191 Evaluating Your Year & Setting New Goals for Your Business (My Process)
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Release Date: 12/21/2022
369 The One Metric That Tells You if Your Farm Leads Are Actually Worth Anything
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
What is a lead actually worth to your farm business? Most farmers know how many email subscribers they have. Far fewer know what those subscribers are actually worth. And that can lead to some very bad marketing decisions. In this episode, I introduce a simple metric called Earnings Per Lead (EPL) that helps you measure the value of the people entering your world -- i.e. whether they came from a Facebook ad, a farmers market, a farm tour, a referral, or a lead magnet. You'll learn how to calculate EPL, why it's different from Cost Per Lead, and how it can help you decide which marketing...
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368: How to Prioritize Your Farm Marketing When Time Is Tight
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
One of the questions I hear all the time from farmers is: "What marketing channel should I focus on?" Or: "If I only have a few hours a week, what's the minimum marketing I need to do?" But I think that's the wrong question. The real question is: Where should I invest my limited marketing time so it creates the biggest impact? In this episode, I share a simple framework to help you decide where your marketing time should go based on the three metrics that actually drive farm revenue: customer count, average order value, and order frequency. We'll talk about the four places marketing time...
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367: Not Every Offer Is a First Offer: A Live FMS Coaching Call with Pigasus Meats
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
What happens when you launch an offer that seems like a no-brainer... and nobody buys it? In this episode, you'll listen in on a real coaching call with Lexi from Pigasus Meats. Lexi came to the call frustrated because their Simple Supper Box subscription had only attracted one customer after months of promotion. As we dug into the problem, we uncovered a lesson that applies to every farm business: Not every offer is the right first offer. Many farmers assume that if an offer isn't selling, the offer itself must be flawed. But sometimes the real issue is where that offer sits in the customer...
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366 What Farmers Can Learn from Aldi's "Shop First" Strategy
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
I got this podcast episode idea in the middle of Aldi. Seriously. I was walking down the grocery aisle when a sign stopped me in my tracks. It said: "Shop Aldi First." And I remember thinking: "Dang. That's good." Buried inside that simple phrase was a powerful marketing lesson that applies to almost every direct-to-consumer farm business. Aldi isn't trying to convince customers to buy everything from them. They're trying to become the first stop. In this episode, I unpack the marketing strategy behind Aldi's campaign and show how farmers can apply the same thinking to become the first place...
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365 Build Your Farm’s "Dream 25" List
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
What if the fastest way to grow your farm business wasn’t finding more customers… but finding the people who already HAVE your customers’ attention? In this episode, I’m introducing the concept of the “Dream 25 List” -- a simplified version of the famous Dream 100 marketing strategy -- and showing farmers how to identify partnership opportunities hiding all around them. We’re talking about: what's a Dream 25 list? why partnerships can accelerate trust faster than social media how to identify 25 businesses and influencers that already serve your ideal customer examples of...
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364 CSA Buy Down Offers: Marketing Case Study with Thirsty Fruit Farm
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
In this episode, I sit down with Krista Barzen-Hansen of Thirsty Fruit Farm (one of my students from Farm Marketing School!) to break down how her farm marketing has evolved and strengthened over the past year. In this farm marketing case study, we unpack: how customers discover her farm, how she nurtures leads, how she's constantly optimizing her "gateway" product what content she creates, how she thinks about onboarding, the systems she’s building, and how she’s learning to approach marketing with confidence and experimentation instead of overwhelm. Krista’s primary sales model...
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363 Find Your Farm’s Proof Sentence (That Helps Customers Say Yes Faster)
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
What if one sentence could help your customers trust you faster? In this episode, I’m introducing a powerful marketing tool called a proof sentence — a simple line that helps your customer think, “Yeah… this is probably going to work for me, too.” A proof sentence doesn’t just describe your product. It shows what happens after someone buys it. We’ll talk about why promises are so powerful in marketing, how to identify the transformation your farm product creates, and how to build your own proof sentence using a simple formula. Because your customers aren’t just buying...
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362 How to Groom Your Farm Website During the Season
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Is your farm website reflecting what’s happening on your farm RIGHT NOW… or is it stuck in last season? A few weeks ago, our farm was featured in the Toledo Blade newspaper during asparagus season, and suddenly we had a wave of new people discovering our business online. There was just one problem… Our website wasn’t ready for them. The homepage wasn’t talking about asparagus. There was no mention of the newspaper feature. And there wasn’t a clear next step for new visitors trying to figure out how to buy from us. That experience sparked a huge realization for me: Farm websites are...
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361 The Missing Piece in Your Farm Business: The Success Path
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
May 13, 2026 There’s a missing piece in most farm marketing funnels, and it lives after the sale. If your customers feel overwhelmed, unsure what to do, or like they’re “failing” with your product… they don’t come back. In this episode, I’m breaking down the concept of a Success Path -- the intentional roadmap you build to guide your customer from confusion → confidence → transformation. When you build this well, you don’t just create repeat buyers… you create loyal fans who trust you, stick with you, and tell others. What You’ll Learn: What a Success Path actually...
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360 What to Do with Your Farm's Greatest Hits
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
I own every single album by the Indigo Girls. I’m a true fan. I know the deep cuts. The obscure songs. The ones most people have never heard of. But the album I reach for the most?...Their greatest hits. The one with all the favorites. The songs I already know I love. And it got me thinking… What if your farm had a “greatest hits album”? Most farmers are sitting on their most powerful sales tool… and not using it. Your best sellers—the products your customers already love—are doing more work than you think. But if you’re not intentionally leveraging them? You’re leaving...
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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 mydigitalfarmers@gmail.com.