191 Evaluating Your Year & Setting New Goals for Your Business (My Process)
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Release Date: 12/21/2022
292 My End of Year Housekeeping Tasks for Farm Marketing
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
As the year winds down, it’s the perfect time to take stock and set yourself up for success in the year ahead. In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on the 10 essential housekeeping tasks I tackle every December to keep my farm marketing game strong. These aren’t just mundane chores—they’re strategic moves that help me reflect, refine, and refresh my business for the new season. Curious? I’ll walk you through each of these tasks step by step. From evaluating my marketing efforts with a critical eye to organizing the chaos of my digital workspace, I’ve got a checklist...
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291 Debrief: My CSA Early Renewal Campaign Results!
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
What does it take to run a wildly successful CSA renewal promotion? In this episode, I’m breaking down the results of my recent early bird campaign and sharing my biggest takeaways. With 80% of my members renewing and nearly $300,000 in revenue generated, this campaign was one for the books! But what made it work so well? Tune in as I reveal the strategies, insights, and lessons learned during this promotion, so you can apply them to your own CSA renewal campaigns. Whether you're looking for ways to spark excitement or wondering how to handle your own post-promotion debrief, this episode is...
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290 I Threw Together This Farm Marketing Promo in ONE HOUR
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Ever feel like you don’t have enough time to create a great marketing campaign? What if I told you it’s possible to throw together a full week’s worth of promo content in just ONE hour? That’s exactly what happened to me yesterday. In this episode, I’m sharing how I turned a simple promo post for my Fish Holiday Sampler Boxes into a full-blown 7-day marketing campaign. All it took was a little inspiration, some quick thinking, and leveraging the content I already had in my back pocket. You’ll hear the behind-the-scenes of how I pulled from existing resources like customer photos,...
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289 How to Quickly Qualify a Farm Lead or Prospect
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Are you struggling to identify and prioritize your best customers? Ever felt like you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping for a sale to stick? What if there were a proven framework that could help you qualify leads more effectively, saving you time and energy? In this episode, we’re diving into the B.A.N.T. formula—Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline—a powerful tool that top sales professionals use to zero in on their ideal customers. But how does this framework apply to selling directly to consumers, especially when they’re deciding whether to commit to a CSA membership...
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288 How Much Longer?... The Value and Purpose of Waiting in Business
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Ever feel like your farm business goals are taking too long to materialize? In this episode, we explore the often-overlooked value of "waiting" in business and why those seemingly stagnant moments are vital for growth. Drawing from my own journey through a long waiting period, I unpack the hidden benefits that emerge when we embrace the "in-between" times. Whether you're waiting to go full-time, reach a new revenue milestone, or snag that big wholesale gig, there's a lot happening beneath the surface—and it's all happening for you. In this episode, we discuss: Why waiting is a...
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287 The Corporate Transparency Act Deadline: What Every Farmer Should Know
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Have you filed your CTA report yet? (Do you even know what that means?) This is a fairly "new" (and unknown) legal requirement and I'm discovering that a lot of farm business owners have no idea about it. As a business, you may have to file a report, and you have until December 31, 2024, to do so (or face some big fines). In this episode, I break down the Corporate Transparency Act and its implications for business owners, especially small farms. With insights from my lawyer Richard Chamberlain, we dive into the federal reporting requirements designed to identify your beneficial owners...
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286 What's Your Farm Lead Worth? Farm Metrics: Understanding your EPL (Earnings Per Lead)
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
November 6, 2024 by Corinna Do you know how much each lead is worth to your farm business? In this episode, we dive deep into the concept of Earnings Per Lead (EPL) and how it can transform the way you approach marketing for your farm. I’ll explain exactly what EPL is, how to calculate it for both paid and organic campaigns, and why this metric is critical to understanding the value of each lead. By tracking EPL, you'll learn how to make data-driven decisions to boost your farm’s revenue, whether you’re running a CSA, selling farm products, or hosting events. Listen in to discover:...
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285 Boost Your Farm's Revenue with Value-Added Products: Insights from Kendall Ballantine
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
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...
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284 Holiday Promotions: How to Prep Your Farm's Online Store for the Holidays
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
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...
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283 CSA Early Renewal Promotions: My Process
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
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....
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It's the end of the year, and that means it's time for the end of year evaluation and goal setting retreat!
Crickets.
Wait... you don't DO an end-of-year evaluation or goal setting?.... LOL.
If not, I SO get it. Don't beat yourself up. But today, I'm going to inspire you to give it another try. I used to avoid this process too -- 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 basically use a series of 12 questions. (I share 9 of them with you today). I spend two separate days journaling on them for about two hours each time. That's a total of 4 hours. (Don't worry... if journaling isn't your thing, I suggest another way to do it in the show).
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 one (2 hours)
- 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 two (2 hours)
- 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:
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.
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.
My Accelerator Coaching program -- join my small group of farmers and entrepreneurs as we build one marketing asset for your business each month together, and coach each other to greatness! Includes a group coaching and mastermind element!
Find my Facebook group for farmers!
Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer
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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].