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My Digital Farmer Podcast
300 The Power of Anniversaries: How to Use Milestones to Market Your Farm Business
00:46:11
It's our 300th episode!! Wow. Can I make a confession?... I didn't realize this important milestone moment until 10 days ago. And by then, it was too late. I realized I had missed my chance to make this moment a "Big Deal" and build momentum for my...
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Corinna Bench
Did you know that milestones like anniversaries or big achievements aren't just for cake and candles. They're actually powerful marketing tools. And I just hit a big one. Episode 300 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's episode, we'll talk about how you can use your farm's milestones to build momentum, deepen customer loyalty, and and even boost sales. 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 competent 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 300. Oh, my gosh. Of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I am your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers that 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 today? Welcome back to the show. A big shout out to all of my loyal listeners. This is a big one. We just hit the 300th episode of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. Can I get an amen? And let's just pause and celebrate that for a moment. I don't do enough of that when I hit big milestones. I don't know if you're like this, but I just kind of let them pass and I notice them sometimes, but I don't pause and give them their due. And this is one of them. So if you have been around for a long time listening to me from the beginning, big shout out to you. High five. Thank you for your loyalty. If you're new to the show, I'm glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. Go check out my first 10 episodes. If you are green in the marketing space, you're not really sure what's going on. You want to learn the ropes because that's how I designed them when I first recorded them 300 episodes ago. Now you can also get onto my email list. That is a great way to get better at farm marketing because I'm going to send you an email every five days for about three months. And I'VE put those in a very specific order to introduce you to the key marketing strategies. I take you to some of my best episodes. I show you the influencers, the tools you need, the free stuff, lots of giveaways. So it's really good. You can subscribe by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at Localline. If you're like me, winter is your downtime to plan and prep for the upcoming growing season. Set yourself up for success with localline, the best sales platform built for farms. Localline is the most comprehensive software for farmers and food hubs that's out there selling direct to restaurants, schools, wholesale buyers, running a CSA, and more. With features like e commerce, automated inventory management, they have subscriptions, a box builder, point of sale, and more. Local Line helps you grow sales. It saves you time and streamlines your operations. In fact, on average, this is cool. Farms that use Local Line grow sales by 23% and they increase their average order size by 9.5% annually. So ready to switch to sales software that does it all? Local Line has no setup fees, no sales percentages, and your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront for free so you'll be up and running in no time. As a podcast listener, localline is also offering a free premium feature for one year with your subscription when you use my coupon code MDF2025. So to claim it, go to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and then enter that coupon code MDF2025. Don't wait. Start your season strong with Local Line today. And now back to the show. So about 10 days ago I realized that my 300th episode was coming up. And I kept putting it off and putting it off because I felt so much pressure to do something special with it. And in the back of my mind I knew it was a big deal that I'd hit this number. I wanted to have a really important guest on the show, something that would signify this achievement. And I kept struggling with like, what do I talk about? What do I make the focus of that episode to give it the honor that it's due. And I'll be honest, I couldn't think of anything. And so I kept recording podcast episodes, but I like skipped ahead. I was like, okay, I'll do episode 301 and I'll pre record 302. And three days before this episode finally drops, I still didn't have a topic and I didn't have a guest And I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm going to let this go by and I'm not going to make a big deal about it. And I was feeling really, really bad. And then I had this thought, you know what? Let me take the pressure off myself, cut myself some slack, and let's actually turn this into the topic. Let's go really meta and let's notice that I missed the opportunity to plan a really cool hypey thing around this. And let's talk about milestones in our business. They aren't just personal, they're powerful marketing tools. They're opportunities for you to ramp up momentum and I think even increase sales. And today I want to show you how you can leverage your milestones. So I want you to think about a milestone that might be coming up in your farm business. I know for us, we are going to be celebrating our 20th year in business in two years. And so putting this outline together for today's episode actually got me thinking about what would I do for shared Legacy Farms when we hit our 20th anniversary year. Like, I don't want to miss a chance to do something special. And so I started actually thinking about some ideas for that. I know it's still two years away, but this framework for this episode actually got me excited about turning it into an event. Not just one event, but making a big deal about it all year long. Finding ways to continue to celebrate and honor the achievements and the people that brought us there and go back into our history and relive some of it. So I'm hoping to bring some of that into today's discussion. But I want you, as we go through this today, to be thinking about what your milestone might be. Do you see one on the horizon? I'll give you some examples of types of things that could be milestones in a moment. But try to listen to this content through that lens and hopefully you'll come up with one or two things that you might be able to do intentionally to create some excitement in your brand. Now stick around to the end of the episode because I'm going to share with you a really awesome bonus that I put together to help you brainstorm some of your milestones to build yourself a promotion or marketing campaign around that milestone for your business. So make sure you tune in to the end. Cause I'm going to share with you how you might be able to access that. Let's start out with identifying what milestones should you even be thinking about celebrating. I have kind of three different categories here, and the first One would be any time based milestone. So if you have a farm anniversary, the founding of your business, right? So maybe the five year mark, the 10 year mark, 15, 20 years in business, 30 years, 50 years. Right. If you're one of those lucky farms that's been around for a long time, if you have a partnership with another business or some kind of a collaboration and you want to celebrate an anniversary around that, like when you started collaborating with them, that's another way. And now you have two businesses that are making a big deal about something. It could also be remembering an achievement. So an achievement based milestone. This might be when you hit a revenue goal or the number of products that you sell. If you have a goal to hit a certain number. I know in our early years we would make a big deal of trying to hit our 400 CSA memberships that year that we had to actually jump and double in size to hit 400. We actually made a little thermometer and we colored it in and we were all together rooting as a community to try and get it all the way to the top. And when we did, we had a big party and we were really excited about it. Maybe CSA membership growth. So when you welcome your 500th member or thousandth member, something like that could be really powerful as well. Maybe it's things like your social media followings. When you hit a certain number of followers on your YouTube channel, if you want to make a big deal about that, that's something to think about. And then community centered milestones. So this is when you might count the customer, right? So customer count milestones. Like join us in celebrating 250 CSA members, team member anniversaries. Maybe you want to spotlight your crew member who has been there for 20 years and you want to throw a party for them or honor them. It could be a product specific celebration, like hey, it's our 10th year of our signature chicken bone broth product that everyone loves. Right? You celebrate the birthday of a very specific product. So what I want you to do is look ahead on your calendar and try to identify two to three milestones or at least one milestone that you could celebrate this year and maybe just look out way ahead into the future and identify how far away is my next farm anniversary opportunity. Right. Where I can make an excuse for throwing a big party or creating a lot of rah rah energy. Now why is it important to celebrate milestones? Why do they matter so much? Well, they give your customer a reason to notice you again in a different way and for them to Reflect on why you've been important to them. And I think that reflection piece is a key part. When I was thinking this through the lens of my celebrating a 20th anniversary in a few years, like, I'm really excited about getting our customers to think back to all of the ways our farm has impacted their lives, to remember specific growing periods, memories that mean a lot, ways that we've impacted and transformed their kids, their diets, their health, and for them to actually stop. We make them stop and think about this moment in time, like how we've impacted their life and we've intersected with them and shaped them. I think that can be really powerful, and they can end up giving credit to your part in their story. People also love being part of a success story. Have you ever noticed that people want to be a part of a winning team? And so when you share your success story through celebrating a milestone and you remind them, hey, you were a part of this team. You helped make this happen. Customer, we appreciate you. That draws them in, and it builds loyalty. There's this kind of psychology of celebration. And I picked up on this back in the days when I was a youth pastor and I was in charge of, like, 30 or 40 volunteers. And I learned that it was important to not only recruit well, to recruit the right kind of person who had passions and gifts for what I wanted them to do, but I had to equip them and train them. I had to excite them and make sure their needs were being fulfilled. And then I had to make sure I celebrated them and appreciated them. And I had many different ways that I did that throughout the year, because the psychology of celebration really matters. And this is one of the reasons why I think my particular ministry thrived so much. And I didn't have trouble finding volunteers at the church. People would often ask me, what is your secret? And I was like, well, you know, you just recruit well. You train them, and you take really good care of them, and you love on them, and celebrating milestones feels good. And so that creates all kinds of personal, positive, emotional connections to your brand. And we want to create positive, emotional connections. If you remember the podcast I did a few weeks ago about my son Josiah's signing day at his new high school and how going to that event to watch him walk across a stage, stage and sign his name on the board and how everyone cheered, like, the whole auditorium cheered for him, that created a positive, emotional, emotionally charged moment for me that I associated with the school. And that's a good thing. We want to create these Positive emotional moments for our customers and celebrating milestones does that it also, there's a little bit of like scarcity and that FOMO fear of missing out going on when you're celebrating these limited time anniversary things. Like if you have a limited time anniversary offer, for instance, that's going to appeal to someone, someone's going to buy that product because they're going to feel like, oh, this is the only time I'll ever be able to buy this, I don't know, 20th anniversary t shirt or whatever, right? I'm kind of thinking off the top of my head right now, but it's going to feel special like this, this moment isn't going to come back again. And so you can leverage that. So, you know, an example is like a Farm hits their 10 year anniversary and they might offer 10% off for 10 days or come up with some kind of, you know, theme like that. And a person's like, oh, I need to take advantage of this because this is only going to happen one time. So I want you to really think about, man, am I one of those business owners that's skipping the celebration step. Right? I'm raising my hand here. So if that's you, like, no shame. How often do we set goals for ourselves as entrepreneurs? Well, sometimes we don't even do that, but we cross a significant line. We do something that's pretty awesome or, you know, a certain amount of time has gone by and that's significant and noteworthy. And yet we don't pause and pat ourselves on the back and notice the journey and reflect and just do all that feel good vibe work. Right. So I want us to start planning intentional marketing campaigns around our milestones. So let's remember these are a chance to create all kinds of momentum and energy and feel good emotions within our customer base. So how do we celebrate milestone moments creatively? So once you've identified what they could be, here are a few kind of lenses to look through as you are mapping out, like, what does this look like practically? And this was the fun work that I did when I thought through this exercise through the lens of my own 20th, 20th anniversary for our farm business. It's coming up in two years. I sat down with ChatGPT and I said, hey, Chat, like, help me think through this particular scenario and like, what are the questions I should even be thinking about so that I can create an awesome experience for the whole year? You know, not just obviously I can think of the idea of let's do some kind of a big party. Okay, that's easy. But, like, what else can I do? And help me brainstorm some ideas and categories of thinking around this topic so that with the goal of, you know, creating emotional connection, creating loyalty, getting testimonials, making additional sales, driving revenue, getting new customers in. Right. And that conversation back and forth with ChatGPT got so many cool ideas and got me really excited about putting this together. And I can see the potential. And actually what I want to do this is I was going to bring this up at the end, but I'll just do it now. I want to share that back and forth conversation that I had on ChatGPT, because what I did is I literally copied and pasted the prompts that I used and its responses to me and then my kind of response back where I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. What about this? And here's some other things I'm thinking about now. And then it would respond back to me and it was awesome. And so I like copied and pasted it. I put it into a Word document. And if you are a member of Farm Marketing School, I am going to put that resource inside on the homepage. Way down at the bottom where I feature a podcast episode. I'll have this one linked up and you can go down and find it and look for the link that's going to take you to that Word doc and it's going to include like almost a whole page of different prompt questions that you could put into the ChatGPT model, or any other AI model for that matter, and ask it for help to give you some of these ideas for your own milestone anniversary that you want to celebrate. Okay. So if you want to grab that resource, it's just gonna. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited about it. You're gonna get a ton of ideas. If you're going to have an anniversary for your farm business, you're going to get a lot of value from that document because those ideas that I'm going to take and run with can totally work for you too, and it's going to get your mind spinning. So. But the prompt questions are amazing. So I encourage you to to grab that if you are not inside Farm Marketing school yet and you want to go try it out for a month. So much good stuff in there. But you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS and that resource will be in there as a perk of membership. So just look for it again down at the bottom where I post the podcast. It'll be right there in that section, look for the link. Okay, so here are some of the different categories that you might think through when you're celebrating your milestones creatively. Number one, think through the lens of events and experiences. What could you do in your farm business that is some kind of an event or experience for your customer? So for example, hosting a farm anniversary party or open house, that could be a farm tour. It could include local food trucks, live music, maybe it's a VIP event for your CSA members. So you know, in my case, our business is predominantly driven by our core CSA members, like they are the heart of our farm. And so I'm definitely going to have a VIP members only type event, probably several of them, because I want to reward their loyalty and we want to really celebrate the story of how the CSA has developed over the last 20 years. So that could be a private dinner, it could be a behind the scenes tour. It could be a dinner that's not even like on your farm. It could be hopping around to some of the different farm, excuse me, some of the different collaborators in your farm business. Maybe it's a progressive type dinner or a progressive type tour. It could be a themed farm market day, 20 years, 20 veggies, special marketing event. That's not a great example, but you could be celebrating it at the market too. Another lens to think through is are there any special offers or promotions that I could run to celebrate that milestone? So maybe it's a discount campaign, like celebrating 15 years with 15% off this weekend. Or a limited edition product, special jam flavors, or a seasonal bundle or you know, a one time anniversary bundle that's like super generous and super over the top that you're never going to offer again until another 10 years from now. Right. Or it's a custom flavor that is, you know, special for this year and you're going to feature that. It could be a buy one, get one deal. So our fifth year in business, buy five, get one free. It could be some kind of a seasonal bundled offer, spice kit or a limited edition collection of seasonal herb mixes for your holiday season. Okay, I'm just sort of riffing here, but again, that whole idea of limited edition, this isn't going to come back around. Or just that limited edition T shirt that will only be sold once and then it's gone. Maybe you're celebrating when you hit 10,000 followers on one of your social media accounts and you have a really big deal around that on that particular week. Or a customer appreciation giveaway where you offer a free pint of cherry tomatoes. To every 10th customer. Because it's your 10 year anniversary. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. This is my monthly online membership program for beginning to intermediate farmers that's designed to teach you the ropes of farm marketing, but also more importantly, to help you actually build the most essential marketing assets that you need to have in your farm business if you want to thrive. Now, I know you know how important systems are. You have systems in your business for all kinds of things in the production realm, but you also need systems in your marketing and sales, especially if you want to scale up and get to that point where you can have a team, hire a great group of people and be less and less involved in the minutiae of your business. So inside of Farm Marketing School, there are over 15 different classes that you can take. You join for a monthly fee and you can have access to all of them. You can binge them all if you want, or you can be selective about which ones you want to deploy. They're each designed to take about 30 days and you watch the training video and then you actually build that particular marketing asset. Whether it's updating the homepage of your website, or it's writing an email nurture sequence, or it's practicing writing a weekly email really well, or building out different kinds of promotion offers. So many different projects inside of there, I also give you a resource folder with examples and templates to shortcut the process. Sometimes I have bonus videos that give you a step by step of how to do the tech work. It's really good, it gets really high marks. So I encourage you in your off season to take some time and invest in building out the sales and marketing systems in your business. To join Farm Marketing School and try it out for a month, head to mydigitalfarmer.com for forward/fms. And now back to the show. The next lens you can think through is customer engagement. So how can you get your customers to interact with you and engage with your brand in this milestone moment? Because that's when you remember the customer value journey. Engagement is one of the phases. It's one of the steps we need customers to graduate to before they want to get on your list or actually buy for the first time. So we can use anniversary events or milestone events to get someone to graduate into a greater level of engagement. So I was thinking about things like giveaway contests where, you know, share your favorite memory with our farm for a chance to win this giveaway or like, like doing some kind of a memory lane. This is What I'm going to be doing with our anniversary celebration. I want to do some kind of milestone scrapbook. I'll probably actually have a scrapbook that I create and sell with photographs over our last 20 years. But I was thinking through like, what are the key milestones that have, that have happened to us as a farm business over the last 20 years? And once I can identify them, can I come up with 12 at least. And then maybe I feature one every month for the entire year and we focus all around that particular story and we relive it again as a community. But inviting your customer to think through their memories of working with you. Right? So a memory lane social post or having a contest around that, inviting your customers to share then and now photos or telling some of their favorite stories from the past. We want to remember we're making the customer the hero. Still now it's really tempting when you celebrate anniversaries and milestones to make it all about you. And we want to watch out for that because that's not something that excites the customer. The customer cares about themselves and so they need to be reminded of how does their story interact with ours, how have they helped shape us and make us into the heroic brand figure that we now are? So we really want to make this a community driven celebration. Right? Make them feel like they are part of the story. This isn't just a farm milestone, but it's a community milestone. Like they helped bring us here. And so helping them remember and go back and look and reflect and see the different ways in their past that they've engaged with us, their favorite memories, that can be really powerful. So coming up with some engagement strategies around that testimonial collection campaigns. This is an amazing time when you have a milestone to collect testimonials from your customers because you'll create some of these engagement solutions and in the process it will pull out testimonials if you put these posts up, like, hey, celebrate your favorite memory. Like they're going to talk about all these feeling words about why they love you so much. And those are things you can take a screenshot of and store away for later. You could do some kind of a campaign where you say, hey, celebrate with us by sharing why you love our farm so much. And you collect those and you, you could even put them into a document and share those later with your customers. And then people will enjoy looking through what everyone says. They're going to look for their answer to see if it's in there. Right. You could do A photo contest. Like, post a picture with our product, tag us to enter to win a farm tour. You could have throwback recipes. So, like, for us, we've been sharing recipes for 20 years, and we could create some kind of special cookbook that we even sell. Could be a digital version of a cookbook. Some of our favorite recipes from over the years. Many of them will probably include recipes from our customers. So again, we're pulling in how they have helped shape the story of the farm, even things like legacy interviews. So reaching out to some of your core customers and interviewing them, asking them to recount and remember some of the key moments in your journey. If you're doing an anniversary like I am, like where we come from, what do you remember in the good old days when we first started and how we changed? You could have history trivia contests and some of your old members who are still a part of your farm or old customers, they're going to have fun, like reliving the old days and trying to answer some of those. Right. I'm just kind of brainstorming here with you, but there's a lot here that you can do just to get customer engagement to rise. So think through that lens. And then finally, there's merch and swag. Let's not forget the chance we have to sell products and make. Make revenue on the backs of this milestone. So things like custom T shirts, commemorative stickers, branded kitchen gear. I don't know, the tote bag. But I'm also thinking of, like, making a scrapbook on snapfish or Vistaprint or something and getting it printed. Or a calendar, an actual physical calendar that they could buy. Or I could give it away as a. As a free gift. I could do that, too. But I might turn it into something that I actually make money on. Or a cookbook. I'm thinking of those. Like those church cookbooks, if you know what I'm talking about, raise your hand. Like, some of my favorite cookbooks are the ones that I get at these church potluck events or fundraiser events. And it's all these old ladies who bring in their casserole recipes and their jello desserts and all those, like, old school things that you had when you were a kid. And they all go into this one, like, spiral recipe book. You might find it, like, Amish country, right? And, like, collecting those. And there's a way to organize that and turn that in. Into a product. So that might be something that we might do for our 20th anniversary. I think that could be really fun. Be a Little bit of work, but might be worth it. This could also include milestone gifts. So maybe you're not trying to sell the merch or swag, but you might create a product that actually ends up becoming a gift to all your customers to commemorate this particular anniversary or milestone. One of the ideas that I had as I was brainstorming was my own promotion for our 20th anniversary was to somehow try to find out who's been in our CSA the longest, like who's our longest standing customer. But not just that, also just giving all of our customers a chance to name the day or the year that they first started buying from us and they became a customer of ours. And if there was some way that we could put that onto a timeline or map that onto a time map to see when did a bunch of our people actually join us? Were there cluster moments and does it kind of stagger out in a certain way and to see who are the collections of people who have been with us 10 plus years and how many people fall into the less than two years category and so forth. Right. And I've actually done a little bit of research and there are digital tools, there are things you can subscribe to for a monthly fee to allow your customers to be able to go and pin themselves onto a map like that so that you can collect that data and celebrate it. You could even give customers a chance to come and post something on the timeline that was important to them. And you build this collective farm business timeline that is not just your memories as a business owner, but that includes memories from anyone from your business, any of your customers that want to come, that wants to come there and post something. And that might be a really neat way to collect the, the full story of your, of your anniversary years. So that's just something else to think about. If you're one of those farms like me that has an anniversary celebration, I'm kind of excited. Again, the goal there is to. To invite the customers to be a part of celebrating the story, to help them see, where do I fit into this timeline? How did I, when did I come in? What else happened before I even got here? Where did I come into the story? How far along was the story before I joined? Where were these different influxes of energy and momentum in the brand, Educating themselves about it too, being like, oh, wow, I had no idea that this is how the farm began or what some of the struggles were in the early years or how it was. And I think it could just be a really neat experience for our customers and create a Lot of buy in. Okay. Another thing you want to think about is just, like, how to name your milestone promotion, because there's a lot of power in the name. It can really help your. Your marketing campaign kind of stand out and it almost becomes its own tagline or branding opportunity. So, first of all, just some tips here. Use numbers in the name or look for alliteration and try to tie it into your farm's identity in some way. And I know that for us, like, the name of our business is Shared Legacy Farms. And I've already decided that I'm going to call it Legacy 20 like, and that it ties in perfectly because Shared Legacy like has the word legacy in it. That's actually what gave me the idea. And I want to have a number in there so that at first glance, someone can very quickly see, oh, this is all about celebrating 20 years. 2020. Right. That's the important number. So just be thinking through that, that grid of, like, numbers, alliteration, farm identity. And is it clear when someone sees what it is and is it hashtagable is that you can easily turn into a hashtag so that you can be sharing it throughout your marketing channels and throughout the whole season. If you're like me and you're celebrating for an entire year, then this is something that's going to get a lot of mileage for you. Now, if you need help with this, you could go to ChatGPT and ask it to help you brainstorm some names, which is actually one of the things I did do. And you will see see that in that bonus that I talked about. If you're inside Farm Marketing School and you get that document, that is actually one of the questions that came up. And you can kind of see the back and forth that went on there. There are so many benefits to celebrating the milestones in your business. I really want to encourage you to think about doing this. Number one, you're going to increase your visibility because milestones stand out. It's going to increase your customer retention because your loyal fans love being part of a success story. And when they get a chance to reflect and celebrate themselves and notice how they were a part of a winning team, they're going to want to talk about it. They're going to leave a testimonial for you, too. And in the process of leaving the testimonial, they make themselves more loyal to you. And it makes it much more difficult for them to backtrack and not want to be a customer in the future. So you're going to give them A gift by giving them many opportunities for that entire year to celebrate and talk about how amazing you are and how much you've made a difference in their life. You're going to see a sales boost too. Because if you create a lot of limited time offers around this anniversary or this milestone, that's going to mean more revenue for you. It's an opportunity to do some brand storytelling. You're going to have an excuse in your content creation, an excuse to talk about your things from the past. You'll be able to talk about your history and the founding moments and the values that shaped your business and the key pivotal moments in your story. All of that is just going to stir up these feel good emotions that build trust and connection with your clientele. And let's not forget the press opportunities. I haven't even talked about that, but this is an excuse to send out a press release to your local newspaper. You know, if you're celebrating a huge anniversary and you're having a big event or you're having a big community celebration or a block party or whatever, like this is a chance for you to invite someone out from the press and tell your story. And that bodes well again for building momentum and visibility for your brand and bringing in new clients. So your action steps today to get started is, number one, to identify a milestone. So go check your calendar. Look for anniversaries, look for an achievement that's coming up that you might want to celebrate. Number two, choose your celebration type. So is it going to be an event? Is it going to be a giveaway? Is it going to be some kind of a special promotion? Will it be a product launch, some merch, some swag? Then set a budget plan for what it's going to cost you to run that promotion. And then step four, involve your audience. So that could mean some of those engagement strategies that we talked about before where you're inviting them into the story and asking them to remember. But you could also just ask them to vote on how to celebrate the event. Right? You could pull them into the idea planning committee, so to speak. Like, hey, help me figure out. We want to make a big deal about this. What are some of your ideas? What are some event themes? What could be some of the giveaway prizes? What kinds of activities could we even do? Help me brainstorm. Like, you could pull in ideas from your own customers. So involve them. And then finally create a marketing promotion calendar around that milestone, if it's an especially large one, like, we're gonna have 20 years, that's not something I'm gonna just throw together two weeks before the big day. Like, I'm gonna be thinking about that the year before it happens in earnest. Like, I'm already thinking about it two years ahead of time. And I feel like I've done my due diligence now. I've got a good list. I'm kind of, kind of let it steep and sit there in the back of my mind here for this next year. But the next year I need to start thinking through and putting some things into place, making decisions about. Okay, I've got a lot of ideas here in this Google Doc. Which ones am I going to do? What resources do I want to devote, how much money do I want to spend, and so forth. Right? And at that point, then I'll start kind of mapping out, what are the events going to be, where are the dates, what are the promotions? Do I want to do a special giveaway or something where I'm going to have to take time to build a new product line or get a T shirt designed? Right. Like, we need to think through, what are those key steps? What are the special offers? If you're doing something that's maybe not quite as big a deal as a 20th anniversary, you'll still have to think through, like, what are the posts I want to do, what are the offers, what are the emails that I might want to send out, how many, and just kind of mapping those roughly out onto a calendar. All of these things are things that you can ask for help from ChatGPT to do for you, and then you can kind of edit it from there. Just be aware that AI is a huge tool, a virtual assistant basically, to help you get a lot of this stuff down and very practical. Now, if you need help turning your milestones into marketing magic, I want to invite you to join Farm Marketing School. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com fmsremember inside. I'm going to be sharing my free milestone planning worksheet. It's going to include the AI prompts that you can put into ChatGPT to help you figure out how to put together an amazing promotion around one of your milestones. And it's also going to include my back and forth conversation that I had with ChatGPT that helps me kind of think through some of the ideas for my own farm's 20th anniversary celebration that's coming up in a couple years. So you can grab that free worksheet in there. You can get inside Farm Marketing School by going to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS subscribe for a month. See if you like it. I would love to have you inside and coach you. All right, today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 300. I will put all the links from today's episode in there. Okay. And I have one more surprise for all of you who stay to the end. As a celebration of my 300th episode, I want to say thank you to all of my listeners who have brought me here. And here's how I want to do this. I want to offer my three favorite marketing books as a gift bundle to three farmers who send me an email and share a heartfelt story of how my work either on the podcast or in farm marketing school has impacted them. That's all you gotta do. Send me an email, send it to mydigitalfarmersmail.com and do so before March 15th. And I will choose three of my favorites and I will send you three of my favorite marketing books and I will also announce who those winners are on a future podcast episode just for integrity, so that, you know, I really do what I say I do. And I just want to say thank you to all of you who are listening for, I guess, number one, tuning in every week. You don't have to do that, right? Like, it's an honor to be in your earbuds. I know you could do a lot of things with your time, and the fact that you choose to listen to what's going on on this show is actually really humbling. When I think about where I've come from and how I had this crazy idea, like, four or five years ago to share my story. I was so excited about how much I was learning and how the things that I had discovered about digital marketing were significantly helping my farm business make more money and get more leads and customers. And I just was like, I know farmers don't know this stuff. Like, what if we could? Like, someone could teach this to them? And I just felt drawn to start sharing my story, knowing that I wasn't an expert yet back then. But I chose to do it anyway, and I just kept showing up. I remember the Facebook group that I started, what had like five people in it for nine months or something, but I just kept coming in, and slowly that morphed into a podcast, and now I have thousands of people who listen every week. And it's just so cool to know that there are people out there who are growing their business and making it stronger because of, you know, this 45 minutes that I spend in front of a microphone every week. I love doing this, by the way. This isn't hard for me. I have so many ideas. It gives me energy. And so thank you for allowing me to do something I love to do. Thank you for helping me feel secure. Significant. Thank you for all of you who reach out to me and send emails and tell me how much you've benefited from the stuff you've learned in firm marketing school or from my podcast. It really means a lot when you share that. And that's partly why I created this little challenge and prize here to celebrate the 300th episode. Because I like reading those. I like reading your emails selfishly. And it feels really good to to hear some of the stories that are coming out of the work that I do. So if you have some time, even if it's just a couple sentences, I sure would appreciate it. And you can send those to mydigitalfarmersmail.com youm could also put post them on Apple Podcasts in the review section. That would be awesome too if you left me a review. So, okay, so that's my little bonus today. I hope you participate. Um, don't forget, if you want to get onto my email list, I have some things to send your way for free that are going to help you get better at your marketing. So if you're not on that yet and you're intrigued now, go to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe to get on that. It'll happen automatically once you subscribe and you confirm that first email. And if you decide you don't like it or you're getting annoyed with all my emails that I send every five days, you can just unsub. No feelings hurt. Now I'm also on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I'd love to catch up with you there. So come over and connect with me. Thank you for joining me today. Have a wonderful week and I will catch you next time. Remember, I believe in you. Bye.