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My Digital Farmer Podcast
308 Inside a Sales Funnel: How I Became a Raw Dog Food Superfan in 7 Days
00:51:27
It started with a few innocent dog scratches. My dog Daisy was itching like crazy, and I began to wonder: could it be her food? One Google search later, I found myself tumbling headfirst into a raw dog food rabbit hole—complete with Facebook ads,...
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Corinna Bench
Have you ever realized you just walked through someone's sales funnel? That happened to me last week for raw dog food. In just seven days, I went from casually googling my dog's itchy skin issue to becoming a loyal buyer of raw dog food. And as a marketer, of course, I couldn't help but take notes. So today I want to talk about why it worked and how we can apply those same principles to your farm business. 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 308 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. Big shout out to all of my regular binge listeners. So glad you're here today and if you are new to the show, I hope you get a lot out of it. Make sure you go and subscribe to the podcast. And I always tell people to check out my first 10 episodes. I designed them long ago to be an on ramp into the marketing lingo. So if you need some help, that's the place to start. Or you could just surf through my archives. I have over 300 episodes. Pick out the things that interest you, but I think the first 10 is a good place to get the foundations. You can also get onto my email list that's going to help you a ton because when you do, I'm going to send you an email every five days or so for about three months where I drip out the most important things you need to know first to help you learn the principles of marketing. So it's key. Podcasts you need to go listen to, influencers you need to be following tools. You should probably have free gifts that I send your way to make things easier. Tips and tricks. It's really good. So you can subscribe by going to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/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 localline, the best sales platform built for farms. Local Line 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. Well, I think today is going to be fun because I'm going to walk through a real life example of a sales funnel that happened to me. Every now and then I do an episode like this where I have a product that I end up buying and I can kind of analyze afterwards as a customer how I got pulled in and what the company did to foster trust and pitch an offer and deliver on the offer and ultimately transform me or give me the thing that I wanted. And I'm going to share a story today about raw dog food. And I want us to look at this case study of a sales funnel through the lens of your own business. So you may not sell raw dog food. That's okay. But I want you to hear the principles of the sales funnel that's underneath this story and I'll be pointing to them as I go. And I want you to think about, well, what would it look like for my farm business to be leveraging this piece of the sales funnel? Like, what do I have to do to actually implement it so that a customer has a similar kind of response? Okay, so I'm going to just tell the story and you'll get to know my golden retriever Daisy along the way. And hopefully you will see some dots beginning to connect. And you might by the end of this episode, be able to imagine a few things that you could be doing differently in your own business to move your customers along. Remember, our customers don't just show up to your website and decide to buy. There have been many prior steps to that that have happened, perhaps without you even realizing it, to warm them up and get them ready to do so. And we're gonna look at what are some of those triggers that need to have fired for a person to feel comfortable finally putting down the cash and saying, yes, I want to purchase this thing. Okay, so here we go. I have a dog, a golden retriever named Daisy, and she is two and a half years old. She has been eating kibble her whole life. In fact, we've always fed our dogs kibble. And it wasn't until about two, three months ago that I started to even think about wanting to feed her something else. And the reason I began to think about it was, number one, she was scratching herself a lot. And normally I probably would have just been like, oh, whatever, dogs scratch themselves. But perhaps also because of the fact that I have just come out of a year long experience of healing my gut, and I have become very aware of the concept of a microbiome and how it creates all kinds of autoimmune issues in people, including rashes and, and itching. I had the thought like, huh, I wonder if maybe she's allergic to something, Or I wonder if this is being caused by what she's eating. And I began to be curious. So it started with a problem. I saw that she had a problem and I wanted to try and fix it. I remember bringing it up with my vet. She happens to go to my church. So I saw her one day and I just kind of mentioned, do you think that maybe this might be caused by her diet and what's in kibble anyway? And my doctor said, definitely if you changed her diet, you would see an improvement. So that just got me thinking, how much do I love my dog? How much am I willing to spend on my dog food? And am I willing to overcome the friction of the time having to learn this whole new skill of feeding my dog a different way? Right. Like, that just seemed like a very big, overwhelming topic to tackle. And was I willing to give the time to look into it, realizing that I may decide at the end not to do it after all, it was just kind of a question of do I want to make that investment? Do I want to take that risk. But it all started with a problem, a desire to help my dog, you know, overcome that problem because I love her. But also I think I wanted to feel confident about what I was feeding my dog. And it's interesting because I didn't used to care about that. I used to be like, whatever, a dog is a dog, but now I feel differently about it. Daisy's different, and I want to give her the best. So as you're listening to this, I just want you to imagine, like, these are the kinds of things that go on in the head of a consumer when they are encountering a problem that you solve for them. Now, you may not sell raw dog food. You might sell something else, but they have similar kinds of things come up. Usually there's some kind of a problem, there's a desire. Like in my case, I just wanted to feel good about what I was feeding her, and I was not feeling good about the fact that I was giving her kibble. In fact, I was, like, anxious to get it off her bowl as soon as possible because I was just like, this is not helping her. We need to get this gone as soon as possible, because I think it's hurting her. Right? Your customer wants something. They're curious about you, and they begin to look into your business because they think that maybe you can solve this problem or meet this desire. And so that's exactly what happened for me. Once this curiosity was born, I started to research it. Now, I knew about raw food. I knew that that was one of the options. I also knew that you could get human grade food and cook it, because my friend, she's also a CSA member. She's a good friend named Kendra, does that for her dogs. And I knew that there were these subscription boxes because Kendra also got one of those ones called Farmer's Friend. That's one that I knew about. And I also remembered having an interview with Kendall Valentine here on this very show. We actually talked about a totally different topic. I'll put the link in the show notes. It was about doing prepared. A prepared foods line. But she did briefly mention as part of that interview how she has a raw dog food line which is very profitable for her business. And. And one of the things that she sells to farmers actually is the recipe that they use to create that. And now that I'm on the other side of all this research, I can understand how valuable that recipe could be. But I remember that interview, and I thought to myself, okay, I know that there are things that you could feed your dog instead that are probably better. And so I thought, let me at least look into this and see what it is that I don't know. So the first thing that I did is I went and I asked my friend Kendra, and she. And I texted back and forth. I actually invited her over for coffee, and she brought me a sample packet from farmer's friend. She shared some recipes with me. She gave me. She even gave me, like, a baking pan with. It's like a cupcake pan, but they're in the shape of dog bones so that you can make your own treats. It was super cute. A cookbook and all kinds of advice about how she does it and what the other options were. And I ultimately didn't decide to go her route with the cooked food, but I was really grateful for her advice. She also told me where she goes to source her ingredients and how she puts it together every week. And at first I was like, oh, wow, this is a lot more work than I thought. But, you know, I took. I was just taking it all in as part of my research. I also went to Google and I researched. I don't remember what I typed in, but I wanted to know, how do you feed a dog? I might have typed in the word raw dog food. And I was brought to first, first of all, a subscription company, actually, several of them. Farmer's Friend, I think was near the top, but I kept scrolling down and I clicked on a few of them. I watched some YouTube videos for some of these channels to try to educate myself, like, what's their origin story? And as I was listening to some of those videos, I was identifying with them. I'm like, yeah, those are some of the same questions that I was having too. And so whatever content they had put together, they were using the words and the stories and the emotions that they knew their ideal customer was probably feeling too. And it was creating a touch point, a connecting point, a bridge. I also read a lot of the pages on those websites and blog posts that were basically describing the pros and cons, or, you know, here's the difference between a raw food dog food diet versus a kibble diet, and comparing, like, why I should do one over the other. Again, that was super helpful. And as I was reading it, I was nodding my head and I was like, yes, they're right. I should make the switch, right? So all this content was kind of corroborating what I already felt and what I already probably knew I wanted to do. And it just needed to coach me along and give me that little Nudge to finally take action. So I ultimately decided to choose one of these subscription boxes called wefeedraw.com and I chose that one over some of the others, partly because of their messaging. Frankly, like, it was just a whole lot simpler to understand. There were a lot fewer words, and I liked that they were just raw. It looked easy. I did the math, and it was coming to about $8.50 per meal, so per day. And that felt like a lot at first. But I told myself, you know what? I'm willing to make this investment for a couple of months until I figure out if I can do it for less on my own. So that was always the intention going in, that I wasn't going to stay with with this company, but that it was gonna help me transition into a different way of feeding my pet. It was gonna help coach me and give me confidence along the way. I bring that up because what I ultimately wanted, when I was reflecting for this podcast, what I ultimately wanted from this whole process was a dog food solution. Okay? I wanted to walk away from this with an actual dog food to give my dog. That wasn't kibble. But I also realized that what I wanted was to do it myself. I wanted to learn the skill. I wanted to become a person that knows how to do this. And that felt a little exciting, a little daunting, but kind of like way back when I decided I wanted to be a backpack guide in my late 20s, and I was terrified of it, but I was like, no, man, I know I can do this, and I'm gonna figure it out, right? It's that same sort of thrill. Like, this is something that's gonna feel a little hard at first, but I want to figure this out, and I'm gonna do it. It's gonna be a challenge. It was that sort of feeling that I was going for. And the reason I bring this up is because your customer, when they're buying your product, not only are you selling them a solution to a problem and giving them probably a physical thing, but you are also meeting some kind of inner transformation desire that they have. And it's important for you to know what that is. In this case, the. The desire was, I want to feed my dog something besides kibble, but I also want to feel empowered. I want to become this confident woman who knows why she's feeding her dog this way and knows how to do it herself. And I'm going to feel powerful at the end of this. That's what I wanted. And I think that that is why I ultimately ended up doing what I did later, which I'll tell you, I ended up canceling the subscription. But that's what was driving this whole journey was figure out that piece. So as you're looking at your own story, your own brand, I want you to spend some time really getting into the head of your customer. What is it that they want? What problem do you solve for them? Do you know what it is? And the best way to find this out is to just get on the phone or get in person with a few of your best clients and, and talk to them and just listen to them. And you'll hear it, you'll hear it come out after you talk to like 10 people, you'll see the pattern and it comes up over and over again and it's usually not very complicated. Okay, all right. So I did get onto the We Feedraw.com's email list. They had some kind of a download, something that I wanted and I honestly don't remember what it was and I didn't want to take the time to go look it up before this podcast, but there was a download. So I did get on their email list. But the moment, the transition of being slightly interested to okay, I'm ready to buy was pretty fast for me in this case. And I don't even think that they had a chance to send me a few nurture emails before I was ready to go. Like, I think it was a matter of two days and I was deciding that I want to, I want to look into their trial offer. So they did have an offer on their website and it was a trial. And once you kind of read up on their, the pathway, they make a suggestion. Rather than saying, hey, sign up forever with us. They say, why don't you try it for 10 days? We have a 10 day transition process for your dog. And then after those 10 days, because you have to kind of transition them off the kibble. Ideally, I know you can do hardcore, but they were suggesting that we do a transition and so they were going to coach me through how to do that. They were going to send enough food to be able to do that well. And then once that was over, they were going to start me on a subscription for every month and they would send enough food for a month. Okay, that was kind of how it was going to work. So I was comfortable looking at the price point of this 10 day package that fell with the discount. There was like a 20% off discount as part of the offer with a certain coupon code. And I think that was around the 75, 80 range. That felt like a good amount of money. And the only reason I bring this up is because they had a gateway offer. And as you are thinking about how do I get someone to buy my product for the first time, like, to move from being on my email list to actually becoming a paying customer, it is important for you to think about creating a first offer. This is often called the gateway offer. Usually it's the thing that's your best seller, the thing that everybody wants. In this case for this company, they have a higher priced premium product here. It's a hard ask to say drop $300 on the first box for a month's worth of food, and instead they need to somehow splinter that off something off of that offer to make it a little bit more palatable, to make the risk a little bit less. And so the way they chose to do it was, I'm going to take 10 days, I'm going to come up with this thing of like, you need to transition your dog for 10 days and I'm going to coach you through that. We're going to give you enough food for 10 days. And here's the number. And that number landed around 85. And I feel like I would have been willing to spend up to $100, maybe 125 dol for that first purchase for this kind of a product. So they needed to create an offer that fell within those parameters. Okay, that's going to look a little different for your sales funnel. You may be selling something at a lower price point initially, but just be thinking about that. What does that look like? What is that first offer? And how can you encourage, how can you get it to go higher? How can you get the average order value of your gateway offer to be as high as possible? Of course. But think through that lens. Like, I know you want to sell them everything in your product suite, but that's not how we do it. That's not how we turn a customer into a super fan. We do it slowly. We first tease them with our best stuff with an opening offer, and then when they have a great experience with that and we sort of tested it out on them and they've proven the concept and they're like, yeah, I like it. Then they're open, they trust you, they're willing to take your next offer, and then you have a second offer ready and you have a third offer ready, and then they're in a buying rhythm, and maybe then you have a subscription or something else or they have created their own Quote, unquote subscription habit. Because they come and see you every week because they like you now. Okay? So this is how we naturally grow the customer relationship. And I just want to bring that to your attention and encourage you to be patient as you cultivate a buying relationship. And don't throw everything at your customer the first time. Find that perfect first offer and just be patient. Be patient and let them fall in love with you. Okay? 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. The 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. Okay, so I signed up for this subscription box. Now I want to bring up something here. I was going to do this later, but I'm going to do it now. I was eager to get it. I was eager to get started. Okay. And so I was now in the excite phase. When you learn about the customer value journey after the moment of conversion. Conversion, there is a a key period called the excite phase where the customer is really excited to try the product. They're going to use it for the first time. And it's really important that you give them a an experience of success that you actually engineer that first experience of opening the box or getting the product so that they are successful with it. And I have to tell you that this is where this company dropped the ball for me. I did get a confirmation of payment, but I remember waiting for the news like when is the box coming? I figured that that was going to show up as maybe the second email later on that day or the next day. And I heard nothing for them for like four days. And I started to get nervous. So I went back and I looked at that first confirmation email that said, you know, we received your payment and I was like, is it on here where like when the shipment is coming? Because like I, I want to know, like I need to prepare. This is going to be raw food, right? Like anything. Like, like is it coming in a couple days? They did not communicate that key piece of information to me. Um, so maybe it didn't occur to them that this is something that a customer is really interested in knowing. I wish I could tell them that. But I bring it to your attention that your customer, that that confirmation email that goes out that actually is really important in some cases the information that's on there. So make sure that you think about what's the stuff my customer must know now. There's a lot of stuff they eventually need to know, but what's the most important stuff they're probably wanting to know now and am I putting that information out right away so that there's a reassurance that they are in good hands? I did not have that feeling. I actually began to wonder if I'd been scammed. I sent an email to them and said, hey, I haven't heard anything like when is the box coming? And then the next day I got what looked like an automated message that said, your box has shipped. And so then I was like, okay, it's probably coming in the next few days, okay. But there was just not a good communication stream. So I just bring that up because that, that was a moment here, the excite phase where I was like excited, I was ready, I was like woohoo. I was trusting them, I was all in. And I have to tell you that I was, I was disappointed and I lost a little faith in this company. And I'm like, oh man, did I make a bad decision? Are they maybe not super organized now? The other thing that happened during this four day window is that I started to take more seriously the idea that I might have to do this all on my own, that I was probably not going to stay with this company. I was going to do these 10 days that hopefully we're going to come. But that maybe I needed to look into how to DIY my own dog food myself and just be a little more hardcore about it. And that I needed to figure this out sooner rather than later because I had food coming, presumably, and within the next couple weeks, if I didn't want to use this company more, I'd need to have another solution in place. So that got me really serious and excited about researching how to do it on myself. So I again went back to Google and I discovered a blog. It was k ninesovercoffee.com I think is the one that came to the top. And I just dove into her site and she was intense. She has way too much material, frankly. I'll be honest. There is such a thing as having too many affiliate links and too many, like, links to every other page on her blog. But she had everything you needed to know about how to get started if you wanted to feed your dog raw dog food. And throughout this journey. So I read probably 50% of her blog posts, which is saying something. She's got hundreds of pages. And in the process of reading all of this stuff, I began to assimilate the knowledge, right? So I was looking for frequently asked questions. I was looking for things like the how to. Like, like, what do you actually. What kind of food am I even supposed to feed them? Turns out there is a formula. There's an acronym called barf, which I think is hilarious. B A, R, F. You have to feed your dog a certain percentage of raw meaty bone, a certain percentage of muscle meat, a certain percentage of secreting organs. And then you could also even do vegetables. And there's whole idea, add in kelp or, like, supplements, right? So there's all of that that I kind of had to learn. Then there was the whole dog food calculator. Based on the weight of your dog, how much food should they be feeding every day and how often during the day? Then just the how to the practical how to. Like, if I just. If I sourced a bunch of raw meat from a bunch of different places, like, how do you actually get it into the bowl so that it doesn't take over my meal prep time every day? Like, is there a system I can build? And so she had answers to that. How she spends, you know, one day a month or two days a month where she assembles everything, where do you source the food? Is this safe? And what do I have to worry about in terms of safety, cost? I was really concerned about that because I didn't want this to become, you know, a financial stressor on my life. I wanted to feel good about that. And even something as simple as, like recipes, like, just make it simple for me so that I don't have to decide. I was looking for guidance in that respect. Now I just went into a bunch of detail there, but that was. Those were some of the high level pieces of information that I wanted to know and I found it on her blog and I took notes. And through the course of this, she helped me build a success path. Right? A, you know, step one, do this, step two, do this, step three, do this, and you will have a system for how to create your own dog food. And as I was reading this, as I was writing this down, as I was building out my plan, she was answering my questions and she was overcoming all of my objections, all of my fears, all of my worries, all of my imposter syndrome. Can I do this? This is going to be too hard. There's no way this is going to be affordable. All of those things got knocked down one by one as I went through her material. So I bring this up because within your sales funnel, you should have a process where you overcome your customer's objections. You need to know what those questions are. Questions are basically just an objection in disguise. Okay? You need to know what those frequently asked questions are, and you need to know what those objections are. You need to know what the myths are, what the mindset shifts you have to make are, and you need to overcome them. That needs to be a part of your messaging and you need to beat that drum over and over again because you always have new people coming into your sales funnel. So you're gonna feel like you're saying the same things on your social media and in your emails over and over again. That's okay. Your people who already know this will be patient and they'll nod their head and be like, yep, I already know that I'm in the club. Okay? But this was an important piece that I needed to have solved for me at some point before I was ready to move and graduate into the convert phase of, okay, now I'm going to turn into a kind of buyer that's buying meat on my own. So I already went through the objections and the frequently asked questions for like a subscription model of the we feed raw. Like, if they're just going to send me packages and I don't have to do anything, like, I went through that too before I converted, but now I was kind of shifting to, actually, I think I want something else. Because I'm not sure I want to stay with this company. I think I can do it myself. I think that's actually what I want. I want to feel powerful and I want to feel good about how I'm doing this on my own. And so in order to become that Corinna, I need to answer these questions. I need someone to tell me I can do this. I need to. To have someone tell me it's safe. I need to read a bunch of social proof. I need to talk to some friends who are doing this, who are saying, no, you're not crazy. This is actually amazing. And it's very easy to do, and it just takes a while at first, and it's a little scary at first, and that's normal. I just needed to hear that, right? So I went through, I found all those objections, I overcame them, and there I was, ready to take the next step. Now, don't laugh. This is what that next step looked like for me. Because of the work of this canines over coffee blog and a few others that I looked at, I felt confident. I felt like, okay, I know the formula. I know how to do this. Now I have to actually sit down and do some math, get into a spreadsheet and start actually putting together a dog food plan. And I spent a good two hours of my life looking at all the different options, playing around with it, looking at the numbers, and I put together a basic, you know, four week plan. I called it my little beta test. I give myself permission to change it. But here's what I'm going to do for the first month, and I give myself permission to not be amazing at it at first, because I'm learning how to do this right. But I built a spreadsheet. And on this spreadsheet, I figured out how many ounces of meat I had to feed Daisy every day. And I figured out, based on the formulas, I'd learned how much of those ounces needed to be raw, meaty bone and liver and other secreting organ and heart muscle and other muscle. And I had it all broken down by ounces. And then on that same spreadsheet, I had week one, week two, week three, week four. And then I like, laid it out like, here's what we're going to do. Week one, we're going to focus on chicken as the main muscle meat. And then we're going to add in this, this, and this. And I saw it all. I'm like, oh, I'm going to need one ounce of liver every day. And I'm going to need one ounce of heart every day and then I'm going to need this many ounces of bone every day. So I just, I saw how it all played out. I had gone price shopping. I'd heard tips from some friends like, hey, here's an online store where you can source some weird organ meats if you want to go a little crazy and have some more variety in your diet. But I had a really good tip from my friend Bri, who has done this before. She's like, you could just go to tanks, which is down the street from me. She's like, they have actual like raw dog food tubes by the pound. And she's like, the beef one even has like the organ meat in it. I'm like, oh, sweet. So I don't even have to worry about sourcing the liver and the hearts for that, right? So even knowing that that existed and I went and found that and I saw the price point and I'm like, that's awesome. That can be my starter pack. And then all I have to do is like, figure out a few other things to throw on top of it. And I get to have some creativity and fun with toppers. You know, maybe throw some, some goat yogurt or a little bit of sauerkraut on the top or maybe some an egg yolk a couple times a week, right? Like, it suddenly became fun like, oh, this is, this isn't going to be that hard. I just need to get these four base kind of grinds and then I can jazz it up with my creativity in other ways by choosing the, a different kind of bone, by choosing some of the different kinds of organs and so forth. Not going to gross you out, but I just created a plan, right? So I researched prices at a lot of different stores. I found my base supplier. I built a shopping plan. Then based on this four month or four week schedule, I was able to price it out and see how much it was going to cost per, per week based on these different menus. And then how many ounces or pounds of those different cuts I was going to need to source in a given month and then how much that would cost. And I'm like, holy cow. I can Shift this from 8.50ameal to $4. In some cases $3.50ameal if I get the sales just right, right? And you know what happened in the process of doing that? I felt powerful. I felt awesome. And remember how I told you at the beginning that that's what I wanted? That's actually What I wanted, yes, I wanted to feed Daisy, and I wanted to know she wasn't having kibble. But I also wanted to feel like I had understood the why and the how behind all of this, that I was an empowered buyer. And in this process, that is what happened. And I felt amazing. So I canceled my We Feed Raw subscription. But in the process, I became a new consumer, a new type of consumer of the raw dog food industry. And I am bought in, my friends. Can you tell? Did you just see how, like, my pace of my talking sped up there when I was explaining the goat yogurt? I felt it as it was happening. Anyway, I am bought in, and I am that crazy consumer who is making goat milk ice cubes to drop into her dog's bowl and going out and finding chicken paws and chicken feet from local butchers. And, yeah, like, I'm having a blast. So I want you to be thinking again about what is it that your customer really wants? And are you making sure that they get that? Are you making sure that they're going through the excite phase and having a good experience? Are they growing? Are they transforming into a better version of themselves? I always talk about this idea in marketing of, you know, your customer, when they first meet you, they're on one side of a cliff, they have a problem, and they want to get to the other side of this chasm, to the other side where there's another cliff face. And they don't know how to cross that divide. And your product is the bridge that gets them over to the promised land, right? That transformation that before and after life. Like, this is how I am before your product, but this is how I am after your product. And I want it so bad. And it's a feeling word of some kind. So what is that feeling they want, and what are you doing on that bridge to make sure that they have that feeling? I want you to think about that. Okay, now, before I wrap up, I wanna bring up the last two stages of a sales funnel. When I teach this inside of our marketing school, there is something called the ascension ladder. And we actually talked about this, I think, in last week's episode, maybe the week before. This is where you make your money in your business. It's often called the profit maximizer phase. After someone has purchased for the first time and you have hopefully excited them and given them success with the product, then you give them another offer and then another offer and another offer until they turn into a lifetime buyer and they graduate into a promoter, into someone who just wants to buy from you all the time. And whenever you come up with another product or another kind of offer and you give it to them, they're like, yes, I want that too. And they begin to spend more and more with you every month, every year. And the customer lifetime value goes up. And hopefully that's something you're tracking. What is the customer lifetime value, or at least the annual customer value. And then you can kind of extrapolate from what a typical lifetime number of years that your customer might be with you. You can maybe extrapolate how much one customer is worth to you. But as I think about this dog food example, like, I am now someone who is going to be buying raw dog food at the $150 a month level for the foreseeable future. And when you think about how much money I am now putting out into the wide world for this, like, that's a, that's a fair amount of money to spend on a dog. And I'm going to keep buying that. Like, I've created a four week schedule for myself, Right. If you wanted to know, I could tell you exactly how much money I will spend on chicken wings and chicken feet and so forth. Right. If I were buying all of this stuff from one company, they would be able to feed me additional offers from week to week to try and get me to take even better care of Daisy. Maybe they're like, hey, do you want to buy our kelp supplements? And I would probably say yes, I would be open to it because I am learning about this, I'm excited about it. And if you continue to give me offers and make a good case for why this is going to be helpful for my dog, I might very well take you up on it. Or if I don't do it on a regular basis, I might do it every now and then as a little gift to my dog. Right? So we are always looking for ways to encourage our new buyers to ascend up the ladder of products. And we need to keep giving them offers, we need to keep turning them into a habitual buyer. What are some buying habits that you can encourage to develop in your customer? So think about your business right now through that lens. What am I doing to get my customers to come back and buy again? What is my second offer? What is my third offer? What offer do I give them at month two or month four? Do you have certain things that you do on a regular basis? Or could you, if you don't have that yet, could you start to put a plan together to turn them into a super Fan buyer. The last thing I want to say in this story is that I have also hit the promoter stage in this sales funnel because I am telling other people proudly of what I am doing and how I am feeding my dog raw dog food now. And there is a final stage in the sales funnel called the promote stage. And this is where you successfully turn this customer into someone who talks about you, who advocates for you, who becomes almost like a marketer for your industry or for your specific product. And I have noticed that I have been posting pictures to my audience my on Facebook, social media. I remember texting my friend Kendra, the one who introduced me, who I had over for coffee, right? And she gave me that cute little baking pan. She was the first person that I texted when I got the raw dog food and put it in the bowl. I sent it to her and said, yay, I've joined the club, right? I'm in the family and I find myself wanting to make other disciples, right? Like just. I'm so excited about it. I'm proud of myself. When I watch Daisy eat her meal at. In the morning and then later on in the late afternoon, she just looks so happy. And I. I feel like I can see her coat glowing and shining, which is ridiculous. I know it's not. But, like, I'm just. There's this halo effect right now, and I'm loving it. I want to tell everyone about it. I'm noticing this in myself with this product. And so I want to just point out to you that your customer, if they turn into a super fan, they. They will have this feeling too. They will be so proud of themselves. They will be so excited. They will enjoy what you are giving them and how they are growing, the transformation that you are providing them. And they will want to show it off and talk about it with people. So be ready for that. Have suggestions for what they could do. Encourage that behavior. Make it easy for them to tag you. Or if they happen to share it publicly and you hear about it, get permission to share it for them on their behalf on your own page. Like, look for ways to celebrate this behavior with your audience. Because what you celebrate, what you reward, often gets repeated. And your future customers will see that you like it when people do this. You reward people when they do it, and then they will aspire to it and they will start to promote you as well. Maybe this means you have a referral program that you build because you know that eventually a certain percentage of your customers are going to want to talk about you. And so you're going to make it easy for them by letting them know you have this. And so now they can send a code to their friends or they can send this email that you forwarded to them to their friends. You've given them the tool that makes it easy to talk about them. Okay, so brainstorm what that could look like for yourself. All right, my friends, that's the end of this beautiful story. And your homework is to think about your own business. And what is the customer journey like through your business right now? Do you have things positioned along the way to make sure that your customer, your future, your prospect, becomes a customer, that they move from milestone to milestone? When you come inside of farm Marketing School, this is the first project that I recommend everyone takes. It's the sales funnel audit because it teaches you the customer value journey framework. This is the framework, the skeleton on which the entire marketing system stands. I didn't come up with it. It's the one that's kind of just out there undergirding every industry, every retail industry, at least. And it's basically the stages of awareness. Engage, subscribe, convert, excite, send, advocate, and then promote. And we need to have things in our business that are getting at each of those stages so that a person gets moved along and massaged along this customer journey. They don't just jump from being aware of you to a promoter in a matter of seven days. Like, that process takes a while, and you've got to do some things along the way to make them move. So I'm hoping that today's case study will show you how this company moved me along and made it easy for me to grow and become what I wanted to become. How can that look in your business? How can you take these stages in the customer value journey and then overlay your business on top of them. Maybe there are a few pieces, few marketing assets that you are missing right now. And people are getting lost in the pipeline because there's a key step in the middle that's not firing for them. And so they walk away or they get confused and they leave and they don't continue. They fall out of your sales funnel. So that's why I encourage you. If you don't know the framework, come inside Farm Marketing school because that's the basic starter class that you take to learn it. But then once you learn it, you'll be able to figure out what are those missing pieces? What are the. The marketing assets that I have to build and build fast to plug those holes. And that's where pharma Marketing School also helps because there's a project for almost every single one of those phases. I'm continuing to add more classes as we go, but most of those holes can be plugged now. But you can take the class, the project that's going to help you kind of build out that one system that maybe isn't firing. To learn more about how to join Farm Marketing School, you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS all right, well, there you have it. That's the end of the episode. The show notes for today can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 308 if you liked today's episode, please go leave me a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. I know I say that every week, but it would be really awesome if a couple of you did that this week. It means a lot. It helps more people find out about the show, but it also just feels good to me, honestly, to read them and to know that I'm making a difference and to see what it is about the show that you actually like. You could also just share the link of the show with a friend, maybe text it to them. That would be awesome as well. Now don't forget, if you want to get onto my email list and learn some more marketing tips, I have some free stuff to send you to make your marketing stronger. You can get that by subscribing@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe check me out on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I'd love to connect with you there. And Happy Easter. And don't forget, I believe in you. I'll see you next week. Bye. Bye Ra.