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My Digital Farmer Podcast
304 How to Document Your Farm Promotions So You Can Recycle Them Easily
00:36:37
Have you ever found yourself scrambling to write an email or social media post for a promotion—only to realize you already did it last year? What if I told you there’s a simple way to save yourself hours next season? Today, I’m sharing how...
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Corinna Bench
Have you ever found yourself scrambling to write an email or social media post for a promotion only to realize you already did it last year? What if I told you there's a simple way to save yourself hours this season? Today I'm sharing how documenting your promotions as you go can eliminate the guesswork and make next year's marketing 10 times easier. Let's dive in. Hey there, this is Corinna Bench and welcome to the My Digital Farm 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. Lets start the show well. Welcome to episode 304 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I'm your host Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmer, 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 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 regular listeners. I'm really glad you're here and if you're new to the podcast, welcome. Make sure you subscribe to the show. Go check out some of my first 10 episodes. I designed them to be an onboarding into the marketing lingo. So if you're a little green when it comes to that stuff, that's the place to start. Of course you can scroll through all my 300 episodes and see if there's something that jumps out at you. You can do that too. Another place to learn the ropes of marketing fast is to get onto my email list. So go subscribe to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and when you do I'm going to send you an email probably like every five days for about three months and I'm going to give you the best of the best. I'm going to show the principles you need to know. I'm going to link off to the really good episodes, the influencers. You should follow the tools that are going to help you. Free stuff that I'm going to give you. So definitely get on that list. It's mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at Local Line if you're like me, winter is your downtime to plan and prep for the upcoming growing season. Set yourself up for success with Local Line. The best sales platform built for farms. Logoline 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's 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. 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 Local Line today. And now back to the show. I want you to think about the last time you did some kind of farm promotion. It doesn't have to be a huge deal. It can be something that's maybe more moderate. Maybe it meant that you wrote a few emails and you posted about a special offer for five or six days. I want you to think about how you went about that process. If you are like many farmers and I'm raising my hand here, this used to be me. We are recreating our emails, our social posts, our texts, and our promotions from scratch. Maybe you find yourself spending time searching for past emails in your email service provider and you can't quite remember what the subject line was, but you vaguely remember when it happened. So you do a search by the date and you try to find that old email so that you can use it as a guide. Or maybe you scroll endlessly through your Facebook feed. I'm totally raising my hand here to remember what you did a year ago when you promoted that XYZ offer. We think we're going to remember what worked, but in reality we often don't and instead we just end up living in the moment once again, looking ahead maybe a few days out and saying, oh, I've got this promotion I need to run in a couple weeks. Or this Weekend I've got all this meat I want to clear out of my inventory. I'm going to put an offer together and I should probably send them an email and that might mean I need to throw together four or five posts next week week and put it into my Facebook feed and send some things via text to my list. But you just sort of see it coming a few days ahead and you redo it all in the moment. Is this ringing a bell for any of you? Now that is totally me. I know I sit here as a marketing maven and expert, but I'll tell you, a lot of times I don't take the time to go back and try to find what I did the last time and make it easier. I just sort of wing it. I get back onto my email provider, I spend an hour, hour and a half writing from the heart, kind of getting the gist of it, and I send it out. Well, today I want to talk through another way to do this and it's something that I have been pretty disciplined, pretty diligent the last probably 12 months in doing to the point that it's now become a habit and it's saving me so much time. I love it. I've hinted at it in a few past episodes. Today I want to give an entire episode just to this concept because it is a huge time saver. And what I want to talk about today is the alternative to living in the moment. Just winging it, seeing something a few days ahead of time and quickly throwing it together in many cases just on the fly and instead documenting your promotions as you go this next year so that next time when it comes back around, the next time you have to run that early bird campaign. The next time you want to help your customers clean out your inventory of meat. The next time you've got a big you pick flower promotion you want to broadcast to the world, you can go back to how you did it before and just rinse and repeat. Now the tool that I use is very simple. It's just a Google Doc or sometimes a spreadsheet if that's easier for you. And inside of the Google document you are going to include everything that was related to that promotion. So let's talk about what would I put inside of a promotion Google Doc. Here is a short list. Past email copy all of the emails that you sent for that specific promotion with their subject lines. And I encourage you to also include the timing or the frequency at which you sent them. That way, a year from now, you don't have to ask yourself, how many days did I wait between this email and that email? You have it specifically documented. You could even include the email open rate statistics if you wanted to kind of help you see what those benchmarks are are. Now, there's a couple of ways you can do this. You can either literally copy and paste all of the copy and stick it into the Google Docs so that all you had to do was just read through the Google Doc and you would be able to see the words and remind yourself of what what it was. Or you could put the link to that email into the Google Doc instead so that when you click on the link, it takes you to, in my case, kit.com it would take me to that website where I would see the archived version of that broadcast and then I would read the copy in there. I personally like to put the copy itself into the Google Doc because when I'm reviewing reminds me of all the different things I was talking about and I don't have to click on enough sites. Plus I can print it out and study it in a different manner. But I do also like to include the links to the URLs of that actual email because then it's much easier for me to go and duplicate the email later because I'll have the actual archived version of it, the one that went out as a broadcast. Okay, so all your past email copy. Second of all, any social media posts, whether you do it on Facebook or on Instagram, what you said, what worked, what was the image and link off to the Canva folder where those graphics actually live. Now, I don't know if you know what Canva is. If not, we'll stop right now real quick and just do a quick pitch for or canva.com this is a free graphic design software that is really easy to use. There is a paid version. I have no relationship with them, but I highly recommend that you start using Canva. It's spelled C-A N V A.com and if you want a very basic kind of training course on how to use Canva and you want to see what's possible, you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com canva and watch the free workshop. It was made a couple of years ago, so the features are even more powerful now. But it's at least going to show you kind of a vision for how you can use that tool and it'll totally train you well enough to be able to use it. This is my graphics software of choice and I actually pay for the premium version, so I I want to say it's like 15amonth, something like that. It's not ridiculous at all for what I can use it for. When you go into canva.com, you create projects. It can be specific graphic designs. You can make videos, you can make, oh my gosh, you can make stickers, you can make labels, you can make workbooks, you can make flyers, brochures, even slide decks. I know I build a lot of my slide decks for farm marketing school on there. It's really powerful. And once you build a project, that project has a folder and it lives, has like a URL address. And so you can scrape the URL address of that particular project that's holding all of the designs for your farm promotion and then link that up in your Google Doc. That way, when you're reviewing this and you're like, here are the social image posts, you can just click on that link and it'll take you right to the Canva document where you see where they live. And then again, you can just repurpose them or edit them for the next year. So I love that feature. If you want though, you might want to actually download and stick the PNG files, the image files, into this Google folder for that promotion so that you have a visual of them that way as well. Kind of depends. Okay, so we have email copy, we have the social media posts, stats and results. So how many sales did the promotion actually generate? What worked, what didn't work? This is your chance to kind of do a quick review and audit of the overall promotion. So this isn't usually a huge chunk of the document, but there is a place where I keep track of this, and that ends up becoming the benchmark for the next year. I. I can go to this document and I can see, oh, last year I made $10,500 in revenue from the plant sale. So that doesn't seem like an unreasonable goal. When I set the goal for this year. In fact, I try to increase it by 10 to 20%. And that suddenly doesn't feel like a huge stretch because I easily have this information from the year before that's there. I sometimes include my earnings per lead or my cost per lead or the budget that I am allotted for this promotion just to help me remember. Okay, discount codes and offers is another thing you might put into this Google Doc. So what price points were your products listed at? What incentives did you use? What was the offer? Did you have a buy two get one free? Did you have a minimum order of $50 and you get A free gift? Did you have a tiered promotion where the discount increases the more they spend? Did you offer free shipping? What were some of those offer formulas that you played around with? Did you have a short term bonus or a limited time bonus? All of that information goes in here to document it. Chat GPT Brainstorm Notes now, this might not occur to you, but because I use ChatGPT now for almost every promotion, I include this information in there. Because sometimes when I sit down with ChatGPT before I build everything out and we brainstorm ideas together, I will feed it all the stuff I've done in the past and then I will kind of ask it to help me see some other opportunities. What else could I do to enhance this element? And I often end up with a lot of really neat ideas for challenges or contests or giveaways or new offer ideas. I can't possibly choose them all. I have to land on just one or two of them. But sometimes I like these notes so much that I want to save them so that I can review them the next year. Maybe next year I'll decide that I want to do one of the other offer suggestions that ChatGPT made to me, but I couldn't fit it all in this time, right? So it becomes a record of even the brainstorming that went into putting this promotion together. Another thing you can put into this document are customer testimonials. Maybe you saw some additional Google reviews come in as a result of the promotion. Maybe as part of the fulfillment, you sent out an email to everybody who bought that product, coaching them for some kind of a testimonial, and a few of them came back and you grabbed a screenshot of it or you copied and pasted it and you put it into this document. One of the things that is easy to forget is that social proof often helps you sell your products. So if you can collect social proof for an offer, then the next year you put it on your sales page or you can include it in your social media strategy because it will help people who see that offer the next time feel less risk and it will overcome objections for them and they're more likely to take action. So I think it's always a good idea to try and collect those and put them in a specific spot associated with that promotion. Any customer responses, frankly, associated with this promotion should go into this Google Doc. I'm thinking of frequently asked questions or maybe customer objections that came up. Sometimes you'll get an email or a Facebook message from a potential customer and they'll want to just check in and say, hey, can you just clarify, is this product xyz or how is this product going to be packaged? I remember doing the chicken share promo a few weeks ago, and one of the potential customers wrote back to one of my emails and asked, how long will these chickens have been frozen by the time they get to me? And that was not something that I had included in my promotion material. And I thought that was a really good question. She was basically talking about, what's the freshness level? Like, are these chickens things that have been in their freezer for six months to a year, or are they recently butchered? And so I was able to go get the answer to that because I didn't know. And I asked my meat producer and then I wrote her back and I made a note of that on this document because I said, next year, make sure you answer this question somewhere in the sales process, whether it gets its own email or it's in the FAQ email, or it's a social media post that goes into the private Facebook group, but it should be one of the talking points. And that came out of a customer response or a customer question. And then finally, your launch timeline. So I kind of referenced this at the beginning with respect to emails, but frankly, any of this stuff you want to document, when did you start teasing the offer? When did the emails and the social media posts land all of it, so that you can literally just replicate it the next year? Now, to help you organize this material, I'm actually going to give you a freebie as part of this episode. It's my Farm Promotion Playbook template. So this is a sample Google Doc format that you can use to track your marketing success with each of your promotions. So it's the basic template you can add to it or delete stuff based on, you know, what you want to have inside of it. But it's got kind of these main categories that we've just walked through. And you're basically going to duplicate this. Every time you create a new promotion, you're starting over from scratch from the basic template. Okay. And you can just pile these into a giant folder that you label 20, 25 farm promotions. Then each Google Doc has a specific, specific name for each of your specific promotions. Okay. If you want to grab this template, it's really good. I think it's like three pages long. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com promo log. And if you're inside of Farm Marketing School, I have placed this template inside of the building a promotion calendar Workshop so you can go grab it from there. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. All right, farmer, let me ask you something. Is marketing your farm something you actually enjoy or does it feel like a constant struggle? If you are like most farmers that I talk to, you are wearing all the hats and marketing always seems to slip through the cracks. Can I get an amen? That's exactly why I created Farm Marketing School. It's an online membership designed to help farmers like you build a simple, repeatable marketing system that actually works. Inside, you'll get bite sized, step by step projects that make marketing easier. Each month you pick what to work on, like writing better sales emails or improving your website copy, or setting up your online store. And I walk you through exactly how you should be doing it. And you're not doing this alone. Every month we have a live Zoom meetup where you can ask me questions, meet other members of Farm Marketing School, get coaching and hear what's working for other farmers. It's like having a farm marketing mentor in your back pocket. This isn't some long, overwhelming course. The projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days. So you're making steady progress without it taking over your life. So if you're ready to stop winging it and finally build a marketing system that brings in steady sales, come join Farm Marketing School today. Sign up for your first month and see what a difference it makes. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com fms to get started. And now back to the show. I now use this process with all of my promotions. I'm addicted to it. And the very first time that I tried it was two years ago when I was running my CSA early promotion campaign, the one where I'm trying to get people to renew their shares. I do this every October and there is a lot of work that goes into it. It's my biggest promotion of the year because it generates about 70% of my revenue for the year. So I want to make sure I do it really well. And I was running into that speed bump of every year, just being exhausted at the thought of having to put it all together again and find all the stuff that I knew had worked well before. And one year I got wise and I said, why am I repeating this process year after year? It would be smart if I just documented it all in one spot, linked things off so that when I come back I can just duplicate things a whole lot faster. And so I started doing it with that promotion first. And because it was such a huge promotion and it ended up saving me so much time that second year when I actually was able to implement it and make good on it. That's kind of when the light bulb clicked and I said, why am I not doing this for all of my promotions? So with the exception of the occasional weekly email random thing that's available this week at the farmer's market, I might not do it for something like that. Well, we don't even go to farmers markets anymore. But I, I would recommend doing this for any kind of substantial promotion that you see yourself doing from year to year or maybe every two or three months, you're going to have to do it again. I think there's merit in creating this kind of a workflow. So whether it's you have an annual big promotion to draw people to your you pick strawberries event, or maybe it's your annual promotion to get people to come to your you pick flowers or you have a big farm dinner that you sell tickets to and you've got a promotion where you run that. Or once a year you've got a big sale for your Thanksgiving, your reserve a bird Thanksgiving kind of promotion, or you've got a giant freezer full of meat that's overstocked and it seems to happen once a year, so you always have a big promotion for that. All of these are great candidates for setting up a workflow. A different Google Doc for each one. You'll have to do the work of building it out that first time, but then after that you can just point back to this resource and duplicate things. I recently just did this with my spring plant sale. We launched that on March 1. I as expected, we sold out of most of the inventory. We have a few scragglers, but most of it sold out in two days. And I spent time crafting those perfect emails, finding them from the past, going back and looking at what are the social media posts. When am I going to start stick them in their right place? I sat down with ChatGPT, got some really cool ideas, added that to the mix, but this year I actually put it all into the Google Doc and so I'll be able to go into that next year copy and paste instead of starting from scratch. I'll have to still put in my results, my statistics and some of my notes and testimonials, but for the most part that document is ready to go. Go. I also did this process with my holiday Sampler fish promotion. So we have a affiliate partnership with Citizen Salmon Alaska, my friend Aaron up in Alaska and we three different times a year, promote his halibut, his salmon, and then his holiday boxes. And so this year I kept all of that stuff, stuff in a Google Doc. So that next spring here coming up, when I have to pitch the halibut sale again, I won't have to work so hard. I'll be able to find those emails real quickly, see what those graphics were, and then just tweak them a little bit and put them out into the world. Right? So the result of taking this time is that you get faster execution and it's just a better, more refined promotion. So I encourage you to build this system into your marketing flow. So before I wrap up, let me just break this down for you into four simple steps for how you can document your next farm promotion. And this is going to take you less than five minutes. Okay, so step one would be just to create a simple Google folder called Farm Promotions, or maybe it's 2025 farm promotions or whatever year it is for you, and then create documents for each of your major promos of the year inside of that folder. Okay, that's step one. And you can use my template that I have made for you as sort of your starting document. Remember, you can get that@mydigitalfarmer.com promo log. Okay. Step two is at the end of those promotions, or maybe even as you go and build them along the way, you are going to spend five minutes pasting your emails and your social post images, your social media copy and the results into the Doc. Okay, this can be something you do at the end when it's all over, or you can do it at the as you go. It just should be part of your workflow. Step three, next year you're going to start your promotion planning process for that same type of promotion by reviewing that Google Doc instead of creating everything from scratch. And that's when you're going to pat yourself on the back and be like, why haven't I done this before? And then step four, you're going to repeat that process and improve your promotions every season. Now, if you prefer, you can use a Google spreadsheet instead of a Doc. Whatever makes it easier for you. Sometimes I like my social media posts to be more in the format of a Google sheet, but that's up to you. Now, I want to warn you, there are going to be some voices in your head that are going to try to convince you not to do this. Here's the first objection you're going to hear. I don't have time, Corinna, to document things like this. And I want to just reframe that for you and have you consider that this actually is going to save you time, a lot of time in the long run, because you're not going to have to hunt down all those broadcast emails in your archives in the future. You're not going to have to spend 30, 60 minutes scrolling all the way back through a year's worth of history to try and even find those graphics that you posted in your Facebook business page. Right. Fifteen minutes today is going to mean hours of saved time next year. Okay? So this idea that I don't have time to document things, I want you to reframe that and think about the time you're saving in the future by doing this today. Multiple times over, actually. Right. Because you're not just going to run this promotion next year. You're going to run it the year after that and the year after that and the year after that. So you're saving yourself even more time. The second thought that's going to come creeping into your head is, I'll remember it next year. I know that I did that for 15 years. I was like, oh, I'm just going to remember what to do. I do the same thing roughly every year. And I'll just remember it. I'll just remember that I need to write an email that handles objections. I'll need to write an email that. That issues the bonus offer, and I'll just remember how to word those emails. Right. Trust me. Here's the reframe. You're not going to remember, or you're only going to remember parts of it, and it's not going to be as efficient as it could be. Even if you do remember some of it, you are going to waste time searching for all those past assets and having to rethink about it and redecide and reanalyze. That's all extra time. So this idea that I'll just remember and know what to do next year, I'm going to push back on that. And then the third objection that totally came up for me was, well, I like to change things up every year. Are you thinking that right now? I don't want to write this all down? Because you know what? It's always different, and I want to have the freedom to change it. And so I don't want to waste time doing this. Here's the reframe for that thought. Listen, I am not saying you can't adjust. Of course you're going to adjust. Every year I tweak my offer, I tweak the emails just a little bit. I'm not literally copying and pasting, but in most cases, people don't remember the stuff that I posted. They don't remember the exact wording of the emails. There's always something that's a little different. I switch out the pictures, right? But the framework is essentially there. The bones of the promotion are the same. So starting with a strong foundation is going to make iteration so much easier for you. Your brain is not going to have to hurt and think you're going to be more excited about doing the promotion sitting down to work on it because it won't fit. Feel like such a heavy lift. Okay, remember, you could copy paste the whole past promotion into ChatGPT and say, use this information from last year to help me build a new promo for this year. Think about that for a minute and that's going to blow your mind because you could give ChatGPT the whole job next year if you have documented it well. And if that isn't a reframe, I don't know what else is. Okay, so here's my homework for you from today's podcast. I want you first of all to download my farm promotion playbook template. Okay? Go to mydigitalfarmer.com promo log, get that Google Doc template format thing so that you can use that as a basis to start tracking your marketing promotions, the successes, how they do, documenting it all. Okay. MyDigitalFarmer.com promo log. And then I want you to actually build one of these Google Docs for an upcoming promotion. Will you pinky swear that to me? I want you to look ahead for this month. What's on deck, what's coming up? You're gonna build that marketing asset anyway. Just promise me that this time once you build it, you're going to just quick copy and paste the stuff and move it over into a Google Doc and label it. And just remember that you did it, organize it, structure it so that you can easily find it next year. You're going to be really glad that you put everything into one source of truth. Now, some of you are already doing this within some of your different apps, like you might be arguing. Well, Corinne, I already have some graphics inside of Canva and I've labeled that folder for the promotion. Like that's good enough or I've organized it inside of Google Photos with a folder. Fine, maybe some of you are saying, but I, I just do a search for the broadcast in my email provider. I don't need to do this. I'm going to argue that you should have a one source of truth for each of your major promotions and you can link off to those different links there if you want, but all of the stuff should be in one spot. It's going to make your optimization process the next year a lot faster and feel less heavy. Now if you need help creating marketing systems or even building a promotion to begin with, then I want to invite you to come join me inside Farm Marketing School because you are going to get step by step projects coaching from me and tons of templates to help you streamline all your different pieces of your marketing system. So you can go sign up there today. It's a month to month membership. You can sign up for a month and then stop. Check it out by going to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS that is a place you can go to dive deeper and really get this job done. All right, that is all I have today. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a rating or a review or tell a farmer friend about it and send them here to this particular show. If you want to get onto my email list for some more farm marketing wisdom, remember I have free stuff to send your way so you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and I'll start sending that to you right away. Don't forget I'm also now on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I show up there almost every day with a marketing tip or some kind of a mindset coaching moment to help you stay on track in your business. I'd love to connect with you there. And I'm also looking for podcast guests, so if you have a story to tell or you know someone who's doing a really neat thing in farm marketing, please reach out to me and let me know. Brag about them a little bit so I can contact them and see if they want to come onto the show. You can email me by going to mydigitalfarmersmail. All right, the show notes today can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 304. I'll also put the link for that promo planning log inside of there if you want to grab that template. Thanks so much for joining me today everyone. Have an amazing week. Remember, I believe in you. Bye.