191 Evaluating Your Year & Setting New Goals for Your Business (My Process)
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Release Date: 12/21/2022
386 Your Farm's Black Friday Playbook: One Offer, One Simple Plan
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Are you doing a Black Friday promo, or not?... Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year. Customers are actively looking for gifts, ready to spend money, and hoping to find something special. So why shouldn't some of those dollars go to YOUR farm? But what should you sell? And how do you pull off a promotion when you've only got two weeks to prepare? In this episode, I'm walking you through a simple, step-by-step Black Friday playbook designed specifically for farmers. We'll tackle the big decisions, avoid the common mistakes, and map out a realistic promotion plan you...
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385 The Power of One: Why Focusing on ONE Offer Helps You Sell More
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Trying to market everything your farm sells could actually be costing you sales. As farmers, we've got a LOT of things to sell. Vegetables, flowers, CSA shares, meat bundles, U-picks, workshops, eggs, seasonal specials... and naturally, we want our customers to know about ALL of it! But here's the problem: When everything gets the spotlight, nothing gets the spotlight. And the more things we ask our customers to pay attention to, the harder we may be making it for them to actually BUY. There's some fascinating psychology behind this. And understanding it should change the way you approach your...
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384 What If Farm Marketing Didn't Have to Be So Hard? (Here's How)
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Does marketing your farm ever feel harder than it should? You know you should be sending emails, posting on social media, making offers, and finding new customers. But somehow, all those marketing tasks keep getting pushed to the bottom of your to-do list. Maybe it's because you've convinced yourself that marketing takes too much time. Or that you're just not very good at it. Or that if you're going to do it, it needs to look really polished and professional. But what if you're making marketing harder than it actually needs to be? In this episode of the My Digital Farmer Podcast, I'm sharing a...
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383 Stepping Into the Mist: How to Move Forward When You Don’t Know What Comes Next
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
There’s a place just beyond the edge of what you already know how to do. I call it the mist. As farm business owners, we find ourselves there more often than we probably realize — when an opportunity shows up, when something changes, when we take a risk, or when we find ourselves doing something we’ve never done before. And the mist can feel uncomfortable. We can’t see very far ahead. We don't know exactly how things are going to turn out. And sometimes, our first instinct is to back away and return to what we know. But what if the mist isn't something to be afraid of? What if it’s...
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382 Facebook Is Limiting Your External Links. Now What?
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
What would you do if Facebook suddenly told you that you could only share two external links per month from your farm business page? That’s exactly what happened to me while I was scheduling posts for Shared Legacy Farms—and it stopped me in my tracks. For years, one of the primary jobs of my social media has been to move people off Facebook and onto my email list. But this new restriction, which appears to be rolling out to more business pages, could affect far more than email sign-up links. Think CSA registration, online stores, blog posts, recipes, YouTube videos, event registrations...
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381 The Nostalgia Effect: Why Memories Make Customers Buy
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Sometimes customers aren't just buying the product in front of them. They're buying access to a memory. I recently bought two boxes of sugary cereal I hadn't eaten in decades—even though I don't normally buy the stuff and can't really eat it anymore. Why? Nostalgia got me. In this episode, we're digging into the psychology behind this surprisingly powerful buying trigger and why farm products are uniquely positioned to tap into it. We'll explore how taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound can bring old memories rushing back—and how you can use those sensory connections in your marketing. But...
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380 Can You Actually CREATE More Demand for Your Farm Products?
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Can You Actually CREATE More Demand for Your Farm Products? Demand for your farm product often feels like it has a ceiling — but what if that ceiling can actually MOVE? This is part 2 of a two-part series all about Market Demand -- an important element in the sales/marketing formula. In the last episode, I talked about the danger of scaling production before you have enough demand to support it. But that raises an important question: What if you check the demand…and there simply isn't enough yet? Are you stuck with the demand you've got? Marketing can't magically make everyone want what...
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379 Got Demand? The 6 Questions to Ask Before You Grow More Farm Products
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
What happens when you’re really good at growing something… but you don’t have enough people to buy it? I learned that lesson the expensive way this summer when we ended up renting a refrigerated semi-trailer to hold thousands of pounds of watermelons we suddenly didn’t have a market for. We had successfully grown the crop, but growing it and selling it turned out to be two very different things. In this episode of My Digital Farmer, we’re exploring an important piece of the revenue equation that farmers don’t always spend enough time thinking about: demand. Before you add another...
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378 Who Should NOT Buy Your Farm Product? (A Worthy Thought Exercise)
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
We spend a lot of time defining our ideal customer, but here's a question we don't ask nearly enough: Who should NOT buy your product? If you're spending too much time answering questions, overcoming objections, or trying to convince people to buy (only to have them walk away!) you may not have a sales problem. You may have a qualification problem. In this episode, I'm sharing a recent encounter that made me realize how valuable it is to recognize our “no signals” -- the clues that someone simply isn't a good fit for what we're selling. And even better: What if our marketing could...
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377 Practical Ways to Get More Referrals From Your Farm Customers
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Most farmers will tell you that word-of-mouth is one of their best sources of new customers. But there's a big difference between being grateful for referrals, and intentionally creating more of them. In this episode, we're talking about how to put an engine behind word-of-mouth. I'll share a whole bunch of practical ways farms can make referrals easier, more natural, and more likely to happen—without needing complicated software or some fancy loyalty program. More importantly, I'll show you how to think strategically about who you ask, when you ask, what you give customers to share, and...
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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].