's your fear of being sales-y coming out. Put it out into the world, see what happens, then commit to tweaking it. It will take several iterations before you feel good about it, but you have to take the first step and get something out there. I promise: the world will not end. In fact, you may find that you create a pipeline for ongoing sales in your business that takes some major time (and stress) off your plate.  This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by CSAWeek and the CSAInnovationNetwork -- Mark your calendars: CSA Week is February 19-25, 2024! Imagine a week dedicated to empowering farmers with the latest strategies, tools, and ideas to enhance their CSA and kickstart the CSA season.  From February 19-25, 2024, join the CSA Innovation Network in this week-long celebration dedicated to promoting CSA, supporting local agriculture, and fostering a stronger connection between farmers and their communities. Get your free CSAWeek Promotion Pack from CSAInnovationNetwork by subscribing at csainnovationnetwork.org/csa-week It includes Canva templates for social media posts, sample emails, press release, customizable CSA infographics, and even a social content calendar guide. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work.Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. Get my Social Media post templates - Looking for ideas on the "categories" of posts you could create on your social channel? This guide will give you 20 different examples of post styles, from the "question" post, to the FAQ post, to the Lead Magnet post. Use this to break the logjam when you're racking your brain over what to talk about on social! Find my Facebook group for farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

January 31, 2024 In today's episode, you're going to hear from a flower farmer who used the "early bird launch sales method" to help her presell 60% of next summer's subscriptions in just 7 days. Megan reached out to me a few weeks after her promotion campaign ended to say, "It worked!!!" (Multiple exclamation points). I use this exact same process to presell about 400 CSA vegetable shares every fall, and I usually get about 75-80% of my folks to sign on the dotted line. I asked Megan onto the show to share her story, because I know how important it is to show you that this stuff works for other farmers! She'll share how she modified my strategy to build an irresistible offer to her clients, how she created hype and buzz, and what advice she found most helpful when she was in the thick of the launch. There's also a really good tip in here about how to capture testimonials from flower subscription clients.... This podcast was sponsored by Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work.Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. Interview Guest: Meet Megan Rudroff Megan Rudroff started Rudy Lane Flower Farm in 2019 with the intention of solely growing peonies as an added enterprise on their traditional cattle and row crop farm in the heart of Missouri.  However, since peonies take a few years before they can be harvested, she planted a few hundred dahlias to cash-flow for more peony plants.  Then, throw in a world-wide pandemic and an unforeseen addiction to dahlias and now Megan grows 600 peonies, 800 dahlias, thousands of tulips and too many annuals to count that she sells primarily retail via her subscription program and farmstand.   Though Megan is the primary flower farmer, her husband Layne, and their three daughters all play a part in the flower business.  Layne does all the equipment operation and flower deliveries, and their girls, ages 8, 6 and 3, help with planting, harvesting and, their favorite, deadheading spent blooms.   Megan believes that growing flowers is the easy part, it’s selling those flowers that is truly the hard part.  Megan’s full-time career is in natural resource conservation… not marketing! Because of that, she credits podcasts like My Digital Farmer for helping her flower business being successful from the start. Learn more about Rudy Lane Flower Farm Instagram: @OnRudyLane Facebook: www.facebook.com/RudyLaneFlowerFarm Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Episode 235 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast: CSA Renewal Promotion Process: Step by Step - Megan used this episode to help her build her own strategy. Episode 120 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast: How My "CSA Giveaway Challenge" Experiment Built Some Major Brand Identity - Megan referenced this episode as inspiration for her giveaway element in her offer. Sign up for Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. And new content is being added every month. You get to chose what you want to study each month. I’ve taken the recordings of just the teaching sessions of each project inside of my high-end coaching program (Accelerator) and made them available to everyone. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work.Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer  

Farm website updates. Ugh. If you're like most farmers, you cringe at the thought of working on your website. It feels overwhelming, time consuming and ultra confusing. What do you say? How do you set it up technically?  How do you even get started?! In today's episode, I interview an actual website designer who works specifically with farmers to design or rebuild farm websites. She has seen it all. We talk through the 3 most important elements that need to be on your farm's website home page, and what's at stake if you get them wrong!!  You'll hear great conversation around the importance of visuals, CTA buttons, navigation, testimonials, knowing your customer, and creating clarity for the potential buyer. We also talk through the process for finding and hiring a website designer, so that you get someone who will deliver a great end product and set you up to maintain it easily after they're done. If you're thinking about building or refreshing your farm website, this is a MUST-LISTEN to guide your plan of action. Today's Podcast Guest: Jean-Marie Merkle Meet Jean-Marie Merkle: an extroverted maximalist with a passion for branding, project management, and regenerative agriculture. After working at design and advertising agencies in New York and Philadelphia for over a decade, burnout hit, and she moved to Tennessee to throw herself into farming. A car crash, the pandemic, and some cosmic alignment led to her forming her own agency, Dig Digital. Now she lives in Lancaster County, PA collaborating with farmers and food businesses to improve their digital presence through design and marketing.  Learn more about Jean-Marie's services on her website: www.dig-digital.com Follow her on Instagram @dig__digital Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Top 10 Website Mistakes Farmers Make -- Want to know why your website isn't working? I've audited a lot of farm websites over the years, and I see the SAME issues over and over. I put together the most common website mistakes in this multi-page guide Want to know what they are? Download my PDF and use it as a checklist to audit your own farm website and make some quick adjustments that could be stopping your website from converting. Sign up for Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. We reference the Chrome Extension Go Full Page. This tool will allow you to take full screenshots of individual URL pages, so you can reference them as templates later.  Find my Facebook group for farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

I'm willing to bet that if you're in business, you have some big dreams and goals you want to hit. How do you make sure you reach them? Over the last 3 years especially, I've made some pretty incredible things happen. One day this past year, I was reflecting on the art of "manifesting big things." I decided to catalog a list of things that I would consider "big goals" I had manifested. And then I asked the question in my journal: What do all of these things have in common? Did I see any patterns in how I experienced them, or in how they came to be? I wrote down 5 observations. And then, I did something I've never done... I photocopied this page in my journal, and I put it in my podcast folder. (That means I was impressed with what I came up with). I stumbled upon this photocopy last week as I was looking for a podcast topic. I re-read my reflection and thought, "I've got to talk about this." The more I work with my own coach, the more I realize how powerful our thoughts and beliefs shape our feelings, actions, and (ultimately) our destiny. I have a feeling that some of your hangups when it comes to creating your dream might be all in your head. If you have an audacious sales goal or life quest, and you're interested in exploring "how to manifest," then this podcast is for you. As you listen to this episode, I'm going to ask you you to think about a achievement you manifested in your past. Then I want you to think about your big, audacious goal/desire that you are chasing right now. Take the principles I share from today and see if they ring true foryou. Did you need to hear one of these "lessons" today? Lean into them as you move towards manifesting your dream. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better.  Sign up for Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: a promotion calendar, a sales funnel audit, home page of your website, an email nurture sequence, and your latest best-selling offers. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing machine piece by piece.  To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. Follow me on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/mydigitalfarmer for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

January 10, 2024 Today we do one of my favorite things: we interview a farmer and audit their sales funnel. In today's episode, you'll hear from Adam Henson of Shady Brook Farm. Adam joined my Accelerator program this fall to build out his email nurture sequence and sales sequence for his meat sales. As you listen, I want you to hear how simple his sales funnel is. Sometimes we think that we have to have a lot of irons in the fire, but in reality, in the early years of setting up your business sales flow, you're just layering in the main players: the website, the weekly email, the nurture sequence, the product ladder, the attraction strategy and message. Although Adam will tell you he isn't at his finish line yet, I wanted to show you a farm that is well on its way. Listen for some of the strategies that are working well for him. Notice the importance of the buyer's journey at the point of sale, and knowing your customer's pain points. I'm sure you'll find some marketing gems in this episode! This podcast was sponsored by: The Thriving Farmer Podcast.  In this top-rated farm podcast, you'll learn the latest tricks and strategies of successful farmers, strategize with in-depth interviews with leaders in the industry, and connect with stories of farmers just like you. In our interviews, we focus on building farms that last, on setting up systems, knowing your customers, building your team, and creating a work/family/life balance. With over 15 years of farming background, your host Michael Kilpatrick has the experience and authority to bring you practical advice, ask the hard questions, tease out the gold nuggets, and help share what it’s really like to build a profitable, sustainable farm. Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts or visit: https://www.thrivingfarmerpodcast.com/ Today's Podcast Guest: Today’s podcast guest is Adam Henson of Shady Brook Farm in Canton, NC.  Adam is a fourth generation cattle farmer running a cow/calf operation in a grass based production model along side his wife Jada. his dad and grandmother are stake holders in the operation as land owners and in having a small interest in the cow herd. In 2012 Adam made the switch from the commodity system to a direct to consumer model offering grass fed and finished beef under their own label. Since then they have added pasture raised eggs in 2013 and pasture raised chickens in 2015. In 2022 they switched their laying hens and meat chickens to an organic/soy free feed. They sell at a local farmer’s market on Saturdays, maintain an online store connected to their website, publish a weekly email to push customers to the online store and farmer’s market, as well as offer some small scale subscription services. Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Sign up for Farm Marketing School at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/fms - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms  Cancel your membership anytime.

How do you make more money in your farm business? Answer: make more offers. In our early years as a CSA farm, we struggled to increase revenue because we only had the one thing to sell: our 18-week CSA membership. That's it! Once you paid for that, you weren't asked to buy anything again until the next year, when we asked to renew the membership. Looking back, that was a mistake. In order to maximize profits, your farm will want to sell multiple things to the same customer all year long. That means you will need to have enough products in your product suite to sell. You need a "product ladder." In today's episode, you'll learn how the product ladder works, how to build one, and how to USE it to make more money. This may involve making new products!! Your homework is to identify your product ladder and map out the different key categories, products, or promotions that fall into it. This is your key step to increasing your revenue as a farmer. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2023. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by: The Thriving Farmer Podcast.  In this top-rated farm podcast, you'll learn the latest tricks and strategies of successful farmers, strategize with in-depth interviews with leaders in the industry, and connect with stories of farmers just like you. In our interviews, we focus on building farms that last, on setting up systems, knowing your customers, building your team, and creating a work/family/life balance. With over 15 years of farming background, your host Michael Kilpatrick has the experience and authority to bring you practical advice, ask the hard questions, tease out the gold nuggets, and help share what it’s really like to build a profitable, sustainable farm. Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts or visit: https://www.thrivingfarmerpodcast.com/ Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Sign up for Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, and practicing different types of offers. And new content is being added every month. You get to chose what you want to study each month. I’ve taken the recordings of just the teaching sessions of each project inside of my high-end coaching program (Accelerator) and made them available to everyone. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work.Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. ConvertKit - I mention my email service provider of choice. If you decide to try this ESP out, use my affiliate code here and I get a small commission. Flitetest.com -- this is the RC airplane brand that got my kids hooked on aviation! Find my Facebook group for farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

Have you ever wondered what are the primary agents that cause people to buy your product? Turns out there are "laws" in marketing that drive the sales to our products. Do you know what they are? I'm betting that many of these principles are familiar to you. You're probably using some of them without realizing it. But there might be a couple that are new to you. What's REALLY cool is when you can use multiple principles at the same time for a multiplier effect. In today's episode, I want to introduce them to you all as a group -- let them "walk across the stage" and strut their stuff. Pay attention to your favorites, but also notice some new characters. Then pick one principle that you can work on this month as you optimize the different elements of your sales system. Here they are in a list: Principle of Authority Principle of Social Proof Principle of Direction Principle of Tunnel Vision Principle of Objections Principle of Why Now? Principle of Cause and Effect Principle of Reciprocity This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2023. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by: The Thriving Farmer Podcast.  In this top-rated farm podcast, you'll learn the latest tricks and strategies of successful farmers, strategize with in-depth interviews with leaders in the industry, and connect with stories of farmers just like you. In our interviews, we focus on building farms that last, on setting up systems, knowing your customers, building your team, and creating a work/family/life balance. With over 15 years of farming background, your host Michael Kilpatrick has the experience and authority to bring you practical advice, ask the hard questions, tease out the gold nuggets, and help share what it’s really like to build a profitable, sustainable farm. Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts or visit: https://www.thrivingfarmerpodcast.com/ Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Take My 5-Day FREE CSA Startup Challenge - Looking to start your first veggie CSA, but not sure how to get started? Subscribe to my 5 day challenge. Each day, I'll walk you through one of the 5 key steps to getting your CSA framework in place. You'll do the homework assignment each day, and by the end, you'll have your basic roadmap! Sign up for Farm Marketing School - my monthly online membership. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in you business like: auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, creating a promo calendar, practicing different types of offers. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini -- this is a great read that will show you the triggers and psychology that cause someone to be ready to buy. The Rule of Reciprocity is one of them! Find my Facebook group for farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

It’s the end of the year, and that means it’s time for the end of year evaluation and goal setting retreat! This is a rebroadcast of Episode 191 -- because it's THAT good, and I want you to repeat the process again! I used to avoid this process — partly because I didn’t have a good process that worked for me. That all changed when I found these evaluation questions. And in today’s podcast, I’m going to share them with you. I spend two separate days working through them for about two hours each time. That’s a total of 4 hours.  In this episode, I walk you through 9 questions and flesh out examples of what kinds of answers you’re looking for. By the time you’ve really worked through these, I PROMISE YOU that the answers to question #7 “What are your goals for next year” will be pretty clear to you. I love how these questions bring up so many discoveries, limiting beliefs, desires, direction, and clarity for me. I hope it works for you too. I encourage you to listen to my episode in its entirety. Then book some time this week to work through the questions — make the process your own. See what comes up for you. Then tell me what you came up with! I’d love to hear one idea… email me or shoot me a DM @mydigitalfarmer on Instagram. Here are the questions I journal through: PART 1 – do these on day 1 List everything that has happened to you in the last 12 months related to your business? What are the lessons from those experiences that you can take into next year? What do you want to do more of? What do you want to do less of? What are you still holding onto from last year that is taking up space? And what will there be room for when you let that go? (Think physically, relationally, feelings, possessions, time sucks, mindsets and limiting beliefs) What are your 5% revenue generating activities? PART 2 — do these on day 2 What do you want? (Think outside your business. What else do you want for your life?) What are your goals for next year? What results do you want to produce? (This could include elements of your personal life too). What specific measure will you use to know that your objective has been realized? What new habits will you have to adopt to win your game? (Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly?) Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code:MDF2023. Head to this special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Join my free email list! I have a great “email onboarding sequence” that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you’ll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Sign up for Farm Marketing School - my monthly online membership. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in you business like: auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, creating a promo calendar, practicing different types of offers. And new content is being added every month. As the DIY version of my Accelerator Group Coaching program, you get to chose what you want to study each month. I’ve taken the recordings of just the teaching sessions of each project inside of my high-end coaching program (Accelerator) and made them available to everyone. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work.Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. Take My 5-Day FREE CSA Startup Challenge - Looking to start your first veggie CSA, but not sure how to get started? Subscribe to my 5 day challenge. Each day, I'll walk you through one of the 5 key steps to getting your CSA framework in place. You'll do the homework assignment each day, and by the end, you'll have your basic roadmap! Register for my webinar called “The 3 Mistakes CSA Rookie Farmers Make (And How to Avoid Them).” You can register at www.mydigitalfarmer.com/rookie — and select from the time options available each week. This is a free webinar, designed to help “new” CSA farmers learn the framework for a profitable and resilient CSA.

How do you sell a rare breed pig in a community who's never heard of it? This was a problem faced by today's podcast guest. Joanna Shepherd from Cobblestone Farm had moved from the UK on a mission to save the Berkshire pig breed! The problem: not many people in Saskatchewan, Canada knew what they were, or why they deserved her luxury-level price point. How do you market a product no one has heard of and create desire for it? Joanna has spent the last 5 years trying to figure it out. In today's episode, we'll hear some of the issues she has had to work through to help her find her way. Now she's guiding other Berkshire pork farmers and helping them learn how to market this rare breed of pig. You'll hear her rather simple strategy which is a mix of email marketing funnels, social media, and SEO that is slowly building an audience of super-fans who become repeat buyers. She's building a marketing machine "slow and steady" that will serve as a strong foundation as she scales her production. This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2023. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline This podcast was sponsored by: The Thriving Farmer Podcast.  In this top-rated farm podcast, you'll learn the latest tricks and strategies of successful farmers, strategize with in-depth interviews with leaders in the industry, and connect with stories of farmers just like you. In our interviews, we focus on building farms that last, on setting up systems, knowing your customers, building your team, and creating a work/family/life balance. With over 15 years of farming background, your host Michael Kilpatrick has the experience and authority to bring you practical advice, ask the hard questions, tease out the gold nuggets, and help share what it’s really like to build a profitable, sustainable farm. Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts or visit: https://www.thrivingfarmerpodcast.com/ Meet Our Guest ~ Who is Joanna Shepherd: Joanna Shepherd is the co-owner of Cobblestone Farm in Saskaketchewan, Canada, that specializes in raising Berkshire pigs. She and her husband Carl  are a couple of Brits from the North Of England, and you’ll definitely hear her fun accent! Joanna was raised in UK on mixed livestock farm, meaning beef, sheep, and pigs.  She met her husband at an abattoir they both worked at and decided to move to Canada to see where the adventure would take them. They started out working in abattoirs and ended up buying acreage and raising registered Berkshire pigs. Joanna’s mission is the save the rare Berkshire breed, selling her "genetics" to breeders, as well as weanlings and processed pork to local buyers. Her small herd of Berkshire pigs free ranges on 27 acres of pasture year round. She’s committed to allowing her pigs live a stress-free life -- one that allows them to breathe fresh air, wallow, root, sunbathe and play. Blunt, bold, a risk taker, she says what she thinks and goes after what she wants. Learn more about CobbleStone Farm at www.berkshirepigs.net Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Take My 5-Day FREE CSA Startup Challenge - Looking to start your first veggie CSA, but not sure how to get started? Subscribe to my 5 day challenge. Each day, I'll walk you through one of the 5 key steps to getting your CSA framework in place. You'll do the homework assignment each day, and by the end, you'll have your basic roadmap! Sign up for Farm Marketing School - my monthly online membership. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in you business like: auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, creating a promo calendar, practicing different types of offers. And new content is being added every month. As the DIY version of my Accelerator Group Coaching program, you get to chose what you want to study each month. I’ve taken the recordings of just the teaching sessions of each project inside of my high-end coaching program (Accelerator) and made them available to everyone. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work.Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. Find my Facebook group for farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer

What do you want your farm customers to DO? This is the all-important question as a farm marketer. You are always taking your customer (or prospect) somewhere. We should be ready at all times with a "call to action" in whatever communication channel we use. So what is your go-to CTA? Most farmers (and business owners) default to "buy my stuff." But in the world of marketing, there are a lot of other options for CTAs (calls to action). And frankly, you shouldn't be pitching your stuff all the time. That's when you start to feel icky and sale-sy. In today's podcast, I answer a question that came up with my Accelerator coaching members last month as we were practicing the art of writing weekly emails. The question is: "What are some other things I could ask customers to do in my weekly email?". In this episode, I share a list of 10+ CTAs you could use when sending an email. These actions are all examples of "micro-conversions" that bring a person ever closer to the final goal of getting them to buy. I recommend you write these down and put them somewhere near your computer. The next time you need to write an email, you'll have PLENTY of ideas for a CTA. It will make writing so much easier. I love this hack! This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2023. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Take My 5-Day FREE CSA Startup Challenge - Looking to start your first veggie CSA, but not sure how to get started? Subscribe to my 5 day challenge. Each day, I'll walk you through one of the 5 key steps to getting your CSA framework in place. You'll do the homework assignment each day, and by the end, you'll have your basic roadmap! Sign up for Farm Marketing School - my monthly online membership. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in you business like: auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, creating a promo calendar, practicing different types of offers. And new content is being added every month. As the DIY version of my Accelerator Group Coaching program, you get to chose what you want to study each month. I’ve taken the recordings of just the teaching sessions of each project inside of my high-end coaching program (Accelerator) and made them available to everyone. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work.Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside, watch my new Email Marketing Course, or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Cancel your membership anytime. Find my Facebook group for farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer