Corinna Bench (0:00)

I'm staring at my promotion calendar for quarter one and I see that I have a big spring plan sale coming up in the next four weeks. This is one of my four marketing peaks in my promotion calendar. What's a marketing peak? Well, we're going to talk about that today, how vital they are to driving your revenue and giving you cash flow. I'm going to teach you exactly how to find your marketing peaks and make sure they happen. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast, where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 301 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I am 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 today? Welcome back to the show. If you're one of my regular listeners, I'm so glad you're here. And if you're new to the show, welcome. I think you're going to get a lot out of today's episode. Make sure you subscribe to the show. And if you need some help learning the lingo of marketing, like, you're pretty green when it comes to marketing. I encourage you to go check out the first 10 episodes of this podcast. Start there and then work your way through the titles that seem to catch your eye in the archives. You can also get onto my email list, which is a treasure trove information. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and and I'm gonna send you an email, like every five days for the first three months. That's basically gonna walk you through the jungle of marketing, which I know you're in there, my friends. I remember being in there and it is confusing. It is a maze. So I'm just gonna guide you and help show you. Here are the people you need to be following. Here are the key principles, the foundational stuff. Some episodes to listen to, some freebies to give you. It's good stuff, so get that at mydigitalfarmer.com forward/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. Localline helps you grow sales. It saves you time and streamlines your operations. In fact, on average, this is cool. Farms that use localline 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. Localline 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 Localline today. And now back to the show. This is the 301st episode of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. That's a little crazy. I feel like it's a milestone moment, and every time I sit down and record a podcast, I ask myself, how much longer am I going to keep doing this? And what is the intention behind recording yet another episode? You know, when you, when you get to like number 300, you start to almost feel like you're repeating yourself because there are only so many things that you really need to know when it comes to marketing, and I do kind of feel like I've hit that point, but I still enjoy it. And I have to keep reminding myself that I have new listeners coming in all the time who have not listened to episodes one through 200 who don't know some of that background information and it's okay to repeat myself or review some of the common principles and say it in a different way and bring in new information. Even for those of you who have listened to all 300 episodes, and bless you if you have, you're amazing. This is actually a really helpful tip for all of you out there who are running your own business because it's tempting to fall into this trap of thinking I don't have to say that piece of content again. Haven't I already told people 8 million times what my offer is? And haven't I answered those frequently asked questions? And haven't I already posted a picture of the farm owners? Don't they know what I look like? Like, all these stories that it seems like we repeat again and again. Here we go. It's April 2025, and once again, I'm taking photos of the crew planting potatoes. You know, how many more times do I need to show the same thing? But remember, you have new people coming in all the time who haven't seen that before, and we do have to repeat ourselves. So I'm telling myself this now as I sit here in front of the computer. I'm like, what am I going to talk about for the next year that isn't new? And, you know, there will be some new things, but a lot of it will be repeat information. But that's okay because it kind of burns it into your brain. It reminds you, I know there's some things that you've probably heard me say that you haven't taken action on, and I'm raising my hand here, too. Okay? No shame. So, yeah, it's a little pep talk for you and for me, but it is fun. I wanted to tell you my intention every week is to just share from my heart lessons that have really spoken to me that I think are important more and more, especially since I've recovered from my illness. I really am coming from a place of generosity and love. Like, I just love sharing this information. And even if I get nothing out of it, which I do, by the way, like, I get so much positive feedback and I feel a lot of goodwill coming back at me. My students in farm marketing school are amazing, too. Like, I do get a lot out of it, but it's. It's really not about that. It's. It's just, I love to teach. I love to connect the dots for people. I love to listen to other people share what's going on in their business and see the red thread guiding their story and point it out to them and empower them and say, hey, this is where I see energy, or, here's something to think about and to see their eyes light up like that. I just love that stuff. So my intention every day when I do these podcasts really is just, hey, what's going to be fun to share? Where do I feel excited to talk about this right now? What feels easy to teach at this moment in time? Where do I really feel like people need to hear something? So it's still coming from a place of love. So as long as I still feel excited about podcasting, I will continue to do so. All right, let's move on. Today I want to talk about marketing peaks. Do you even know what they are? What is a marketing peak? My friend, this is something you should know about. Is it the most important thing? No, it's not in the top 10. It's probably not even in the top 20. But it is an interesting principle that you should be aware of, especially in your kind of intermediate phase, because it does provide you with a framework that will eventually lead to more predictable sales. So have you ever felt like you just have sales that are trickling in? I know that you have, because I remember being there, especially in the early stages of our business, and I was never quite sure when or how to create giant revenue moments where I really needed the money to come flying in in large amounts, especially certain seasons of the year where cash flow was tight and I wanted it to be a rush of revenue, not a little drip, drip, trickle. Well, in this episode today, I want to talk to you about this concept of marketing peaks, because every farm should have at least four major marketing peaks in your annual cycle in your year, and they should be planned and intentional times when your sales just surge. Okay, just picture that. A surge in sales four times a year, at least. Now, if you can get six marketing peaks or five or six, even better, but you should at least have four. And usually they tend to happen once per quarter. Okay, so I first heard about marketing peaks maybe four years ago, and I had never heard of the concept when I did. I don't even remember where I heard it from. It was probably on some just random webinar I was listening to, but it kind of. I had an aha moment. I had always had, like, events scheduled throughout the year to try and promote sales. But this idea that in the industry at large, like all retail brands, follow this formula of trying to hit four big marketing surges or marketing peak moments in revenue, that was a new idea to me. I'm like, oh, that should be the benchmark that I'm aiming for. Didn't even know that. And then to recognize that many of the holidays are actually the corporate world's attempt to fabricate these marketing peaks to give our customers an excuse to come and buy something, and that I could tie into those existing holidays and promotions that the culture has created for me. Or even create my own was a really grand concept for me. And I quickly plotted out when I had my big promotions planned out when they fell in the calendar, and I noticed that I only had, at the time, two, and that if I wanted to increase revenue, I was going to have to have more. I was going to have to actually create more. And it was a really kind of one of those, aha, breakthrough moments. And the next year is when I was more intentional. When I started actually building a promotion calendar where I could plan ahead and plot out when those marketing peaks would be. Where I saw the gaps in the calendar, I'm like, aha, here's. Here's an opportunity, here's a holiday, here's a thing, a moment when many other businesses, other retail businesses create revenue and create offers, I could do one, too. That's when I started to actually get thoughtful about it. And I plotted them onto my promotion calendar. And then I did it. I did the thing that I planned, and I did make more revenue. A lot more revenue. So for all of you who have not ever created a promotion calendar, oh, my gosh. I cannot tell you how awesome it is when you do it for the first time and actually have a map, a roadmap to follow. You're not going to hit everything on the roadmap. You're probably only going to end up doing 60 to 70% of it. But, man, that's still more than you would have done if you hadn't had one at all. So I. I do have a class inside of Farm Marketing School called Building a Promotion Calendar that teaches you how to do this. You walk away from that class, the project build for that month is to actually create a promotion calendar. It does not have to be complicated, and I encourage you to take that class at the very least. But this concept of marketing peaks is sort of a part of that conversation. It's one of the things I talk about in the class, and it is part of this planning process to think about what they could be. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about. Well, first of all, I'm going to define what a marketing peak is. Where they fit into your farm's sales calendar, how, how they will relate to your cash flow needs, because that's really huge. I'm going to share lots of examples from retail farms and just from retail in general, and how to find and plan your own marketing peaks. That will be a part of today's episode as well. Okay, now I do have a freebie for this episode that That I think will go along nicely. And it's my marketing peak planner. This is a PDF worksheet that's gonna kind of summarize some of the stuff in this episode, but it's also gonna give you a place to go and brainstorm and map out the steps and kind of step by step, see how to take this stuff that's in your head and turn it into action. Okay, so if you wanna grab that, you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com marketingpeak P E A K All one word. Okay. Mydigitalfarmer.com marketingpeak and you'll be able to grab that. And I hope that that's helpful. Okay, let's get started with what are marketing peaks? A marketing peak, simply stated, is a strategically planned promotion or sales event that results in a surge of revenue in a short period of time. So I want you to imagine one of these line graphs, almost like an EKG graph. And that that graph represents 12 months in the year. Let's just say that it's a flat line, okay? No heartbeat, meaning you have no revenue coming in. Now, if you turn on your marketing channels and your marketing promotion plan, in theory, you should start to see that EKG pulsing, right? Like, you should see it going up and down as you make revenue throughout the year. What you want is to have four big spikes throughout the year. Four intentionally planned promotion events that are designed to drive in large amounts of cash. So why does it matter that you have these? Well, first, it prevents sales droughts, right? If we don't have a plan to actually push a product, you may end up having a period where you do flatline and you have no huge cash infusions coming in. And then you run into cash flow issues. Okay, so that's kind of the second thing is that it's going to help you predict your cash flow when you see, oh, I've got this projected amount of income expected to come in for quarter one from this particular marketing peak, and then this other stuff that typically kind of runs as a in the background. Well, now you can predict your revenue. And if you know that you are going to have a huge outpouring of cash flow for certain expenses at certain times of the year. And you see, well, my cash flow needs are going to be really high and I'm going to maybe go into the red, then you can plan a marketing peak around that time, before that time to offset it. And that gives you huge peace of mind. You don't end up coming to that circumstance and having to figure out a solution for the problem with no energy and no creativity. Right. You can, you can plan for it. I also think that marketing peaks train your customer to expect and engage with your sales cycles. I've seen this now over and over again now that I have certain predictable promotions year after year. Like we always have a feed the need bag in Thanksgiving where we give away a bag of produce to to people and say here's a $30 bag of produce for $1, go give it to someone in need. And that ends up driving people to our online store to grab that bag. But they also buy a lot of other things for Thanksgiving while they're in there. That is now an expected promotion. Like if I don't have that every year, people get mad at me. So it. I have trained the customer to expect that sales cycle. They wait for it. They're going to get their vegetables for Thanksgiving from my farm. You probably have similar types of things. And I think that marketing peaks also create energy and excitement and urgency around certain farm products. Especially if you do things that are like limited time offers or you have a big launch where you have a bunch of fun activities around that product, or that product is only there for a little bit of time, or it's a really great price, you create some urgency around it that's going to drive energy for your whole brand. Now, common places where you see marketing peaks in the retail world, so let's not even just look at farms. Let's look at all retail businesses. The obvious big one is Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That is the most, one of the most profitable days or weekends of the entire year. And many retail businesses bank everything on that weekend. Like if they don't have a strong weekend there, they're toast and they're not going to stay in business. And they wait all year long for the majority of their sales to come from that particular weekend. That is a huge marketing peak for them. Valentine's Day is a really big one. If you're a florist, you're nodding your head right now. Mother's Day probably falls into the same category for you. Tax refund season for big ticket purchases. Now, I know that may not affect us as farmers, but in other retail industries there's a big focus there. I'm also thinking of like school supply season would be the end of August. Then would be another big spike marketing peak for some businesses where there's a whole bunch of people that go and shop during that time. Summer grilling season might be a big influx for some of you who are meat producers. So if you just brainstorm there and think for a moment, they tend to fall around some of the big holidays. If you, if you actually take the time to, to go through a month at a glance calendar, or actually an annual calendar and circle all of the holidays that our world has created, you will notice that there is one in every single quadrant, in every single quarter, at least one. And that's partly because they were trying to drive people to come back. This is largely driven by commerce trying to give people reasons to come back and buy things so they would create a holiday. Okay, so where do marketing peaks fit into a farm's annual cycle? Now, the general rule of thumb is that we want to have at least four marketing peaks per year and they should align with your farm's natural production cycle. Makes sense. Right? So are there any seasonal buying behaviors that your customers are expecting? Are there holidays or cultural buying moments that you can tap into that have affinity with what you produce? And your own cash flow needs should also be informing when and what and where you place your marketing peaks in your calendar. But I want to go back to the first point. The nat your farm's natural production cycle. Some of you are creating products for, I don't know, six, six to eight months of the year. And you might have a quote unquote dry spell or a resting period, a Sabbath time where you really don't have a lot to sell, you're taking a break intentionally, or your animals just aren't producing, or your crops, your land is lying fallow, or it is wintertime and nothing is growing and you don't have greenhouses. Right? So you all are also thinking about that reality. We're not trying to fabricate offers when we literally can't produce anything. So make sure that we're thinking through our natural production cycle. However, that being said, it is possible, especially through value added products, to create things that you can sell in your off season. The question is, do I want to? Do I want to stay busy? And that's something that my husband and I have really struggled with in certain seasons of our life where we have felt the pull to continue working through the Christmas holidays and January and February, because we could have, but we held firm and said no, we're going to actually choose to just chill out. Even though there's opportunity here to make tons of revenue, especially over Christmas. We just have not really stepped into that space just yet. Okay, here are some example marketing peaks that you might see in farm businesses. In the spring, you might see A CSA launch. Seedling sales. Like we're doing a spring plant pre sale in early March and we sell out of all of our sale, all of our seedling sales by March 15 so that when we actually pass them out in May, it's all pre sold. Pretty awesome. Highly recommend you do that. Early greens, asparagus, right. Summer peak. If you're a vegetable farmer, bulk sales for canning might fall into this category. Grilling meat promos. If you're a meat producer, like July 4th kind of falls in there. People like to be outside grilling through July and August, at least in North America. Fall peak, you might see Thanksgiving meal kits, fall storage crops, pumpkins. Agritourism is huge. Right. People are coming out and doing pumpkin hunts and picking their own pumpkins and hay rides and all of that. Winter peak is where you're going to see the holiday gift boxes. Year end sales or inventory. Trying to get rid of inventory. Pantry staples. Those are just a few to kind of get your mind thinking. Now, I want to make sure I emphasize how your marketing peaks should be spread out to ensure that you have even cash flow throughout the year. We don't want to get ourselves in a situation where all of our income is coming from one giant peak and then we have nothing for like five months. That's a tough spot. Now, if you're really good at money management and you can make that giant marketing peak, that cash influx last, great. But if you can't, then you need to really think about, what can I sell? How can I create a marketing peak here to help drive in additional revenue? Okay, how do we identify our marketing peaks? Let's say that you want to do this. You're intrigued at the concept and you want to map them out. Well, the first step is you're going to review your sales data. So you're going to go and identify the months where your sales were naturally higher. And you're going to ask yourself, why was I selling something there? Did I have a big promotion that kind of blew up and I didn't really pay attention to the numbers. You're also going to try to spot seasonal buying patterns that your customer is exhibiting. So maybe there's a certain time of year where they want to can the tomatoes, and it tends to happen around Labor Day weekend. Like, I know that's the case for us. We could sell tomatoes a whole lot earlier to them in bulk, but it seems like they don't want to do the canning until Labor Day weekend or after. I'm just not sure if it's because it's a long weekend and they've got a tradition around that or what. But we tend to sell way more. Right. Just that week, right before then. That's when they want the product to be ready. Right. So if I see that, then I can plan for. That's when I need to have a lot of those offers available. So reviewing your sales data, step two is to then align with your key product availability. So what crops, what meats, what products do you sell at the different times of year and which ones naturally lend themselves to a promotion? So you're looking at this is sort of the process of building a promotion calendar, right? Like I write out all the things that I could sell, all the different products that I have and I put them on post it notes and then I'm trying to figure out where are the ideal times in my year that lend themselves. When are they ready, when are they in in abundance? When is the ideal time to actually promote this? And I sort of plot them generally in the right month. Then I'm looking at cultural and retail buying opportunities. So the first thing I take a look at are the holidays. Easter, Mother's Day, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Labor Day weekend I would argue is a big one for us too. Maybe Father's Day. For those of you who are grillers who sell products for grilling, um, we're looking at those holidays as potential moments that we could create a marketing peak. Back to school is another one. Especially for meal kits or subscriptions, bulk freezer sales, New Year's resolutions. So if you're in the health, health marketing space, that might be a place where you can kind of lean into some messaging there. Okay, so look for what those cultural retail buying moments are. Step four is to consider your cash flow needs. Hopefully you are looking at your numbers, my friends. If you are not looking at your numbers, we need to have a gut check right now. And I need to have a come to Jesus moment with you. You cannot grow your business unless you know your numbers. And I'm raising my hand here because I was not one of those people. For the first 10 years of our business, we were flying our business blind. So if you have not practiced this or you don't know where to start, I have a whole class inside of Farm marketing school called the Farm Metrics Dashboard. And its goal is in 30 days to help you figure out where your numbers live and build your tracker and your dashboard so that you can be using that for the rest of this year. Okay, end of rant. But that's really important. You need to know where. Once you looked at your numbers, where are your cash flow dips? And we all have them. I have them, my friends. Like, there is a certain month of the year when it gets a lot closer to just breaking even than I would care to admit. And then we have certain times of the year, like at the beginning of the year, on January 2nd, we cash all these deposits from our CSA members, 50% down deposits, we get a huge cash injection. And I have to make that last and I have to know, when are the other cash injections coming in? This is all stuff that we budget out in our budget in our Excel sheet, so we can actually see what our expected revenue is, what our expected expenses out that month are going to be. And then we kind of see, we do the math right, we subtract one from the other and we can see what is our cash flow. Where are we going to be? Close. We're looking at that. When do you need a cash infusion? When you can see that that will help. You know, I've got to plan a marketing peak to fund a specific operational need there. Right? Okay. And then step five is to consider your. Your own energy levels. I almost didn't include this, but I think it is important. It's very tempting to build all these marketing peaks in there and not consider the fact that, oh, you know what, that's a really chaotic month for me. I'm planting or that's a crazy harvest season because I've also got a wholesale contract that comes due that month and we're going to be really stretched thin and I don't know if I should try to plan something big there. So look at your patterns, don't overload yourself and find balance. 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 and now back to the show. Let's talk now about planning and executing your marketing peaks. Lead time is key here. I think you should plan your peaks at least two months ahead of time. Now you're listening to this episode in February. Ideally this stuff should be taken care of in December, January so that you can hit the ground running with the new year. And you know, if you need a marketing peak in January, you're on it. So if you're just getting started with this, take some time in the next couple weeks. Commit to that. Right now that you're going to get off this episode, you're going to download that project planner, Marketing Peak planner that I'm offering you for free. You're going to take a look at it and spend some time brainstorming this and just kind of mapping it out on a calendar. Plan those peaks out at least two or three months ahead of time. And you also want to be thinking about building momentum. And I talk a lot about this, especially with my csa, my CSA early renewal launch, how important the pre launch Runway is to being successful with that promotion. It is vital that some of your giant promotion plans, like if you have a level one, tier one promotion, which is a promotion that takes a lot of energy, uses multiple marketing channels, you're putting some major budget behind this and a lot of attention because it needs to do well for you. You want to make sure you've got buzz, that you create energy and buzz in the weeks before that offer is even available. You're teasing the event on social, you're talking about it on your email. You're creating buzz, you're creating the sense of urgency so they can't wait until the doors open when you finally offer that limited time offer or that bonus or that discount. Right. So we're trying to build momentum as we map out and plan these marketing peaks. You also want to think about what are the marketing channels that I can use to leverage these marketing peaks. So is it going to be email? There's a ton of opportunities for email campaigns. You could be using just flat out weekly emails. You could create an actual automated promotional email sequence. We have a whole project inside of our marketing school for how to write those. And you can use chat GPT to help you write those really fast. Now there's cart abandonment emails. So if somebody makes it all the way in and is actually at your store online and they're putting something in their cart, but then something get takes them away, whether it's something some, you know, a misgiving or like, oh, I'm not sure I'm ready yet or I still need to find out the answer to this question or something interrupted their purchase and they couldn't finish and they forgot about it. You could have an automated abandoned cart sequence that comes and helps them finish the deal. Social media is a big part of most campaigns these days. But you could even have like a countdown going in your social media customer testimonials. Are you going to use those to help you drive sales? Right. Those are different marketing channels that you could use. And then you also want to be thinking about what happens after the marketing peak. I should do a whole episode just about this. Oh, I think I will. I'm going to write this down. But analyzing and optimizing your campaign. So do you take time to debrief your promotion? And I confess, friends, I don't do this for everything. I do this for the really big ones, like the early renewal campaign where I make a giant amount of revenue. That's like my huge, that's my, my Black Friday event on, on the EKG graph. Like we have a huge spike there. And so I do take the time to look at that promotion afterwards, look at the numbers in detail. What went well, what could I have done better? Where did it flop? Analyze your marketing peak. How did it do and figure out what do I need to do to optimize it. What worked, what didn't? Look at the sales data, get customer feedback and then write it down somewhere so that the next year when you want to just rinse and repeat that promotion, you've got a page sitting at the Top of that Google Doc. Or if it's in a file folder and you just quickly scan the notes and say, oh, last year I sold this many, I can probably expect to sell that many again. Or that last year I have a note here that says make sure you push the fruit share more. Because you didn't and it showed. And I'll have to come up with a strategy to add that to this promo. Right? So just have a process for what happens after the marketing peak. Don't just plan it and then do it. Learn from your mistakes and learn from your wins. Now I wanted to also just cover a few common mistakes and pitfalls to avoid when it comes to marketing peaks. Number one, not planning ahead of time. So marketing peaks work best with intentional promotion, my friends. If you do not plan the marketing peak, it probably won't happen. Well, maybe one of them will happen because you're in such a groove. You always know you sell this thing, you always sell your turkeys, whatever. But, but if you intentionally stare at a plan and say I need to add something here and you plot it there, you're much more likely to get it done. So this is the number one mistake I see that people just don't even know about marketing peaks, so they don't plan them. And then guess what? You don't hit something if you're not aiming for it. Mistake number two is seeing farmers put too many marketing peaks too close together. Resist that temptation. Spread them out. Partly because you're going to be tired, especially if some one of them takes a lot of energy from you. And they do. They take energy to create, especially the first time. Don't pack them too close together. And if you've got a really busy production schedule that you're very involved in, think twice about doing that. Right. Mistake number three is not warming up your audience. As I just talked about that pre launch Runway is a pivotal part of a successful launch or promotion. And if you don't ramp up your customers before these big sales events, if you don't tease them and treat it like an event and get them excited and warm them up and warm up the algorithm, even at times, then you won't see the same results. Mistake number four, underestimating demand. I see this a lot of times actually with my meat producers where they aren't ready with enough product and fulfillment capacity. Has this ever happened to you where you pitch something and then you run out of product and now you're in this weird spot where you find yourself not wanting to promote stuff you don't want to pitch things because you won't be able to bring it to market for like 18 months. Right. By the time you get started again, it's almost like there was so much demand. And there it goes. And so now you're in this weird place where you. You're afraid to even grow your list because you have nothing to sell them for a while. My friends, I get that. I've been there. So make sure that you aren't underestimating demand when you're putting together these marketing peaks. You could have a huge influx. And are you going to be ready? Is your fulfillment process ready? If you were to suddenly get a ton of orders in your online store, do you have the staff to be able to harvest all of that stuff in the time allowed? Do you have the packing crew staff capacity to be able to create the orders in the time allowed? I know Kurt has told me. I keep telling him we could sell so many more plants in the spring plant sale. We could probably, yeah, increase it by 50% at least. And he's like, we just don't have the greenhouse space, Corinna. I just don't have the team in the months of March to pay to even be able to do that if I wanted to. So, you know, yes, I have the demand, but we just don't have the ability to supply it. And that's all stuff we have to think about. Mistake number five is not following up after the sale. You. You do all this awesome work to create a marketing peak, and you bring in all this extra revenue and then you don't follow up. You don't issue any more offers. You don't cultivate the relationship with that new buyer. Make sure that you're continuing to nurture buyers after they buy with content that isn't necessarily promotional. Maybe you send them recipes, storage tips, or what's going on in your world, or a story that happened to you that shows something that you value. It could be an email that shares some wins from your customers. Like, there's so many different things you could be doing to stay in touch with them and building connection. Okay, before I let you go, I wanted to share a few ideas of common marketing peaks that I see in the retail space and kind of share some ideas for what that could look like for a farm business. Some of these I mentioned earlier, but I want to go into a little more detail and I wanted to do this because I like to be practical and I want to get your mind spinning. But one thing that you could do to try getting ideas for promotions that you could put into marketing peaks is to Simply go to ChatGPT or some other AI model like Claude and asking, prompting them with this question, let you know, give them the context, explain. Here's what I'm doing. I'm trying to create a promotion calendar for my farm business. I serve this kind of client. Tell them the kinds of clients that you have, what you sell and that you want to create. You're doing these four marketing peaks and you need suggestions for products to sell and you will be amazed at what comes back at you. Remember, you don't have to just create products around holidays that the culture has created for us. You could actually fabricate your own quote unquote holiday or cultural event and build a marketing peak around it. In fact, if you think about it, that's how Amazon Prime Day came to be, right? Amazon created an entire day that is now a part of our culture and people wait to buy until Amazon Prime Day. And what would that look like for us to build our own kinds of products, our own kinds of promotions and build hype all around it. So here's some examples of of that. Like a farm Founders Day. That could be your farm's birthday or your farm's anniversary. You could have a big sale that day. You could create an exclusive one day only farm sale that celebrates that event. You could offer a mystery discount or a bonus product with a purchase of xyz. Customer Appreciation Week might fall into this kind of a category as well. That's just something you fabricate. You could run a surprise and delight campaign. Random free gifts, discounts, bonus items. I do this kind of stuff with my CSA early bird promotion. I do all kinds of random free gifts or contests throughout that pre launch Runway. And it does create a ton of buzz and excitement. People love to get presents. You can have a VIP only flash sale for past customers where you could even have like sell tickets to a VIP flash sale. And people can only come into your, your, your store space 10 people at a time and they only have 30 minutes to shop until the next group comes in. Like you could just do all kinds of fun stuff there. Late fall and winter you could create like a frozen food frenzy and offer bulk frozen veggies, bulk frozen meats, prepared soups, prepared foods to stock up for the winter. If you are a meat producer, the grill, a grill master challenge or some kind of grill focus in the summer is an event just all around Grilling could be a great idea for a fabricated event that creates a marketing peak. The stock up and Save flash sale. So if you have a mid season inventory, clear out need. This is where you might choose to sell a slow selling crop or create a limited time discount or a bundle deal. Or maybe you just have a. Yeah, a ton of stuff because this is the item that nobody seems to want and you need to move it. I thought of one for. Because my, my mother in law is a greenhouse, has a greenhouse, she sells all kinds of plants and obviously Valentine's Day. I'm sorry, Mother's day is a big, a big day for her. But Houseplant appreciation month, which is the month of January, apparently you could offer a houseplant bundle or a houseplant subscription or what if you promoted like a plant rescue? I. This was like hilarious. But encourage people to bring in their struggling plants for advice. And this is actually just anecdotally, this is the joke in my house because we hardly have any houseplants in our house because I cannot keep them alive. And this is so ironic, right? We're farmers and we grow things in abundance outside. But inside our house we just cannot remember to water the plants and they just sort of live in these dark places. Our house is kind of dark. Anyway, that's probably part of the problem. I have a mother in law plant and those are supposed to be impossible to kill and yet I'm staring at it right now. We had to actually move it close to the window last week because it's just starting to yellow. Anyway, that's just an aside. I have struggling houseplants and ironically when we were. When I was a kid, my mom brought all the houseplants if they were struggling into my room. And we used to say it was because I played violin. I practiced my violin for like two hours a day. And so my mom was convinced that it was my music. Oh, and I would read to my plants. So I read out loud. I would actually read books out loud. Yes. Remember, I like to be a teacher. I like to play school. And so I would read out loud to my stuffed animals and to my plants. And she was like, there's just a lot of talking going on in here and playing music. And I think that's why the plants are thriving. So anyway, I have a thing about plant rescues, but that would be kind of fun to promote plant rescues. Have people bring it to your greenhouse and you give some advice. And while they're there, they might buy. Who knows? That could be a marketing peak. All of you who, who do turkeys. Turkey pre order madness. Maybe that's in October. Maybe you have to pre sell it earlier. I don't know. But push heritage turkey sales for Thanksgiving or offer a reserve your bird. I think that's kind of catchy. Reserve your bird, early bird discount, even something like a January carnivore reset. What do you think of that idea for New Year's that would target High Protein Keto Whole30 customers? You could offer bulk packs of lean meats, bone broth, whatever. These are just a few ideas that I was scribbling down. I will put this whole list. I have a whole bunch of other ones inside of that Marketing Peak Planner PDF guide. If you want to grab it at mydigitalfarmer.com Marketing Peak P E A K, you'll be able to see not only a worksheet that's going to help you map this stuff out, but it'll have a bunch of suggestions. So I will leave that for you. All right, let's wrap this up. Final thoughts. Remember, marketing peaks equals predictable sales plus cash flow control. That's why I want you to think about looking at them. You want to have at least four per year, ideally spaced throughout your season, one per quarter. Plan ahead, create urgency and make sure that you analyze the results so you can optimize them. Now, your call to action from this episode is to take out your calendar. Maybe not right now because you're probably busy multitasking, but find some time today just to go take out the calendar, all right, and put it somewhere. And then like make a post it note. Make it a goal in the next two or three days to write out where are your marketing peaks. Maybe you have to take a big red marker and kind of circle the month. Or put a post it note on that month and be like, I've got a marketing peak here. And try to find four of them. If you don't have at least four, it's time to start planning. If you have four already, you're probably doing okay. Way to go. And if you want to be ambitious, try to build a fifth one or optimize one of the four you already have. But if you're, if you've got less than four and you're taking a look and you're realizing, I don't actually, I'm kind of struggling with revenue. That may be an indicator as to why. And if you're starting your business from scratch, those of you who are getting started with an enterprise and you're like, oh, I want to do this thing, I want to go into farming and you've only got like one thing that you're selling and it's only going to be around for like four weeks and then you've got no plan after that. Watch out. That is a red flag. Like, if you want to stay in business, you've got to create other things you can sell in other times of the year or you're going to have a major cash flow issue and you won't be around too long. Okay, so I want you to map out your own peaks then. And then it would be awesome if you would email me digitalfarmersmail.com and let me know that you did this and just tell me what they are like as an accountability measure. Just send me an email mydigitalfarmersmail.com and say, here, I listened to your episode. Here are my four marketing peaks. Thank you for suggesting that I do this. And this is just an accountability piece to make me do it. All right, send that to me. Or you can also message me ydigitalfarmer on Instagram. That's another way you could do it. Okay, now I invite you to go check out that resource that I'm going to share with you. The PDF Planner, the Marketing Peaks Planner, mydigitalfarmer.com MarketingPeaks and if you want to dive deep and actually build an entire promotion calendar for the year where you're going to take some of this marketing piece knowledge, but then layer on some other stuff. Subscribe to Farm Marketing School for this month and just go in and work on the marketing peak promotion plan for 30 days. That will be your one. You'll have 30 days before you get charged again. It's a monthly subscription membership. Take that class, watch the video, download all the resources, work on that project. Show up for the monthly zoom call where we coach you and answer your questions and connect in community and try to get that done. Okay, that's another resource if you want to go even deeper. And I can be there and support you and help you and guide you. Okay. And while you're in there, you're probably going to discover there's a whole bunch of other really cool projects that you could take care of here in the remaining months before the season gets crazy for us. Okay, that's all I got today. That was good. That really came together. Wow. The show notes for today can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 301 and if you like today's episode, please leave me a rating or a review or go share this episode link with a friend or share it with a farmer. I want as many people as possible to know about this resource to help other farmers get better at marketing. You guys, this is one of the things that we struggle with. This is one of the reasons we aren't making a lot of money as farmers is because we never got trained in how to market and how to sell and we're not comfortable selling. And I want to shift that. I want to teach you to embrace, to be confident in what you sell so that you don't feel weird about pitching it. You deserve it. You deserve the life of abundance that you want, right? So stand up for yourself and believe in your product and you can get there. Just like you have systems and protocols and SOPs in every other part of your business, for efficiency sake, you've got to have one for sales and marketing. I hope you see that. And that's where my expertise is. That's what I'm passionate about. That's what I want to help you build. I know you have other systems you need to be investing in. I know there's pieces of equipment that are you need to have to make you more efficient. Yes, yes, yes and yes. But you also need to build a marketing system and come inside for our marketing school. Join me for a few months. I will help you build the marketing assets you need in your system so that your sales pipeline starts flowing. Because right now it's not flowing because you either have things missing entirely in the pipeline or they're plugged. And I'm going to help you see what you need to build. All right? To learn more about farm marketing school, go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS I'd love to hang out with you there. So I hope you decide to join my amazing community. Thank you so much for joining me today. Have a wonderful week. Remember, I believe in you. You are right where you need to be. Trust your future self. Bye bye, Ra.