236 How to Raise Your Prices (and Make More $) Using Price Anchoring
My Digital Farmer | Marketing Strategies for Farmers
Release Date: 11/08/2023
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...
info_outlineMy 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...
info_outlineMy 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...
info_outlineMy 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...
info_outlineMy 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...
info_outlineMy 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...
info_outlineMy 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...
info_outlineMy 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...
info_outlineMy 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...
info_outlineMy 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...
info_outlineHow do you raise your prices and get your customers to buy at that price point? (And feel good about it?)
In today's episode, I'm diving into a crucial aspect of farm marketing: the art of price anchoring.
Have you ever gone to Amazon to buy something with a certain idea in your mind of what something will cost?... and then you see what Amazon thinks it should cost?...
For example, I recently needed to buy a countdown timer for our Chopped Competition -- a big one that everyone can see from the room. Amazon had one priced at $300 (!!!), then another one at $65, and another one at $125.
Guess which one I bought?... Yup, the $125 one.
AND... I felt okay with it.
Honestly though, going into it, I was hoping for a $75 option. That's where my mind was. But then I saw the $300, and realized I was at the wrong pricing table. So the $125 suddenly didn't feel so bad -- like I had compromised and found a good happy medium in quality and price.
This... is price anchoring in action. And if you know how to use it, it can help you raise ALL your farm product prices, get people to buy at that price level, and make you more money.
Price anchoring is a psychological technique where consumers use an initial piece of information to base future buying decisions. You set a mental benchmark, or an "anchor" with a high price tag, and then this creates a perception that subsequent (slightly lower) prices are a better deal. (Meanwhile: you've also raised the prices of those subsequent, slightly lower prices, too).
You see this ALL OVER THE PLACE in the retail world. And in this episode, we dive into the details of how it works.
It's time you learned the psychology and strategy behind what makes this work.
Your homework from this episode is to set up a product with a higher price anchor, position your other products around it, and guide your customer this week to buy the thing you want them to (at the price you want).
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 also 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/
Hit play and let's get started!
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 my CSA Renewals Course: CSA Early Bird Campaigns that Convert. In this program, I teach you my exact process for how I build my renewal promotion campaign every fall, that gets 80-90% of my members to sign up again by November 1st.
Sign up for my CSA Academy -- and get access to my CSA member resource library to use for your own CSA (as long as you're a paying member). Use coupon code TRIAL to get your first month for $1.
Find my Facebook group for farmers!
Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer