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My Digital Farmer Podcast
296 How to Build a Farm Promotion Calendar That Drives Sales All Year Long
01:01:44
Are you tired of scrambling to figure out what to promote next in your farm business? What if you had a clear plan that mapped out your marketing goals, revenue targets, and sales offers for the entire year—ready to execute? In this episode, I’m...
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- [00:00]
Corinna Bench
How do you know when to promote the products in your farm business? Well, today I'm going to share with you how to figure that out. We're going to talk about promotion calendars. This is the roadmap that you design, typically in January, to help guide all of your marketing efforts. Over the next 12 months, we're going to talk through how you build them and what goes into the process. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to.
- [00:34]
Andrew
The My Digital Farmer Podcast.
- [00:38]
Corinna Bench
In today's market, it's not enough to.
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Andrew
Just grow your product.
- [00:42]
Corinna Bench
You've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast.
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Andrew
Where we reveal online marketing strategies and.
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Corinna Bench
Tips to help farmers like you get.
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Andrew
Better and more confident at marketing, learn.
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Corinna Bench
How to find more customers, increase your.
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Andrew
Sales, and build a strong brand for your farm.
- [01:01]
Corinna Bench
Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 296 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. How's everyone doing? Welcome back to the show, all of my favorite fan listeners and a big shout out to all of my new folks who are checking me out for the first or second time who have become intrigued by the podcast. I'm really glad you're here too, and I hope you become super fans and binge listen your way through all the archives. If you are new to the show, make sure that you subscribe. And if you aren't really sure where to get started, I always tell people to go to the first 10 episodes and learn the marketing lingo from there because that's how I designed them as an onboarding into the marketing space. But you can also get onto my email list that will be of huge benefit to you. It's free. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and when you do, I'm going to send you an email roughly every five days for like three months. And it's going to walk you through the key things you need to know, the key principles about marketing, the framework, the influencers you should be following, the elements that you should be building in your system, the books you should read, all that. It's going to turn you into a marketing maven. So subscribe, head to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Localline. Imagine all of your farm sales under one roof. Localline is the most comprehensive sales software.
- [02:55]
Andrew
Built for farmers and food hubs, selling.
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Corinna Bench
Direct to restaurants, schools, wholesale buyers, CSA and more. Features include e commerce, automated inventory management, a box builder, subscriptions, point of 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 LocalLine today, your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront at no cost, so you'll be up and running in no time. You can even pause your subscription in the off season now. Bonus As a podcast listener, localline is.
- [03:46]
Andrew
Also offering a free premium feature for.
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Corinna Bench
One year with your subscription when you use my coupon code. So to grab that, go to mydigitalfarmer.com localline that's one word and then enter the coupon code MDF2025. We love localline. We've been using it for years.
- [04:10]
Andrew
I highly recommend them make the switch today.
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Corinna Bench
And now back to the show. Today we are talking about promotion calendars. What's that you say? No worries, I was there once too. This is the document that serves as your roadmap for for the entire year of all the different promotional elements that you are going to leverage in your business. Now, it's not a hard and fast rule type of document. It's very organic. A lot of times things that I put on there I don't end up doing, but it does give me a basic plan that I put together at the beginning of the year to make sure that I hit my revenue targets, to make sure that I've identified the things I could even sell and when I should sell them to make sure that I serve my customers and that I meet my bottom line. So I'm going to walk you through how you go about putting one of these together. I've actually wanted to have this episode for a really long time and then this opportunity presented itself. I was invited to be a guest on the Growing for Market podcast and when he asked me, what do you want to talk about? I said, well, how about we talk about promotion calendars because this is going to launch in January and that's the perfect time to actually be building your promotion calendar and we can teach people how to do this. And I've never taught this anywhere before. So he said yes. And if you listen to the Growing for Market podcast, then you've already heard this episode before. Because my interview, well, was a little bit longer, I ended up editing it quite a bit for my version. But you have probably already heard it then. But I wanted to share the audio of that particular interview. So that was kind of the. The deal. When I arranged the interview with Andrew, I said, hey, I'll do this. I'd love to do it. Is there any way I could get a copy of that audio so that I can use it on my podcast, too? And so he agreed. So thank you, Andrew, for letting me do this. You are going to hear an edited version of that podcast interview. So if you want the whole longer version, there were some additional questions he asked me in his version. You have to go and listen to his episode, which is on the Growing for Market podcast. I'll put the link in the show notes. Now, I want to just say that the recording quality is. Is good, but there is sort of like this imbalance in the mic volume levels.
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Andrew
So.
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Corinna Bench
So you'll notice that when Andrew was interviewing me, his volume is going to sound a little more muted and I'm going to sound a little bit louder. And that's just because of the waveform audio, the way it worked out. I'm not sure if we were mic'd differently or what, but I tried to adjust it as much as I could on the editing side here, but just know that I may sound a little bit louder. I've tried to get his volume to go as high as I can.
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Andrew
It's just the way it is.
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Corinna Bench
But I'm going to turn it over now. You're going to listen to the recording from that podcast, and then at the end, I'll come back in with a goodbye. All right, here we go.
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Unknown
So I read on your website that you don't have any formal sales or marketing training, but that you were trying to grow your customer base for your farm and didn't really have an idea how to do it. Which honestly, sounds like a lot of farmers I know. And you say, one day in 2016, quite by accident, I discovered the world of online marketing. Can you tell us a bit about your journey into online marketing and how you use that to market your csa?
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Andrew
Yeah. So I remember feeling a lot of anxiety about trying to resell, get my CSA customers to renew their shares, and I would pitch this offer at the end of the year and say, hey, it's time to sign up again. And I would maybe get like 20 or 30% of them to, to do so right away. And I would go into the Christmas season, into the holidays, just full of anxiety because I didn't know how many of them were actually going to come back. As it turned out, more of them would come, like sign up in, in May. But I didn't. I just was never sure. And I wanted to come up with a system for getting those decisions to be made earlier. And. And so I decided that I just needed to figure out marketing. And at the time when I thought of marketing, I thought of social media. I didn't really know about all the other things, but that was kind of just really becoming hot at the time.
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Corinna Bench
And so I thought, let me go.
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Andrew
Study social media, specifically Facebook. And I found a podcast, I think it was called the Social Media Marketing Podcast. And I started listening to that. It was primarily targeting entrepreneurs in the digital marketing space, though. But I learned a ton. I mean, I just learned the framework of marketing. I binged through tons of episodes. I ended up going to their conference. They have a virtual conference every year. And in that process, I was exposed to a lot of the influencers in the digital marketing space. So, you know, there was a workshop on SEO, there was a workshop on email marketing. And in the process, I learned all the different marketing channels and the different ways you could do things. I mean, I did a deep dive and I thought to myself, I wonder if I could apply some of this stuff to a physical product like a csa. And I just decided that I would try. So I came back and I designed my first lead magnet. And if your listeners don't know what that is, we might talk about it later. But. And I figured out a way to get people to subscribe to my email list, and I made like four of them in my first two weeks. I was so excited. I started making a lot of video content for my CSA members and digital resources to help them be successful with the box and like a mini training course for them. I started playing around with email marketing and writing autoresponders and onboarding sequences for people just to help them figure out how to get acclimated into the community. And what I noticed is that the engagement level of my CSA went up. Huge amounts, huge amounts. And not only that, but when I decided to run a promotion at the end of the year to get them to renew, I had 70% of them come back in like, that one week period that I offered the promotion, which was like, mind blowing to me. So for the first time ever, I went into my Christmas, my Thanksgiving and Christmas season feeling at Peace, relaxed, knowing that I had sold most of them and that I would probably be able to make up the difference in the, you know, four or five months after the holidays. And so it was life changing for me. And that was kind of validating. It was like, there's something to this. And that is when I really began to explore what else can you do with digital marketing? And because it was so groundbreaking, um, I created a Facebook group, a private Facebook group for farmers, CSA farmers. I think there were like five people in it. For a year I was just talking to the same five people, but I didn't care. I was just sharing all the stuff I was doing in there, what I was so excited about. And slowly that group gained traction and I kept doing videos in there every week. And eventually I created a podcast. But it's just been my mission to help other originally CSA farmers. But now I've kind of grown my audience to direct to consumer farmers in general, of all kinds, just to help them learn the framework. Because I think a lot of us.
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Corinna Bench
Just didn't grow up.
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Andrew
We, we decided we wanted to be a farmer because we like growing produce, we like making the product or we like raising the animals, whatever, right? And it, we don't realize that there's more to it than that. In order to be able to make money, you have to learn how to sell. And that skill is not, at least at the time it was not focused on much at conferences. And so I just sort of saw a huge niche there, a gap where that I could fill and say, you know, I can help, I can help you with this. I can at least guide you to the places that you should go to learn about it. So that's how it was born. And now digital far, my Digital farmer exists to equip beginner intermediate farmers to teach them the ropes of marketing and help them feel confident that they know what to do and they learn how to build their own marketing system.
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Unknown
I worked my first full time season as an apprentice on a farm back in 2003. So I'm going to date myself here. It blows my mind that that was 20 years ago and we were totally focused on the growing aspect of things. And I think also if you look, if you look back at the issues of growing for market, for example, from that time or like the ag books that were coming out, they were really focused on the growing and not so much on the marketing or the business side of farming. You know, then there were some books like Richard Wiswal's book that were, that were a Game changer for us on farm business. But it seems like a promising trend that more farmers, maybe beginning farmers, are, are paying more attention to the business aspects of farming, like having a business plan, a plan for how much they need to sell, a plan for marketing to get the number of customers they need to make a living, and that kind of stuff. Because let's face it, most farmers don't get into farming for the business side of things. I know when my wife and I started selling at farmers markets, we just hoped there would be enough people to buy enough of our vegetables. So it sounds like the marketing you help people with works both for in person sales, like at farmers markets and farm stands and CSAs, or is it more applicable for online sales or both?
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Andrew
That's a great question. I feel like what I offer farmers is first and foremost the framework. The framework works for both digital marketing spaces like e commerce, or if you're more like, oh, I just go to the farmer's market or I have a roadside stand and I sell person to person. In either case, it helps to know that there is a typical journey that a prospect walks through in your brand to turn them into a super fan. And there are milestones along the way in this framework that your customer needs to hit if you want them to turn into a super fan. And the way that you help them hit those milestones might be different depending on whether you have a roadside stand or you're doing things through E commerce. But you have to create systems in your business to hit each of the stages. And so that's what I help teach is like, here's the framework. Here are the seven or eight things that need to be in the journey somewhere and you probably have some of them. But if you're missing a couple in the pipeline, your customers are just going to flow right out of that hole and they're not going to progress. So sometimes people will tell me, you know, I'm not having customers, they're just browsing or they're not actually buying or, you know, you hear a lot of common complaints that come through from, from different farm owners and almost all of them you can trace back to. Well, there's, there's a hole in your marketing system. There's one or two of those spots in the framework that you haven't built a system around. And, and that's just people not knowing, knowing the framework. And so that's kind of what I'm really passionate about teaching.
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Unknown
One thing that we talked a bit about is a promotion calendar for 2025 and so I don't know if that's one of the elements or if that just gives people a framework, but promotion. A promotion calendar seems like a good topic as we're talking here at the end of 2024. This interview will probably run early 2025, and I figure it's a good time of year when farmers have the time to plan a promotion calendar out for the coming year. Which sounds very helpful because there's nothing to kill your creativity like having a blank page or a blank social media post staring you in the face, thinking, I need to post something, but not knowing what to post. So I'm thinking putting the time into planning a promotion calendar now can make it a lot easier to actually get those promotions out to the world when it's busy time on the farm. So, first of all, what channels are we talking about here for farmers to reach potential customers?
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Andrew
Yeah, so I feel like there's. I mean, there are a lot of channels, Andrew, but I think there's maybe three or four that really jump out for me. The first one is the obvious one that everyone thinks of first. That's social media. I think that's actually most farmers default setting is like, oh, when we talk about marketing, they think, I mean social media. It is one of the platforms, one of the channels that we have open to us. I think its primary purpose, though, is actually more just to attract your ideal customer and get them onto your list. I don't see it being a huge driver of sales. There are exceptions, but that is a main platform for me to focus my attention on because I'm always trying to get new people into the sales pipeline. And that's its main purpose. That also means, like paid ads. It could also be like a local Facebook group kind of falls into that category. Another marketing channel would be email marketing. And this is one that I'm really passionate about. Most of my ROI comes from email marketing. It's direct, it's personal, it's very cost effective. If you know how to write well and you learn the unique copywriting style that email needs to be like email. Email writing is not writing a paper for your eighth grade literature teacher. It's a completely different type of writing. And I think that's where people get stuck and they're like, oh, I hate writing. It's just a style. And if you learn like how to write a great weekly email, if you learn things like how to create an actual promotional sales email that the right person will actually be excited to open because they're interested in the product if you learn the skill of what I call email nurture campaigns, these are a series of emails that automatically drip out to someone once they've subscribed to your list and they build connection. They don't pitch anything, they just share your story, they share anecdotes, they teach them the customer new things like that's a really powerful channel as well that you can really pitch, offer, ultimately pitch offers through but you're building a connection, building trust and then making your offers. I would also say another marketing channel would be the farm website. With your e commerce platform ideally kind of hooked together. This is the, the digital hub of your business. Your SEO all drives to that site as well. If you have online orders that you're taking, you need to have a really strong website presence so you can dedicate like you can have a promotions page there, you can have a pop up that comes up that has your recent promotion or how to get on your email list. So that's another really popular one. And the other two I would maybe mention here would be SMS or text messaging that's becoming more and more common in the digital space. A lot of people say oh nobody opens emails anymore but everyone checks their phone. Every text that comes through people are looking at. So that's another whole skill set. How do you write a text message because you don't have as much space but that one is, gets really high open rates. And then I was, I was going to say influencer marketing I feel like is maybe another, another one to think about and print marketing to some degree some, some people who are listening to the show definitely could benefit from, from using print marketing.
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Unknown
So probably depending on the, the, the individual farms goals those, all those channels are, are open to them and it depends on which one they're going to want to leverage based on their, their goals and like if they're right or go ahead.
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Andrew
Yeah, I mean as we're going to talk about when you build your promotion calendar, one of the things you ask in that process is okay now which marketing channels am I going to use? And you, you make that decision based on the, the level of importance of this promotion. You know, some promotions are there's a lot driving them and you, you need a lot of revenue to come from that promotion and so you're going to use multiple channels and you're going to put a lot more energy and time into the communication. Some things, you know, if you're just going to the farmer's market every weekend, you might just have to post on social and send an Email, you know, like, and that it's not as, as hardcore.
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Unknown
Yeah. Okay, so, so you can help people even figure out which, which of those channels to use.
- [21:18]
Andrew
Yeah.
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Unknown
Depending on their goals and markets and all that kind of thing. Okay, well, this is, this is at least sounds like marketing is like everything else in farming. I feel like most, most of the questions I ask on this podcast, the answer is it depends in some way or the other.
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Andrew
Right.
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Unknown
Because all the ad questions, it's always depends on your soil and your climate and your crop. And so I guess, I guess, I guess a lot of the questions in life the answer is it depends. And you just have to figure out what it depends on. So it does.
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Andrew
Or you could, or you could create a whole episode just on the marketing channels right there. You just can't go dive too deep.
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Unknown
Yes, yes. Well, I'm sure we could talk for days probably about this kind of stuff, which is why we will try to try to focus. Which brings me to the question is, so what exactly is a promotion calendar? So, yeah, I think I, I think I know what you mean, but just in case I don't. And for our audience, would you tell us what exactly a promotion calendar is?
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Andrew
Yeah. So this is a visual schedule or visual representation of all of the marketing activities that a business plans to accomplish to achieve their marketing goals over a set period of time. So it's usually an entire year, but some people only plan it for the, you know, six months at a time, maybe even by quarters. But I like to have a, a promotion calendar for the entire year. And it's going to include not just your paid, like your, your marketing activities where you're pitching offers and hoping to build revenue, but it's also including the things that fall under marketing that don't necessarily include getting a sale. So growing your email list, getting people to leave a testimonial or a review, these are all things that are in that marketing framework. I talked about those different milestones that you want customers to hit. So we're building mechanisms into our business or at least planning it out on paper, like, hey, this is what I plan to do to make sure that these things happen and when. Let me, let me be more clear. So the kinds of things that you would put into a promotion calendar would be things like your big time, your one time big product launches. So my CSA early bird renewal campaign, something like that, like I'm just going to, you know, stick that in the month of October and say that is a big event that I have to plan something around it also includes, like your monthly campaigns or your weekly. The things that you do every week. I, I go to the farmer's market, so I need to make sure I have a mechanism that fires every week to remind people to come and check me out at the farmer's market. Right. So you might have that in your promotion calendar. It could. It includes special holiday promotion things that only show up on Mother's Day or at Easter. I sell my hams. Right. So we sort of target holidays and we target certain products and bundles and packages. And it's just like to like a rough draft guide for us to look at visually and say, this month I'm going to be selling these items, trying to hit these revenue goals. And that served as a roadmap for us to, to kind of walk through our year then month by month and things don't creep up on us and surprise us like, oh, shoot, I have to sell this big thing next week and I'm not ready. We can see it coming because we've thought about it and we've paid attention to making sure there's white space and it's not overlapping. And do we have the energy for it because of the week, we're going to be seeding a whole bunch of stuff. Right. We. We think about all of that in advance.
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Unknown
Okay, well, yeah, that, that, that makes sense because I know, you know, once, once you get into the rush of the season, it can be so hard to keep track of what the plan is. It really helps to have a plan. So what can you tell us a bit about the process that you would use to make one?
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Andrew
Yeah, so. So this usually takes me about three to five hours. Like, I set aside an entire afternoon to work this out for my farm. Now remember, I'm. I'm a farm that, that's been around for 15 years, and I have. If you're just getting started and you're just going to the farmer's market, you might not have as much time to devote to this. Right. You're not going to have to do as much stuff. But I've got a lot of things going on. But the first thing that I do is I decide how long I'm going to plan it for, and then I decide on my marketing goals. So these are things like, I don't know, I want to grow my email list by 150 people this year, or I want to try to get my average order value in the online store to go up by $5. You know, I'll think through some general marketing goals because that's what's going to drive ultimately when I start plotting things, it's going to drive like the kinds of offers that I brainstorm and build to put into this promotion calendar. The next thing that I do is I review all of my data from the past year. And this is so, so important to run those reports in your E commerce platform. If you use E Commerce or on Square, just to see, like, what's the sales data telling me? What did I sell month by month, what were the popular items by enterprise, where was the money coming in? And that, that's really important because we don't want to spend a ton of energy promoting items that really don't make us a lot of money, right? So just making sure we know this and you'll get a feel for it. Most of you who've been farming for a while, you probably already know this. You don't even have to run the numbers. But I always say just look at your data and look at the promotions you did last year. So I review not just the numbers, but like I look at my promotion calendar from the year before because that often uses. Serves as a template for me. If I ran a Mother's Day brunch event in May last year and I knew it made this much then, and I've decided, yeah, that was, that was a great roi Then I'm gonna do it again and I'll just plot it there again and I'll. I'll know what goal to set and maybe I'll try to bump it up 10% higher to give myself a little bit of something to go for, right? But I'm looking at what did I do last year? Or I'm looking at some of the people I saw around me, some of the offers that I saw that I thought were really neat, and I'm like, oh, I want to try that next year. And I'm just kind of getting the lay of the land. The next step is to make a list of all of the key products or enterprises that are in your, what I call the product ladder that you want to promote. And for some of us, this is quite a list. And I think this is important because you want to make sure you don't forget anything, right? If you've got a product that does really well and you just forgot to think about it, sometimes you can forget to end up pitching it until it's too late, or you don't maximize what you could have gotten out of it because you didn't, you know, think about it in advance. So I Actually use post IT notes and I will just write the products down on all the post IT notes. Now I'm not writing carrot on one and cabbage on another. I'm not doing that. It's more like categories of things. So like my CSA share or my CSA four week stamp trial membership. My Thanksgiving pop up market online is a really big one. We do a plant sale that would go on a, on a post it note, right. I'm thinking about what are the big drivers of revenue, what are the popular products? Sometimes it's an individual product. Like if I know bulk tomatoes are hot sellers and I want to build a whole thing around that, I'm going to, that's going to get its own thing, right. So I just have it all these things laid out and then that allows me to go, okay, I got all this stuff I want to sell now where's it going to go? Right? How is it all going to fit into this 12 month period of time? Right. I'm looking also at like what are the key drivers of the revenue as I'm staring at those post IT notes. Because some of the post IT notes are more valuable than others, right. If you only have so much time and you decide I can't fit it all in, well, what are the ones that are like crushing it for you, that are bringing in the revenue that are your cash cow or you know there if it's like 30 of your revenue or maybe you make a ton of your sales in Christmas, my God, don't drop that from your promotion calendar. Right? Like that's gotta be there. So you have this, this giant like if you're a post it note girl like me, you've got this giant table now kind of a post notice. It's showing you these are the things that we need to fit into the calendar. So the next step is to look at are there any important dates on the calendar that I need to kind of block out? This sounds silly but like if you know that you want to take a vacation or there are certain weekends that you're just not going to be as available because it's planting season or whatever. Like you need to mark that down so that you don't accidentally create a promotion during a time that is just not feasible for you.
- [30:41]
Unknown
Right.
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Andrew
And so we always take a vacation in the middle of July. I know that sounds crazy, but we make it happen. And so I just make sure nothing, everything gets like built around that. And that's just a, you know, a value that we have as a farm.
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Unknown
I mean that Makes a lot of sense to me just because I'm imagining some of, you know, some of these, like you mentioned weekly promos might not be a big deal. Or like, you know, if you're just reminding people that you're going to be at the farmers market, that's probably something people could pull off pretty quickly. I'm thinking, you know, like maybe a picture of what's going on on the farm that week. What's picking will be at the farmer's market. But some of the bigger ones, like maybe CSA sign up or you know, get your, get your hams, you know, around a certain holiday or something like that might be something that you would want to invest a little bit more time in into if it's a really important part of your business. And so making sure that you've, yeah, like if you're going to be gone the week before that promo, that you do the work the week before that week so that you're not trying to put together a really important promo the same week. You're also trying to be on vacation. I mean, I can see how it can help. It can almost like help you balance the load between what needs to be done and when you, when you have the time to actually do it.
- [31:56]
Andrew
Right. Yeah. And you're also setting your revenue goals as you begin to plot them out onto the calendars or onto the months because it's really important that you pay attention to your cash flow situation. What does this promotion need to generate for you in terms of revenue? And that's not always a question that farmers ask in advance. And then it's no wonder that we get, get ourselves in trouble with cash flow because suddenly there isn't any. And it's like, well, you didn't plan a promotion to make, you know, before then to make sure you could cover that period. And so pay attention, pay attention to your cash flow needs. Look for those gaps in the, in the marketing space in general. Like even outside of our industry, there's this concept of marketing peaks. And there will typically be four marketing peaks in a year. That's what's kind of recommended, one for each quarter. And the marketing peaks recommend representing one of those larger promotions where you're generating a big chunk of revenue. Many retail businesses have a huge one in December, November, December. Obviously the holiday season is a, where they get a big chunk of their revenue for the year. But you've gotta also have some things earlier on. So that may mean you have to, to fabricate some kind of demand for a product. If you're going to need help with your cash flow. So I always will set some revenue goals for each of the promotions as well, either either by promotion or by month or by quarter. And then I'm making sure that the promotions that I put into that quarter are going to hit that revenue goal. And I'm. Then that gives me something to be tracking on a spreadsheet as well as the year progresses because I can look at the end of February and I can see am I on track, am I going to be able to get to that goal that I set with my, with my calendar. And if I've done my job right, I, I will.
- [33:52]
Corinna Bench
Right.
- [33:52]
Andrew
And if I'm, if I'm seeing that I'm short, then I know I have time to pivot and try and come up with something before the end of that quarter. So we're looking at the revenue. That's part of the process is to look at your revenue goals then for, for each month, making sure that your promotions that you put in there are, are meeting those. And then I also take a look at like, what are my marketing channels going to be. So we talked about this earlier. There's a, you know, a bunch of different options, but depending on how important the promotion is, how much revenue it needs to drive, I may have more marketing channels invested in those larger promotions. Most of the time I feel like level, you know, kind of level, low level promotions are things like just writing a weekly email or making sure I post things on social media. That's pretty easy to do. But for the stuff that matters, I'm, I'm building out like giant email campaigns and I've got giveaway contests and you know, I'm making the whole promo feel like an event. Creating excitement and engagement, building a bonus offer, whatever, having a, a raffle. There's all kinds of things you can do to, to create that sort of energy and vibe. And then kind of towards the end of the process is to very generally jot down or brainstorm like what are the promotional strategies going to be for these different things. So that's also going on the promo plan. And again I'm literally scribbling these things onto post it notes. I mean, it's just this is not, this is a rough draft. This is not meant to be. Like I've got my tagline down and I'm writing my email copy and I've got my social media image posts ready to go. Like no, that's, you do that month to month as things get closer. This is just the big picture plan. But I do want to know, okay, for my CSA early bird renewal campaign, like, I'm gonna have a giveaway. I'm gonna have a bonus. It's probably gonna be around $5, you know, in value. So I'm gonna have to have some budget for that. And I'm gonna. My goal is gonna be to sell 80%, because that's what I've done. You know, historically. We're gonna do a contest before, you know, whatever. Like, I can just sort of jot down things, but that's all I have to do. I don't have to go into the weeds and like, literally write the prank the campaign. That is not what the promotion calendar is about.
- [36:23]
Unknown
Yes. Okay. And so it's more like. It's. It's a plan. It's a reminder when you're busy. Oh, this, you know, this needs to be promoted in such a. Such and such a week. Or, or. I'm interested in this idea you said about. I think you called them sales peaks of. Is that like one every quarter? Is that just the idea that, you know, some of them might be obvious, like, like CSA signup week, you know, in the, in the fall for CSA farms. I think that's it's. It's so valuable to have the planning to be able to get people signed up early. But then I'm like, is it just. Well, you're. You're bound to sell more if you have a plan to do some promotion. Right. Because I could see how somebody might just do a promotion once a year. Yeah. Around the holidays or around CSA signup time and then not really have promos for the rest of the year. Is the general idea there? Well, you're going to sell more if you have some plan to promote whatever it is that you're selling more than once or twice a year.
- [37:21]
Andrew
Yeah. So here's the thing. Like people, farmers, the way that you will increase your revenue is really, there's four ways. The first ways you could raise your price. The second way is you could get more customers. The third way is you can increase the average order value, the amount they spend each time they do buy from you. Or you could increase the frequency at which they buy from you. And that means you have to pitch more offers. You have to come back to them repeatedly with, hey, buy again and now. Come and buy again. And now I have another thing you could buy. And for your super fans who want to collect everything you have, they don't mind when you ask them to do that. So this is why we have to create These marketing peaks. So usually you'll see things like in the, this is not necessarily inside the farming space, but I'll give you some examples of marketing peaks that are out there. Like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, like the start of school is sort of another transition point. Thanksgiving and Christmas, those are big ones. In New Year's there's usually a lull. The hardest place for retailers to, to get people to buy is usually in the first two months of the year. It seems like there's a big drop there in energy, but you're trying to take advantage of the fact that customers have buying habits around certain times of the year. Usually they're around cultural moments or holidays. And so we want to tap into that and create some kind of a promotion. When the customer is looking for something to buy, there's energy to buy. So we build a marketing peak or an offer around those times.
- [38:57]
Unknown
Right, okay, well, yeah, the big guys do it. I mean the, honestly the, the, the example that comes to mind is Prime Day. Right. Is, you know, I'm not a huge fan of Amazon, but. Right. Wasn't, weren't they like. My understanding of Prime Day is that they were like, okay, people buy tons of stuff on Black Friday. Wouldn't it be great to have another day like that? And they were like, let's create an artificial holiday or yeah, sales holiday called Prime Day. And so, so, you know, I'm thinking obviously probably most farmers don't want to be Amazon. They don't. You know, they almost want to be the anti Amazon. But there's definitely things that farmers can learn, you know, from, from, from big businesses.
- [39:34]
Andrew
And yeah, we have something called Tax Free Day. I don't know if that's something you have in your state where on this particular week there's no sales tax that's levied.
- [39:46]
Unknown
We don't, I've heard of tax holidays. We do not have one in Maine. But, but that's interesting.
- [39:51]
Andrew
But that, that, that's another example of some, you know, fabricated day that's now turned into this huge shopping day for people around because it's before the school season starts and they're all trying to buy their school supplies and their kids clothes and not have to pay sales tax. So.
- [40:07]
Unknown
Right, okay. So yeah, you might have, you know, I'm thinking farmers might have a particular time of year where they know a certain flower or certain vegetable is going to come on. You know, the, the best I, the best example I can think of this from our own marketing was more when, when we had an overabundance of something. I mean, I, I think this is a classic farmer thing, is to give away recipes. And so I'm thinking, and we would do that at the farmer's market, you know, like, you know, we got too much of this, make sure and have a recipe about it. And that worked really well for us. So I imagine with you they would take it to the next level and put that recipe in an email or put it on a social media post or something like that as a way to do the same thing.
- [40:53]
Andrew
Yeah, that's a, that's a great, a great example. Sometimes you're also looking for opportunities to create a new product, right? Like, I know we just decided a few months ago we wanted to expand our CSA and offer now a meat share. Now we don't actually produce the meat, but we have a partner that we found and they're going to sell it to us wholesale and then we're going to mark it up and we'll, they'll just bring it to us frozen, already ready to go, and we just kind of pass it. And this is going to create some easy additional revenue for us. When we announced it during our early bird renewal campaign, people went crazy and they're so excited about it. And then starting in January, we'll actually pre sell them and pitch them. Right, but this is a question that I asked, like, is there something new, a new product I can develop or promote and create buzz around that? So sometimes you, you artificially manufacture energy and you create energy for your brand around by creating a new promotion or offering a new product. So this does take some brainstorming and some imagination. When you sit down there and you look at, okay, what have I done in the past that's worked well? What have I seen other businesses, industries do that I could modify for my farm? Like, could I bundle something really cool? Could I take advantage of a holiday? Like if you are like they have all kinds of things like national holidays, you know, like national donut day and national take your mom out to ice cream day. Like if you sell ice cream, then you should totally like snag one of those hashtags and you know, build a whole promotion around it. Right. Maybe it'll do something. Who knows? Um, so we're, we're just, we're just looking at what are other businesses doing? Can we take that template? A lot of it is just trial and error and sometimes you find a real, a real winner. I. Oh, I have one more example that of an offer that just did really well. It was Around Thanksgiving, when my husband and I, a few years ago, we had all this food left over at the end of the season, and we wanted to donate it. We were just like, let's just donate it because, like, there's too much work to try and, like, figure out what to do with it. And then I was like, well, let's get our customers to donate it for us. Because then it's not just us taking it to a food bank, but we.
- [43:05]
Corinna Bench
Just put it all in a bunch.
- [43:05]
Andrew
Of bags, like, hundreds of bags, and we just have them, you know, claim one. They're free. They just have to claim them on the online store and they can come pick it up. It's a $30, you know, bag, basically worth of produce. And then they can bring it to someone and cheer them up. Somebody who needs. Who needs some food this season. And we called it the Feed the need bag. And I was like, I'll just throw some other things in the store, too, while I'm there. And it ended up being one of our largest grossing, like, online store days in history, because people came for that free offer, and then while they were there, they're like, I'm going to throw a bunch of vegetables in my cart, too. But that was just an example of an idea that came out of, hey, let's figure out a way to be generous. Let's figure out a way to give our food away. And ironically, it ended up making us a whole lot of money was like. Which is a beautiful bonus. But now that is a staple in our promotion calendar. It shows up every Thanksgiving because it creates so much energy. It also creates revenue. But our customers ask for it. They're like, oh, I love this. This is a tradition now. I love you allowing me to be an ambassador of goodwill. And, yeah, so sometimes you come up with really neat ideas just out of luck.
- [44:19]
Unknown
Yeah. Well, that's. That's brilliant, because where I thought you were going to go with that is that the. The giveaway was, like, nurture content. If that. If that's, like, that's an idea I hear sometimes. Is that you. I mean, of course, like, you can't sell in every single post or email to your customers. Are they going to get sick of it? And I thought you were just going to say that that got people involved and sounds like maybe that's what you were expecting, but it sounds like it turned out to be a great sale. It ended up making a lot of sales for you, in addition to presumably making your customers feel connected to the farm and, like, they got to do this great thing of helping to, you know, give give away food to somebody that they, they know needs it. So that's, that's a really to, to turn that, that event into a sales, A sales event for the farm that.
- [45:09]
Andrew
That comment actually makes me think about. This was a point I wanted to make. The, the promotion calendar is not just about making sure that we plan out the things we're going to do to make money, but we also want to ask those questions.
- [45:24]
Corinna Bench
So, like, what are my other marketing goals?
- [45:26]
Andrew
Like, do I want to nurture people along? Because you have people who have just come into your sales funnel who are not ready to buy yet. They're just not ready.
- [45:34]
Corinna Bench
They're still warming up to you.
- [45:35]
Andrew
They're checking out other, other options. They're watching your videos on social. And, and so we need to have content that's for those eyes too. And so I'm always looking through the lens of, okay, now that I've put out all the things on this calendar that are going to make me money, what are the things I need to make sure I'm doing? What are the mechanisms that I need to have running in the background that are warming up the audience? Right. So, and it's just a simple, like, oh, make sure you're posting on social, like these frequently asked questions. Get into the social calendar on a monthly basis. You always have a, a video or a video unboxing of your CSA box. Like that should be in there just to make people aware of what you do, what you sell. Um, or make sure you have a lead magnet post so that you're getting people onto your email list. Or maybe a goal is like, I'm going to create a new lead magnet this year for this new product that I eventually want to sell because I know it's going to attract that kind of person. Right. So you're looking at the other marketing goals and you're making sure that you have created mechanisms in the calendar somewhere so that those things happen as well.
- [46:50]
Unknown
Well, that's great. I'm so glad that you made that point because, you know, I'm thinking about how you're talking about using social media to maybe get people to your email list. Well, you know, some of those people might be interested enough to get your email, but they're not customers yet. And I'm thinking that that kind of sort of like nurture content, you know, shows people who you are, how you grow and, you know, what you do, and it's a opportunity to show them what you're really about. So they get to the point of being like, oh, yeah, I do like these people. I like the way they do what they do. I'm going to sign up for the CSA or get a meat. Share, share, whatever.
- [47:28]
Andrew
Yeah. The nurture. I have a thing called farm marketing school that farmers subscribe to and they build the different pieces of their marketing system. And the email nurture sequence is one of the most popular projects for farmers who come in there. They are really eager to put that in place because it is such a powerful driver of the engine. If you can, you know, once you get someone onto your list, you do not pitch them right away. Like, that is a bad mistake. They will, they will unsubscribe quickly. You really want to have some kind of a mechanism like this Autoresponder that's maybe two weeks long, 10 days that's just dripping out, I don't know, four emails over two weeks that just slowly introduces you to them and yeah, creates that affinity. That is such an important step. And a lot of people don't take the time to warm up to their audience. There's, there's a metaphor that's used a lot in the marketing space of dating, and that marketing is a lot like dating. Too many farmers are meeting a person for the first time and getting down on 1D, one knee and asking them to marry them and make a big purchase. Right? When really what they should do is ask them, can I have your number? Can we go out on a date first? Right. Can we get to know each other a little bit? Can I meet your parents? You know, there's all these other steps that happen before the big ask, and if you don't honor those, it feels icky. That's when it feels salesy. So we build these other structures in place in our business to move the customer slowly along to hit these milestones so that when they get pitched for the first time, it feels okay to them, it feels okay to you. You do it with confidence because you know you've delivered so much value on the front end that it feels absolutely good to, to say, I know I can help you. This is a product that will, will meet your need and will solve your problem. And then the customer feels okay about it too. And many of them, more of them will convert because you honored the process of building the relationship.
- [49:25]
Unknown
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I'm wondering if you would call, you know, pictures of people's farms nurture content in a way because, you know, I'm thinking farmers are busy. You know, they're probably plenty busy just with what's going on out in the field. But if you neglect that sales and marketing side, you're not going to have enough customers. And I'm thinking that one really easy post that a lot of farmers could pull off is just a picture of, you know, how the crop is looking in the field or just a beautiful shot of the farm, because that should be the kind of thing they could take a quick picture, just throw a caption on there, and that should nurture that relationship with somebody who's already a customer thinking about being a customer. Because then they're like, oh, that's where my food or flowers are come from. Or like, like, yeah, this is a beautiful farm. This is the kind of place that I want to support. You know, my, my dollars can help this farm keep being a farm. And I want to ask you that question because, you know, we're all so busy, we have to. We have to budget our time. I think farmers sometimes might be like, well, why am I gonna just like, take a picture? You know, I'm not gonna put the time into making a social media post unless it does something for me. And so you, you know, you tell me this one might, I might be off the wrong track here, but I was thinking, like, even just a simple picture of what the farm looks like can be a nurture post in a way, because it makes the person, like, understand what the farm is and probably want to want to support it and maybe able to move them along on that journey from interested person to. To customer. Like, is that, does that make sense as a nurture?
- [50:59]
Andrew
I think the question to ask is, what is the desire of your customer's heart? Like, what is driving them to check out your farm in the first place? For many farm customers, they're looking for transparency and knowing they can trust where their food comes from. And so to be able to see a picture of the field and the growing practices being played out, like, that's why that kind of a picture works, because it's feeding that need that the client has that I need to feel secure about where my food comes from. So that's really the question you should ask about. Well, would this picture serve my purposes? I also think things that should show up, you want to build a nurture trust, you need to have pictures of yourself with your eyes looking into the camera. I know that's hard, but pictures of people always do better on social media than pictures of things. So don't be afraid to put yourself in there. If you can get pictures of your Customers using your product, that's also gold because, and get permission obviously to use them. But you want a customer to see themselves in that client and that's what happens. They, it's called mirroring. It's like they hold a mirror up to themselves and they imagine themselves doing what that customer is doing, whether it's eating something yummy from the kitchen table or having a bunch of people around them looking like they're having a blast around your produce or a child scooping up kohlrabi. A kohlrabi stick and some dip. You know, and every mom out there is like, I want my kid to be like that, you know. So we're, we want to try and also get customer photos too. Testimonials are huge.
- [52:43]
Unknown
Yes. But I am a very visual person so, so paint the picture for me here. Corinna, you've got, so you're sticking all these post its up on a wall or on a calendar. Like how are you, how are you managing this?
- [52:56]
Andrew
Yeah, I actually have a paper, I have one of those big paper calendars and I'm, I'm just. Because it's bigger. Because the post it notes take up a lot of space.
- [53:03]
Unknown
Yeah. And so I'm just putting glance kind of thing.
- [53:06]
Andrew
Yes, yes. Month at a glance. And so I'm just placing them originally just on the calendar. But then if I want to get really into the minutia I'll even like try to stick them on the right, on the right weeks because I want to make sure that we don't have overlapping competing things. Like if you have two like level one hardcore promotions going on at the same time, that's not a good idea. Right. We want to kind of space them out. So I'll have all of that roughly in the right week. I'll have the goals, the revenue goals written out on that posted as well. And in my early years I took, I took that information from that and I put month by month onto like a piece of paper and I would, I wrote it out. But now honestly I just use, I just keep the calendar and I just look at it. I'm, I'm experienced enough that I can just see, oh, I've got those two things going on this month. I've already got resources that I, you know, from the past. I'm just going to pull them out, rinse and repeat them and maybe adjust them a little bit. That's the other thing that's beautiful about this. It's hard to build it the first time but then the next year Please do not throw away your promotion calendar. Like, use it again. And as you're building the promotions, save the stuff that you do, like the email that you sent out and the promotion social media posts that you put with that promotion, like put them in a Google Google Drive, like a special Google folder, so that all you have to do is go back and find the crib sheets. Right. And you could repost the same stuff the next year. No one will remember, you know, or maybe with. If you use Canva, which is the graphic design program that I use, you can have folders for each of the different promotions and you just go and find the graphics in there and pull them out again. Right. So that's the beauty of this, is you, you have, you save this stuff somewhere so that it's easy to, to locate and redo.
- [55:04]
Unknown
Right, Right. Because you're going to be doing CSA renewals the same time the next year.
- [55:09]
Andrew
So I have been doing the same process for the last seven years and getting the same results. It's rinse and repeat. I change the bonus out every year, but I use the same emails, I use almost exactly the same social media copy.
- [55:24]
Unknown
So, yeah, I mean, speaking of that, I've really, I've enjoyed this conversation. I think there's a lot there for, for our listeners and you've been very generous with your time. Is there anything else you want to say about any, about promotion calendars or anything else we talked about today before we let you go?
- [55:42]
Andrew
So, yeah, maybe I do want to say one more thing here. I like, I don't want people to feel bad if they don't do everything on the promotion calendar, because that's very common. You have this plan and then there's always a few things that when you get to that month, you're like, yeah, I don't feel like doing National Donut Day or whatever. You know, like, you just, and then you're just like, I'm not going to do it, I'm going to drop it. Or you see another opportunity come up that feels really exciting and you follow the energy and that creates revenue for you or some other asset in your business and you should follow that energy. So, you know, this is just meant to be a rough draft, a guide and use it, change it, develop it, evolve it. It's, it's. Yeah, don't, don't shame yourself if you didn't do that thing in September you said you were going to do.
- [56:30]
Unknown
All right, well, that makes me feel better because I don't know if I've ever sat down and planned out an entire year of promotions ahead of time. But this conversation is making me think.
- [56:39]
Andrew
That I should build one. Commit to doing it.
- [56:44]
Corinna Bench
Even if all you do is first.
- [56:45]
Andrew
Quarter or the most important, the most important quarter of the year where you make the bulk of your money, maybe you can commit to doing that one and just test it out.
- [56:57]
Unknown
Yeah, there you go. Get started. Do it, people.
- [57:05]
Corinna Bench
Many thanks to Andrew from the Growing for Market podcast for that interview and for allowing me to repurpose it on my own podcast. Work smarter, not harder, right? If you liked today's episode, please go. Leave me a rating or a review or share it with another farmer friend. Send them the link and tell them you gotta listen to this Now. If you want some help building promotion calendars, I have a couple of resources that I think you might want to grab. And the first one is a freebie. It's a list of, I think 30 different offer formulas. So one of the struggles that you might have is you build your promotion calendars. You're trying to think of what are the promotions that I could even run, what are some of the different offers that I could make. And so I created a guide to help farmers with that. It has 30 of the most popular types of offers that you'll see across different industries. Things like the weekly special or the buy one, get one free. Those are two examples of offer styles. And having this document can really help you when you're trying to brainstorm how do I go about meeting some of these revenue goals that I want to make or promotion goals in my promo calendar. So you can grab that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com offer and you'll be able to download that freebie and just have it at your desk or right there when you're working on the promo calendar so that you can kind of page through it and it might inspire some ideas. The second resource that I have available to you is to actually take the Building a Promotion Calendar workshop that's inside of Farm Marketing School. So you could go and subscribe for a month Inside of Farm Marketing School, you'd go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS this is my monthly online membership program that is sort of diy. It helps beginning and intermediate farmers build out the different elements of their marketing system. And there are classes for each of the different elements that you might want to have. And one of those classes is how to build a promotion calendar. It's a 30 day project build. You watch the on demand class, you download all the resources from the resource folder and then you take a few days. Usually takes about six to eight hours to do the different projects to actually implement and build the thing that you learned about. So it's a really good class. It's one of my favorite ones and this is the time of year to be doing it in January. So go check out Farm Marketing School. Even if it's just for 30 days. Take that one class and then you can decide if you want to take some of the other ones and build additional marketing assets. Part of our marketing schools that we also meet once a month for a virtual zoom call so you can come and do get some coaching or meet up with some other farmers and talk through some of your questions and share community. I love the farmers that are in there, so I'd love to have you join if only for a month. Okay, so that's another resource that you have at your disposal I want to make sure you know about. All right, if you want to get onto my email list that's free, that's going to give you some resources to help you get better at your marketing. I'll send something to you about every five days and you can get on that list by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe today's show notes can be found at mydigitalfarmer.com 296 and don't forget I'm also on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I'd love to meet up with you there. Thanks for joining me today and talking all things promo calendar. I want you to go build one. Okay. Even if you just spend a couple of hours and you get your most important quarter of the year down in writing, do it. You'll feel so much more confident moving through your season. You can quick go glance at that promo calendar plan and you'll be able to look out two weeks ahead and be like, oh, I better start working on this. And you'll feel just really strong about I know where my revenue is coming from. I know what I need to work on to make sure I hit my goals.
- [61:13]
Andrew
So do it.
- [61:14]
Corinna Bench
This is important. Even if the first year you do it and it's imperfect, that's okay. Just get something started and every year you'll get better and better. Have an awesome week, everyone. Remember, I believe in you and I'll catch you next time.
- [61:27]
Andrew
Bye Bye Sa.