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My Digital Farmer Podcast
290 I Threw Together This Farm Marketing Promo in ONE HOUR
00:50:37
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...
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Corinna Bench
Today, I threw together a marketing promotion in under 60 minutes. Like built the offer, put the social media posts together, found the graphics, boom, it was done. And I thought to myself, this needs to be a podcast episode. How many times have you wanted to promote something and you just kind of did a ho hum job of it? Well, today I'm going to show you how to take an offer and build a quick campaign around it that actually gets leverage. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 290 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow a profitable business online. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. Happy December. A big shout out to all of my regular subscribers and listeners. Welcome back to the show. And if you're new to the podcast, I'm glad you're here today. I hope you get a lot out of it. Make sure you subscribe. Subscribe to the show. Go check out my first 10 episodes. I designed them to be an onboarding into the marketing space away long back ago when I started this show. They're still as relevant as ever. So if you need some help with learning the marketing lingo, that's the place to start. I also recommend you get onto my email list. You can do that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe because when you do, I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to send you an email into your inbox roughly every five days for about three months. And each one of those emails is going to have really helpful information to slowly introduce you to the key concepts you need to understand about marketing. It's going to turn you into a marketing maven. It's going to give you resources, freebies, people. You should be following key principles. It's really good. I get a lot of Good feedback, so go to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe. That's totally free. Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Local Line. Imagine all of your farm sales under one roof. Local Line is the most comprehensive sales software built for farmers and food hubs, selling direct to restaurants, schools, wholesale buyers running a CSA, and more. Features include e commerce, automated inventory management, a box builder, subscriptions point to sale, and more, helping you increase your sales, save time, and streamline your processes. Are you looking to switch to sales software that does it? All subscriptions start as low as $49 a month with no setup fees or sales percentages. Plus, if you join Local Line today, your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront at no cost to you, so you'll be up and running in no time. You can even pause your subscription in the off season. And bonus, as a podcast listener, localline is also offering a free premium feature for one year with your subscription when you use my coupon code. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and enter the coupon code MDF2024. Our farm uses Local Line as our e commerce platform. I can't say enough good things about it. We love it. Make the switch today. And now back to the show. Hey guys. Well, I hope that December is turning into a profitable month for you. I want you to take advantage of this prime holiday buying season. This is when our customers are in the mood to spend money. They're actually looking to buy and we want to take advantage of this opportunity to put our offer in front of them and yeah, make use of this moment when they have these buying habits triggering. So hopefully you have some kind of an offer in place. If not, then today's episode is going to be helpful because I'm going to share with you how I literally just threw together a marketing promotion in under 60 minutes. It's interesting because I wasn't actually planning on making a super big deal about this offer, but as I sat down to put together the post, the one or two posts that I was going to create for this promo in my Facebook group, I thought to myself, you know what, it's really easy to throw in a few more posts here. There's a couple of ideas that came to me very suddenly and they were easy to execute. So I just started scheduling posts and then all of a sudden I'm like, wow, you know what? I could jazz up this offer a little bit and add this element. Let me do that real quick. And I was just Using all of these tools and assets that I had from the past, I could quickly locate them, find them, and I threw them together into the Facebook group. And all of a sudden, 60 minutes later, I realize, wow, this is a much stronger promotion than I had originally planned. So after I finished, I was getting ready to record this podcast. I was actually going to talk about something else. And I thought, man, what just happened there? That was really cool. And I think I sometimes take for granted that I know how to do this stuff. And I thought, let me just sit down and document what I did, and I'm going to do an entire episode about how simple it can be to put together an effective campaign. Because that really wasn't that hard. There were just a few key elements that I needed to prepare and there were a few principles that were driving my action. And I thought this could be an instructional, kind of short guidebook for you if you're kind of new into the marketing space or maybe you've been doing it for a few years, but you've never really had a system or process. I thought I would share with you how you can do this fairly simply. When I sit down to map out my promotions in my promotion calendar, which I usually do at the very beginning of January, oh, you should really be doing that in December. But I usually do it in January because I have a pretty slow start to my season. When I sit down and put that promo together, I can see where I want to be promoting key offers. I already make those decisions way in advance. And so in the month of November and December, I know that there is this opening where I can pitch an offer to my audience for my fish, my community supported fishery partnership. So we have a partnership with Citizen Salmon Alaska. Aaron Seckler is my contact there, my fish buyer, my fisherman, and he and I work together to promote his fish to my audience. This is an affiliate partnership that we have. So there is a commission that Kurt and I receive for every sale that we provide for him. And this is something we've been doing now for three years. It's gone really well. He has kind of within our affiliate contract, designated that there are three periods in the year when he's going to have like a special promotion to our csa. Now, our CSA members can purchase anytime they want all year long. But we try to make a big deal about the fish three different times of the year, kind of aligned around halibut season when the salmon are running. And then at the end of the year, we do a holiday promo push. This really works out well, for my particular farm, because we don't have a lot to sell in the month of November and December. If you've listened to my podcast, you've heard me kind of bemoan that fact a little bit. We enjoy taking these months off. We don't have a whole lot going on out in the field. We do have some stuff in the cooler and occasionally we'll do a pop up market to try and move that. But I don't have a lot of my own things to sell. So I really appreciate having an affiliate partnership, a collaboration with another business where I can sell their products. And so the timing works out really well this time of year when people are looking to buy something and I can provide this as an option. So as I sat down and looked at my promo calendar, I saw, well, I've got this period of time here coming up in the middle of November when I'm supposed to promote the fish holiday sampler boxes to my audience. Now, normally in the past, I haven't done a super awesome job at this. Erin, if you're listening, I feel like I need to apologize. It's usually like two emails and a post in the Facebook group and that's kind of it. But like I said, this year, for whatever reason, as I sat down to kind of do that, that protocol, I felt inspired to try and add a few more things. And suddenly I felt like it had turned into a much stronger promotion. And I was surprised by how quickly that promotion was optimized that it didn't take me a lot of extra time or energy to make it stronger. So that's why I'm kind of excited today to share how this process works. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to walk you through the seven steps that I took. Actually, it's eight now that I'm looking at it. Eight steps that I took to actually go through this process. And then at the end, I'm going to share some principles that I think were at play in putting together this strong promotion. I don't know what the results are going to be. If I think of it. I will come back at you in a future episode as like a little PS somewhere and let you know how we actually did. Okay, so let's get started. The first thing that I do after I've looked at my promo calendar and I've identified this is the marketing promotion that I need to work on. Right? We have to identify the thing that we want to sell. So I'm not even going to Put that in the list. I set a time frame for when I'm going to pitch this offer. I think this is important. I haven't always done this with some of my mini promotions. I'll just sort of send off an email and it's kind of this open ended thing where I oh, I hope you buy it. Until they sell out this year I kind of decided I'm really going to try to push this and build promotional assets and messaging from November 13th through the end of the month. People will still be able to buy after that, but I'm going to do a good job of trying to promote it and really build a promo period around those dates. There is an ideal time for every product to be purchased. That's true for your products too. And I really want you to think about that as you kind of go down the list of some of your key signature products are some of them. Just picture them right now. Maybe your top three, three to five. Are some of those products better to sell at certain times of the year? And why is that? I personally think that even within the subject of local food, vegetables, meats, flowers, there are ideal holidays or triggers, trigger moments where a customer is going to be more open to saying yes, where there's going to be a desire for the product or there's going to be a pain point resolved because of it. They're just going to be more open to hearing the message. So we've already sort of established that November and December are really strong months of the year for pretty much any retail business because this is when people are buying for the holidays, for Christmas, we have Thanksgiving, we have Christmas, we have New Year's. There's so many opportunities. So this is a really ideal time for something like a holiday fish sampler box. Especially since I'm pitching it as a, as a gift, right? That although you can certainly go in there and buy bulk fish, which I will mention in the promo, my main focus is trying to get them to see, hey, you can purchase this as a present for someone else and they're actually bundled and packaged and priced in such a way to make them an ideal present that's going to have a wow effect, a wow factor. Imagine, you know, coming up with a gift idea for your boss that you maybe you want to impress him or you have a star employee that you really want to wow and make sure they know they feel appreciated. Maybe it's a family member like my father really always just, I know is so impressed when, when I send him a fish box for his birthday Every year he just feels like I spent oodles of money on him. That makes him feel amazing. Right? There are certain people in our life that we kind of want to impress like this. So when we have a holiday fish sampler box, which is like in this 150 to $300 price range, it can really make a statement. And so this kind of product works really well for the holiday gift giving season. And I can even suggest to my customer base, who would be the perfect person to give this kind of present to. Now, some of them are going to buy it just to put in their own freezer, but some of them are going to really think about this product through the lens of a gift. And. And that's exactly what I want them to do. So setting a timeframe for your offer and recognizing when is the best time to pitch this, and then how long am I going to be really promoting the offer? Is there a start date and a close date? That's kind of the first step. The second step is to actually create the offer. What is the thing that I'm selling, and to kind of come up with a name for it so that you can use that name throughout the entire promo season. And it's kind of catchy. It's easy to remember. So this is an affiliate promotion. I had to get really clear about that. Right. This is not my own product. I am selling someone else's product. And so I'm very unabashedly doing so. I'm making sure people know, hey, you know, this is fish promo week. And that's at the top of every single one of my social media posts in my Facebook group. I'm very clear that, hey, it's fish promo week. I'm going to talk about fish right now. And you're going to probably be seeing fish posts for the next week. Right. That's kind of what's the underlying hint there when I say fish promo week. And I am identifying the holiday fish sampler boxes as the focal point of this offer. Sure, you can go in and buy a la carte scallops and tag them onto your order and throw in an extra batch of locks or whatever. But really, this is about those three holiday sampler box options that Aaron has put together on his website. And if you want to do some other stuff, great. But I'm really just going to be pitching this whole gift thing now. I also wanted to create some urgency in this offer, so. And a little bit of fun as well. And so that's where I decided to create a contest or a drawing. So what I basically said was for anybody who places an order in this promo period before November 30th, you're going to be entered to win a drawing for a some free smoked salmon. I always get a huge box of fish sent to me at the end of the year and I'll just make sure that I tell Aaron, hey, I need the present or the gift from this promo thrown in there as well. And that kind of comes out of my affiliate commission. So I just decided that's what the prize is going to be. And that's sort of my experiment to see if that motivates more people to decide to buy now in this promo period when I want them to. And that is part of my offer that creates that urgency piece. Okay, so this is part two in the list where I figure out what is the offer. So if you were selling stuff in your own online store, maybe this is where you would be thinking about coupon codes or things like free shipping on orders over 50 bucks, or spend $125 and get a free XYZ. Right. This is where you're thinking through those offer formulas that we teach inside of our marketing school. And you're playing around with how can I create urgency? How can I create scarcity? You need to give people a reason to buy now and it needs to be something that is attractive, something that they want. Okay. The next step is to make sure you've identified your target audience for this campaign and your marketing channels. I bring this up because I kind of want to state the obvious, but you don't have to promote your offer to absolutely everyone on the planet. You can decide that you want to just target a very specific portion of your email list. Or you could say, this is really just going to be an inner promotion to my current buyers, which is what I decided to do. My current CSA members. Or actually, I want this to be a promotion that's open to anyone. So people who are on my email list who have bought from me before, maybe haven't bought yet, but also people that haven't even gotten on my email list, I can promote it on my social media pages and hope that this is an offer that causes them to start interacting with me as a customer for the first time. Right. So you could open it to the public on your public business facing pages or you could keep it kind of in house. So this was a moment where I decided, well, this is an in house promotion. This is a product in my product ladder that is only accessible to people once they are CSA members and that's just because I've chosen to make the CSF product a perk of membership. People actually get a percentage off of anything they buy from citizens salmonalaska.com when they are a CSA member. And that coupon code is something that's shared with them after they join. This is a perk. So I'm not going to put these social media posts on my business page, my business Facebook page, or on my Instagram profile because this isn't something that the general public could actually purchase. Now, I could change my mind on that, but that's just how we have it set up right now. So that helps me identify my marketing channels. If I know that I'm only selling this to my current CSA members and members who have joined for next year, they're the ones who get this promo code, then that helps me know. Well, I'm basically sending it. I'm going to use email and target those tagged people and I'm going to do posts on my private Facebook page because I have a private Facebook group just for my CSA members. And that made it real easy to just decide. Those are my two channels. Those are the two places I need to create marketing assets for. Okay, so that's sort of step three. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. This is my monthly membership program that helps farmers build their marketing systems for their business. If you are a farmer that doesn't really have a good machine in place, that's helping you collect leads, attract your ideal customer, deliver your offer, nurture them into super fans, and learn how to continue to make revenue off of them, then this is a program that you might want to join. This is a monthly membership, which means you pay month to month. And inside I have over 10 to 12 different marketing projects that are 30 day project builds and farmers can come in, they take an assessment to figure out where they are in their business, what elements they might be missing in their marketing system, and then you build the different pieces of the machine month by month. You get to decide what to work on first. I have projects about the website makeover. I have a project about building your email nurture sequence, writing a weekly email, building a promotion calendar. This coming month, the month of November, we're actually doing a live book study on building a story brand by Donald Miller. And you will be building a brand script for your farm, getting clear about what your marketing message is. So that's the live project going on right now. And in the month of January, I'm going to be releasing A new project all about marketing metrics and we're going to be doing a deep dive on the key. It's kind of a short list of the metrics that you need to be tracking and I'll teach you them one by one. And then your homework is going to be to go find that metric for that week and build it into your workbook so that you can be tracking it. It's going to be super good. So if you want to join this community, head to mydigitalpharmer.com FMS to learn all about it. It includes a host of project builds. Each project has a teaching workshop, it has a project planner, it has templates to help make the process of building your own version a lot faster. And we also have a monthly Zoom meetup where we talk out our questions. So I hope you decide to join the community. I'm super geeked about it this winter to work with my members and work one on one with them and help them. Go to mydigitalpharmer.com fms to enroll now. And now back to the show. Then the next step was where I spent like a few seconds trying to quickly identify what are going to be the sticking points in this offer. What are the frequently asked questions? I have customers who are going to see this email come through, who are going to see the posts in our group and they're going to jump all over it because they've bought before and they know how this works. This isn't their first rodeo with Citizen Salmon, but I have a large number of members who haven't taken that first leap. And I have a handful of brand new CSA members who just joined two weeks ago who are true rookies for 2025. They've barely been onboarded into the CSA family and now this is kind of the first offer that they hear about. It's not even my own vegetables, it's fish. And they have no idea how this works. Right? They're probably like, what you have fish? And how does that even get here from Alaska? And is it going to be frozen? And like how many days is it fresh? What does it taste like? I don't understand. What does it look like? What's the box size? What are what, what are the sizes of the fillets? Are there pin bones? Right. They have all the questions that a normal first time buyer has. So I quickly think through, okay, if I were someone who hasn't bought yet, what are going to be the things I want to know to reduce that buyer's friction to make it more likely for me to feel comfortable purchasing for the first time. This is an expensive product. This is a really premium quality product. And people aren't going to just drop $400 without really thinking about it. Makes sense. I totally appreciate that. So when I spend a little bit of time thinking about these FAQs, that helps me identify the content that I'm going to need to use in my content marketing. That's why this step is important. And this really drives the stuff that's going to go in the email, the marketing assets that I'm going to need to build when I post stuff on social media inside the group. Okay, all right, so then step number five is to actually identify and or create the marketing assets and graphics that I'm going to use for the marketing campaign. And these are kind of coming out of the step right before where I thought through what are the frequently asked questions, what are the key points that I need to make about the offer? I need to make sure they know what the call to action is. I need to make sure they know this is my recommended first step. Like if you're going to buy for the first time, you should start here because they can be overwhelmed by all the choices. Right. I've sort of thought through some of those things and that's helping me figure out what are these assets. So here's what I then ended up doing. I went into Canva, canva.com, which is a free graphic design software. If you don't know about it, you need to go learn it. I have actually a free workshop that teaches you a demo of how to use it. It's pretty old. It's mydigitalpharmer.com canva. But it will totally give you what you need to know in to navigate that software. Canva. Yeah, Canva. Canva. And so I go inside of Canva, I create a folder where I'm going to put all of these graphics. And the first thing that I make is the official promo offer graphic. This is just the one that says, you know, fish week, fish promo week. It's a picture of a salmon. And then it just has the offer in a nutshell, like holiday fish samplers. And then the whole, you know, place an order between these dates and be entered to win a free drawing. And it has the coupon code on it. So I have kind of a pretty designed promo graphic that's going to be front and center pinned to the top of the Facebook group. And it's also going to go into the email this is the first graphic that I create. I'm also creating or looking for testimonial screenshots now. One of the benefits of having a private Facebook group and now having done this promo for three seasons is I have social proof that's come in from the past. I have customers who have purchased this product before, who have posted a picture of it in the group, who have talked about how awesome it is, who have talked about in general how awesome Citizen Salmon Alaska is. And when I see those testimonials come through throughout the year, I take a screenshot of them and I store them in a Google folder on my Google Drive under this promo so that it's really easy to find them when I want to then use them. So I've collected these testimonial screenshots. I have what I call UGC or user generated content. So these are photos that customers have taken of the fish, either when it arrived at their house. Sometimes they take a photo of the box because they're so excited, and then they post it in the group and say, hey, this is what 40 pounds of fish looks like. Here's what it comes in. It's in the Styrofoam cooler. I have photos like that which are really helpful, right, for a first time buyer. They'd want to see that. But I also have a lot of photos of like, here's what I made with my first, you know, meal of the salmon, beautiful plated meal. Sometimes it's something really simple along with a testimonial. So I will save those photos as well as I see them and they kind of get funneled into a special folder labeled save salmon or halibut or whatever. And that's all in this same Google Drive so that it's easy to find and locate when it's time to do this promo. Okay, so this is all part of step five, where we're identifying the marketing assets and the graphics that we're going to need and we're collecting them. So the first time you do this, you might actually have to go find them, make them, collect them, and kind of archive them and put them in a certain place, curate them. But once you've done this the first time, you can then come back the next year and reuse them. You can reuse the exact same process, which is why this whole promo only took me 60 minutes to plan. The fourth kind of thing that I'm doing under this marketing assets is I'm creating graphics that answer those frequently asked questions. So that work that I did in Step four, where I was trying to figure out what are going to be the sticking points. I'm trying to answer those FAQs in social media posts. So I'm coming up with a graphic that comes that kind of goes along with that question. So one of the common blockers for people is they, they kind of want to know, well, how is it coming to me and what, how is it packaged? So to have a picture of this is the, the Styrofoam cooler that it comes in. Look, it's hard as a rock. It's it in vacuum, comes vacuum sealed. Here's a picture of it. Here's what 20 pounds of fish looks like in case you can't even visualize how much space that's going to take up in your cooler or in your freezer. Right. And also just where to start. Like, these are the most popular products in his product suite. Not everybody's a huge fan of the shrimp with roe, right? They don't want the little eggs attached or whatever. So they're, they're like, yeah, I'll just not start with the shrimp. I'm going to go with what he's known for, which is the salmon and the halibut. Right. Those are these two kind of signature products. And then I have a fact sheet. So this was something I created the very first time I put a promo together because I knew my customer was going to have a lot of questions and they were not going to take action and buy this product until those were overcome. So I took the time to build a beautif like six page fact sheet inside of Canva. It's a PDF. I've now got it stored on my website, so it has its own unique URL address. Every year I go and update it a little bit. And I have already shared that. I shared that way back in May when I was first promoting halibut. So I have this asset available too. I kind of remind myself this is one of the assets that I can point to in this promo. Mostly for those first timers who have just joined my CSA and are like, what the heck is this even about? I can say, hey, if you have questions about how this whole fish relationship works and how do you even buy fish from Citizen Salmon? Download the fact sheet, right? So I've collected all of the marketing assets. I've made the graphics based on those FAQs and I've kind of got them waiting in the wing. So that's sort of step five. Then the next step, step six is to actually create go and actually schedule and create the content. So I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about what I actually wrote, but I do write an email. I write a promo email that I'm going to send just to this insider audience. And I reused the same one from last year. That makes it really easy. So the very first time I wrote it, it did take some time, but now I just go back and copy it, change out some of the elements, update it so that it's my new offer, change out the pictures, might add a few things here and there, but it's pretty quick. I did not actually include that into the time of this 60 Minutes because I wrote that email a few days ago and sent it. And today I was just sitting down and being like, I should post stuff in this, in the Facebook group. And that's kind of where when I was like, oh my gosh, this whole like promo package kind of came together in 60 minutes. So I guess writing the email is maybe another 30 minutes on top of that. But you do write an email and I got that scheduled. After that I looked at what are my social media posts going to be, how can I supplement the message that's going out via email? How can I be reinforcing it in this other platform where a lot of my members are engaging? So that's where I kind of want to go through now. What are some of the things that I ended up putting together? So I'm pulling up my Google Doc. Once I actually scheduled these posts, I did copy and paste them all into a Google Doc and I called it my fish promo week assets. And this is great because next year I'll be able to go to this Google Doc and see what did I, what did I even post and what order did they go in? And I can just copy and paste it and it'll be even faster next year. So I'm going to share what, what some of those images were. And you can kind of see how I used that plan, that process of identifying the FAQs, the sticking points to help me come up with these. So the very first one was they all start out, by the way, with its fish promo week. That's the first sentence on every single one of these. And I bold that the first one is just where I introduce that graphic of the fish promo, right where it just says Citizen Salmon. Alaska holiday fish samplers use coupon code, blah blah blah. And where I just announce that Citizen Salmon has opened up their holiday fish sampler boxes in their online store for pre order. And I Give them sort of an overview of what this promo is about. Okay? And I tell them to use their discount code. So I give them a very specific reminder. Here's the discount code. Don't forget to use it. This is important because this is how we figure out who gets included in the drawing, right? If they don't use that, then they could just be a random Joe that signs up. I won't know that it came from them because Aaron's the one who gets these names. So he's basically doing a search for anyone who used the coupon code. So I need to make sure that they're using the coupon code. This is also how I get my commission. So if they don't use the coupon code, I don't get my commission. So this is something that I want to make sure I mention in every single post. I also kind of remind them here, hey, you can, you can order bulk salmon, king salmon, coho salmon and all that too. But I'm really just focusing mostly on how you can use it as gifts. In this very first post. This is the one that's going to get pinned to the top of the page, by the way too, for the first two weeks here of the promo, I also give them a copy of the email that was sent out that explains the entire promo. So I say, hey, P.S. i sent out an email about this offer. If you didn't get it or it's lost in your spam folder, click here to read it. And then there's the link from convertkit or it is now known as kit.com. okay, so that's the first post. The second post is where I promote the contest. And this is just a graphic that says, hey, if you order a fish sampler or any kind of fish order within these dates, you're going to be entered into a drawing. So this is just kind of focusing on the kind of the special portion of this offer. The either the bonus or the giveaway or what makes it special. Then I have a question post. I like these because it creates engagement with my audience. How often does your family eat fish in a typical month? Okay, there's no call to action. It's just a way to get people to be talking. The next post is a picture of what 40 pounds of salmon looks like in a box when it gets shipped to you. This is also the post where I let them know that there is a fish buying fact sheet and I give them the link to that document so that they can read it and learn how this whole process works. So that's getting at one of those FAQs. The next post is a photo of cold smoked lox on a bagel. And this is a picture that I took many months ago. And I basically tell people, hey, this is one of my favorite products that they sell. I buy a bunch of this in the wintertime and I use it all spring. And I actually kind of shared just from the heart that this was something that really helped me out. When I was healing from my whole unhealthy, unbalanced gut. This was something that I could actually eat. It was a good source of protein, omega 3s, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm doing a personal testimonial about, hey, this is a great product. I love it. It's one of my favorites. So it's almost like if you get a chance, throw this in as an a la carte or this might be the thing that you decide you want to buy because this is a really great present, smaller price point. And you can get a bunch of these and share them as gifts with friends. Right. So that's sort of the intention behind posting this graphic. Um, then I have another question post favorite way to cook fish again, to drive engagement. Then I have pictures of how the sampler boxes actually look when they arrive. And you open them up, they're very festive inside. I want them to see how the fish comes packaged. So it's really focusing on the vacuum sealed element, the portion sizes of the fish, how big they actually are because they're individually vacuum sealed. And then I kind of explain how Aaron lets you know when the fish ships and that you can even tell him, this is the week that I want it shipped. Especially if it's a gift. You might have some specific instructions that way. So just sort of explain all that and reiterate that that's something that comes up for people when they're using it as a gift. The next day, I have a screenshot of a customer who had posted way back when. This was Dylan. He said, buy this. It's a picture of smoked salmon, smoked black cod, excuse me. And all it says here is, buy this. The best smoked fish I've ever had. Actually, just buy everything they have. It's all fantastic. It's a great testimonial and so tongue in cheek. I just love. Dylan is hilarious and everyone knows him and he's very well respected in the group. So that was a screenshot I took and had saved in my Google Drive and I decided this is going to be the post and Then I just talk about, hey, if you've ever bought Citizen Salmon's fish, tell us what you think of it. We have members in this group who may be on the fence and it always helps to see what other people say about the product. Do you notice a difference in taste, texture and quality? And then I thank Dylan for the screenshot and I remind them to use their discount code and I give them the link of where to buy. Okay, so I'm using a testimonial as a form of content marketing there. And then another Fish Promo Week post. I share a picture of something that one of my customers made. This is some gorgeous salmon just in a cast iron skillet. It's super simple, right? I'm just kind of trying to show them this is not complicated. It's going to be an easy dinner. And then my call to action is share a picture of something you've made with Citizen Salmon, Alaska's fish. And then I credit the person who actually shared this photo. And then I basically say, hey, here's how you buy. Here's the coupon code. Okay, so that's just, it's really simple, right? As you listen to that, those are my social posts. I think it's enough for seven or eight days and that's basically enough to do a full week of hardcore promo. And I don't have social posts scheduled for after that, even though the offer will continue to run. But I'm going to do a really good job of promoting this for seven or eight days. Okay, so those got scheduled and then I documented the whole process on a Google Doc. So I've dragged all the photos into a folder in my Google Drive called the Fish Promo. Fish Promo Week. And then there's a Google Doc within that folder that has the social copy and the email copy so that I can easily find it and update it. That whole process, aside from writing that email, took me about 60 minutes. And I guess I just wanted to show you how simple and easy it is to actually throw something together. Now here are some of the principles that were at play that I want you to remember as you're building out your own quick 60 minute promo. The very first one is to create an offer. Make sure that you take some time to build some urgency around it, some scarcity, give it a good name. Don't be afraid to outright just say, this is Fish Promo Week. Fish Promo Week. Fish Promo Week doesn't have to be fancy, right? Identify it and talk it up, but create an offer. Don't be like about it, right? Like, I don't know if I want to sell. Like, be confident, put it out there, do it for seven days and you're not going to get a result, you're not going to get people to buy unless you show up and ask for the sale. So create that offer and confidently promote it for a set period of time. Number two is to create opportunities for engagement within this promotion. And you see that within my Facebook group because I have these question posts that are designed to get them to respond. I also have posted testimonials, past testimonials from people, so that there's also the user generated content. Like Tammy is gonna see her picture that I shared. Everyone else is gonna see that I've shared two or three photos of other people's dinner. A photo that they took, that customers actually took of this meal. And that's just going to provide social proof, but it's also going to make maybe make some of them think, well, I want to take a great photo of this food and maybe she'll use my photo next year. Right? So it kind of encourages the behavior of sharing your meals and that in itself is driving engagement. Like, it's going to promote this behavior of sharing stuff that I make with Citizen Salmon, Alaska's fish, when I purchase it in the future. The third principle is to repurpose your marketing assets that you've made from the past. Now, you won't be able to do this your first year, obviously, but most of the stuff that got thrown together here came from past promotions of this fish. So that fact sheet PDF, which is a really strong piece of content, I reuse that over and over again. The pictures that come from customers, like, save those, store them away so they're easy to find. Use those testimonials, grab screenshots of them. Testimonials really, really help sell. So when you see them, those are powerful, powerful assets. Keep those. And like I said, I'm keeping a documentation, I'm documenting this so that I can reuse this stuff later. So let's make this easy for ourselves in the future. We want to organize our assets to make the rinse and repeats process easier and faster next year. Okay, so that's kind of the fourth principle. It's real easy. It would have been easy for me to just throw this together, schedule stuff on social and then walk away from the computer. But I paused and I said, wait a minute, I'm going to take an extra 10 minutes to go and copy and paste the text, the copy from each of these posts into a Google Doc and I'm just going to real quick drag these photos, which are already on my desktop. I'm just going to drag them into the Google folder, the Google Drive folder for this promo as well, so that next year I, I saved myself even more time. Okay, that was an extra 10 minutes, but it was, it's totally worth it. So organize those assets. Create a system so that it's easy for you to run this in the future. Okay, I have a couple more principles. The next one is to use the product yourself. Show them how you actually use it. That post of the bagel with the locks on it, for instance, like, I'm not just pointing to how my customers are using it, but I'm showing how I actually use this product. Some of my favorite ways to prepare it. You are the guide in your hero's story. They're looking for you to show them the way. And so yes, we want our customers to kind of point the way as well. But you also have a lot of influence and power. So if you're cooking and using the product, show them your favorite ways to use it. Show them how you're taking this bundle package and doing something unique with it. Give them ideas for how they can consume it and then finally, share the three step buying plan. Often part of your messaging when you're doing a promotion is to make sure that you make it really clear how to actually buy. Don't miss this. Every single post, every single email should be. Here's the call to action. Buy now, Buy now. Here's the button that they're supposed to push. Here's the special offer, here's the special instruction. So if you had to come up with like a three step plan, step one, do this. Step two, step three, like what are those three steps? Maybe it's only two steps for you, maybe it's only one step. But be clear with them about. Here's how we get started. First, you're going to go to this website. Then you're going to choose your XYZ bundle and then choose your pickup site and then check out. Or maybe it's put this particular product into the cart and add on your extra add ons. Make sure that you use this coupon code to get entered into the drawing. And then step three, choose your pickup location. Right? Like what are the three main decisions they're going to have to make in the process of purchasing? Be really clear about what that is and that should show up again and again and again. So if a person doesn't decide to buy on the very first message you put out there, right? Like maybe you send out that email and you've got it all in there and it's super clear, but they're just not ready to say yes. And then it isn't until the fourth post in your social media page where they're like, you know what, I want to do it, I'm going to get it. But you don't have all the details spelled out right. The step one, step two, step three, and they can't quite remember and then they get confused when they go to the checkout process and there's a moment of friction and then they stop. You don't want that to happen. So in all of your messaging, you want to just be really clear of what are the, like, the short list of bullet points that they need to know to actually buy. We call this the three step plan that needs to be communicated on a regular basis. Okay. All right, There you go. That's all I have. I hope that this was helpful and I want to challenge you. If you haven't put together a promotion for the holidays yet, use this as kind of a rough framework. It doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as I'm going to send an email out and throw together a few social posts. But hopefully this kind of process has helped you see, here are some of the things I need to think about to help me craft what kinds of content I should be creating or who I should be talking to or how do I create that urgency to get people to actually buy. So use what you've heard today to help you optimize or create a marketing promotion. Try to just throw it together in 60 minutes, take the pressure off yourself and be like, you know what, this doesn't have to be perfect. This doesn't have to be super elaborate to be called a decent promotion. Like, I can, I don't have to go crazy big. I can just do a few key things well and throw it out into the world and see what happens. No judgment. All right, well, that's all I have today. I hope this was helpful. I'm going to put the show notes for today@mydigitalpharmer.com 290 and I'm also going to include in there the contact information for Citizen Salmon Alaska. So if you have been intrigued by this case scenario and you're like, wow, you know, it'd be really cool if I could promote wild Alaskan fish to my audience. You could create a affiliate partnership with Aaron. I know he's always looking for farmers. If it's a good match, it might be of an extra source of income for you. So if you want to explore that, I'll put his contact information in the show notes and you can reach out to him and see if it's a good fit. And if you like today's episode, please share it with a farmer. I'd love for as many farmers as possible to know that this marketing podcast exists or just go leave me a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. It really does help more people hear about the show. If you want to get onto my email list, I have some free stuff to send your way to make your marketing for your farm even stronger. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. You can follow me on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I love to show up in stories with a wise word or a marketing nugget from time to time. Otherwise, thanks for joining me today. Have a great week and remember, I believe in you. I'll catch you next time. Bye.