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My Digital Farmer Podcast
318 How Farmers Can Use July 14 to Create Buzz and Sales
00:22:11
Have you every wished for a fun excuse to surprise your customers, build some goodwill, and boost mid-season sales? Well, what if I told you that July 14th is National Give Something Away Day—and it might just be the perfect opportunity to try...
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Corinna Bench
Did you know that July 14th is national give Something Away Day? What if you could use this quirky holiday to boost sales, delight your customers, and just create a fun, buzzworthy event on your farm? In today's episode, I'm sharing a list of creative giveaway ideas that you could steal and I'm going to show you exactly how. I used ChatGPT to brainstorm them. 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. Let's learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Welcome to episode 318 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show to all of my regular listeners and if you're new to the show, I'm glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe and go check out some of my first episodes. I always tell people to go listen to the first 10 because they were designed to be an on ramp into the marketing lingo, but there's a ton of good stuff in the archives. You could just scroll through and see what tickles your fancy. Another great place to learn the ropes for marketing is to just get onto my email list because when you do, I'm going to send you a bunch of free stuff through email. About every four or five days. I'm going to be sending you the best of the best tips. I'm going to point you to the podcast episodes that are going to teach you the fundamentals. I'm going to share freebies with you and tools that you need to have in your toolkit templates. It's so good so you can subscribe by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Local Line. If managing orders, customers and inventory feels chaotic this season, it might be time for a better system. Localline is the all in one sales platform built for farms and food hubs. Whether you're selling direct to consumer or managing wholesale buyers, or running a CSA with tools like E commerce, automated inventory management, subscriptions, barcode scanning, box builder, and pos, localline helps you simplify operations and grow your sales. In fact, farmers using localline increase their annual sales by 23% and boost their average order size by 9.5%. Switching is easy. No setup fees, no sales commissions, and your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront for free. No joke, so that you can get started without missing a beat. As a podcast listener, you'll also get one premium feature for free for a full year when you use my code MDF2025 at checkout. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline use that coupon code and you'll be on your way. Start selling smarter this season with localline. And now back to the show. In this episode today I'm giving you a list of creative ideas to leverage Give Something Away Day, which happens on July 14 every year. Did you even know there was such a thing? Neither did I. And when I saw this as I was planning my promotion calendar at the beginning of the year, I thought, well, that would be a fun day to make a big deal about. And so I am going to talk through the creative process, my list of creative ideas to leverage that day to generate some engagement and sales in your own business. Plus, you're going to learn how. I used ChatGPT to brainstorm all of these ideas, and maybe you'll either be able to go do that yourself or you'll use some of the ideas I'm sharing, tweak them a little bit, and adopt this as a new thing that you promote every year. I think it's just something fun to beta test, even if all it does is give you a little bit of momentum and energy for that week. So why should you care about Give Something away day? Well, July 14th is national give Something Away Day, and while this may sound kind of random, I think it's a golden marketing opportunity. It can generate customer excitement during the peak summer months. So we will just have finished July 4th weekend and there's kind of a lull for a few weeks. So it gives you something to talk about and focus around. It positions your farm as fun and as generous and anytime you can do things in a spirit of play and look generous, it does great things for your brand and it increases engagement and sales because you're going to be doing a very simple giveaway that's not going to cost you a whole lot. Now here's a fun little marketing insight if you haven't caught on yet. People love the surprise and delight effect. Small little freebies, gifts, acts of love that surprise people create a big emotional impact and often are the drivers of creating loyalty in your brand. So I'm always looking for ways to surprise and delight my customers. So some of the time it's very spontaneous. With some of my super buyers, it'll just occur to me and then I just go do it and I do a nice thing for them and it ends up creating goodwill and it always comes back around. But that's not why I do it. But sometimes I do them very intentionally. More on a system wide scale where I think through strategically at this point in the customer journey, for every customer, I want to do a specific surprise and delight moment for them. So anytime you can do surprise and delight, this is a good thing. And that is what this day, July 14, will do. So I was brainstorming marketing ideas early on back in January when I build my annual promotion calendar. And one of the parts of that process is to look at these different national days they're called. There's a list of them, there's hundreds, thousands of them that you can scanned through for each month. And I ran across this one, the Give Something away Day on July 14th. And I just thought, why not try something this year for that day and see what happens? And then I opened up ChatGPT to get a little bit of brainstorming help. And that's when the magic happened. So here's what I typed into the prompt box. My farm sells veggies, berries and fruit. I want to celebrate Give Something away Day on July 14th with a fun giveaway that also drives engagement and sales. Can you give me 10 creative ideas? And in about three seconds, ChatGPT generated a list of eight ideas. And I'm going to share that list with you now. I want to just point out the fact that if you're not using ChatGPT yet, even a little bit, then get on this bandwagon right now. Because I feel like it simplifies things. It shortens the brainstorming and creative process. It's making a lot of these jobs that are legitimately stressful and hard for farmers a whole lot easier. I look at ChatGPT, or AI in general as like my virtual assistant. I like to look at it as, hey, virtual assistant, you know how I talk, you know how I think. Can you please write this letter on my behalf in my voice so that I don't have to do this. And I do the same kind of thing a lot with brainstorming ideas. I'm a pretty good brainstormer, very creative, and I find that when I bring my ideas to the table, it makes it even better. It's almost like it accentuates my creativity. So AI can help you think outside the box. It can help you save time. You don't have to do a lot of brainstorming from scratch. If that's not your mojo anyway, then it's a huge gift to be able to do this. And it can adapt its ideas to your goals. So the tip here, the thing you have to remember when you're working with ChatGPT for something like this, is to be as specific in your prompts as possible. So I always lay the context for ChatGPT. I'll tell it some background about my business. So my products, who's my ideal customer, audience, what are some of my goals that I have? What do I want this session with ChatGPT to accomplish? So, you know, an example prompt might be, can you help me write a social media post and an email to promote idea number three from a list of ideas we may have brainstormed? And it will do it right. So we just have to give it a very specific prompt and we have to give it some background so it knows the context of our business. Okay, so I want to share with you these eight fun giveaway ideas for July 14th give something away Day. And I want to encourage you to steal them or adapt them for your farm. I think one or two of them are going to jump out at you. Even if you don't end up doing them for July 14, you could do them later some other time of the year, but this is just a great promotion concept. Okay, so here we go. We're going to run through them fairly fast. The first one is Berry Surprise Freebie for orders over $50. So that's the offer. Okay. How it works is that customers who spend $50 at your farmstand or in your online store, if you're trying to encourage that behavior on July 14, will get a free half pint of berries. Now, notice that this offer is boosting the average order value while showcasing a seasonal fruit. That giveaway, they could certainly also buy more of those half pints of berries on their own in the online store. Or you could make it so that that particular berry is only available as the giveaway. And if they really want to get those currants or whatever, then they're Gonna have to spend $50 with you. I've done both. Either way, it causes people to spend more in your online store. Just watch. It's pretty cool. Second idea, the golden ticket giveaway. I loved this one. Oh, there's actually. All of these are so good. It's going to be hard for me to pick just one. The golden ticket giveaway. This is how this works. You hide three golden tickets either in CSA boxes or in the store pickup bags. You could even maybe put a special sticker on a random egg in one of your dozens of eggs. And whoever finds the golden ticket gets $20 in store credit or a free fruit box or something like that. So this is kind of spinning off of the famous book Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And if you've never seen that movie, you're missing out. I loved it when I was a kid. I watched it all the time. But I have actually done something like this with my csa. I usually do it once or twice a year. And customers love finding tickets in their boxes and they go crazy. They're all looking for it and then they victoriously show it on social media. Their little daughters dancing around the living room with her golden ticket. It was super cute. So this is just going to spark excitement, all kinds of energy. People love to open up their order and see if they won't. The third idea is to is called the Share the love giveaway. So this is where you would nominate a friend. You're going to go on a social media, you're going to ask customers to nominate a friend to receive a farm fresh surprise. And you get to decide what that is. It can be a mini herb bundle. It could be a pint of berries. And what this does is it will increase your social sharing and introduce your farm to new potential customers. Because your friends who are doing this, the customers who are nominating their friends are already your ideal customer. And they're probably hanging out with people a whole lot like them who have similar interests. And now it gives them an excuse to introduce your brand to them. And then they end up looking good because they maybe help their friend win something. So it's a win win. So that's called the Share the love giveaway number four. A mystery freebie with every order. Now this one is probably what I'm not going to do. It feels like it's a little more expensive on my end, but it might not be depending on if I have something in my inventory that I wouldn't be able to sell anyway. And I just want to move it, then that might become the thing that's the freebie. But every order that's placed on July 14 comes with a mystery freebie could be herbs, a jam sample, a bag of salad greens or something that you're long on that you probably wouldn't sell anyway, and you got to get rid of it. And this is a way of making it look like it's a gift. So customers love this fun, unexpected element. And it also has the added benefit of moving small inventory items that you need to clear out. So think about that one. What could that look like for you? Number five, the Berry Match Social Media challenge. So how does this work? You post a picture of four different berries or three different berries, whatever, and you ask, which berry are we giving away today? And the first 10 people who give the correct answer will win a free half pint or a free pint of those berries. So what this one will do is boost your social engagement. It will increase visibility, people will share it with other friends. And then when you post later who the winners are, those people get all excited and they're more likely to come and buy from you, maybe for the first time. And now they turn into a more frequent buyer. So it exposes you to new customers. 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. The 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. All right, number six, sweet surprise for the first 10 orders of the day. This is kind of a fun way to celebrate Give Something Away day. The first 10 customers who place an order on July 14 would get the free thing you're giving away. So it could be anything. It could be a mini fruit crisp mix with pre measured ingredients. It could be a free bundled gift basket of some sort of your top selling items. The reason this works well is because it creates urgency and urgency drives action in the marketing world. Early buyers win. So you're going to have people who might normally pause before they decide to take up your offer. They're going to scooch through that barrier and they're going to say, I want to go for it because they don't have much time and I need to place my order. You'll also be exposed to new potential customers and increase the number of new buyers that you have in your funnel. So that's always a good thing. All right, let's move on to number seven, peach Perfect giveaway comment to win. I'm sure you've seen this formula before, but this is how it works. You would post something like what's your favorite way to eat peaches? And then you would randomly pick a winner from the comments at the end of the day and they would get the thing that you want to give away for July 14th. So this is a great one because your giveaway doesn't even have to cost you that much. It could just be a half bushel of peaches or, I don't know, a peach pie. And you're really not out a whole lot money. And in the process, you've created a lot of engagement and storytelling in the comments section. All right, number eight, this is our last one. A free Berry Bliss recipe card with every order. So this is a way of giving something away that doesn't even cost you anything. So you include a printed recipe card for a smoothie or a berry dessert or whatever you're giving away with every order. Now, the cost for you is basically the cost of the recipe card and the time it takes to put that together. But I have used this multiple times and I've noticed that when I include the recipe card in the product description or even in the product name and kind of position it as part of the offer, I sell a lot more of that thing. So there's this practical value plus it's going to promote future fruit sales if you give them the way to use this product. So that's another kind of formula to think about. So your action step for today is to decide, I'm gonna do something on July 14th on give something Away Day. It's coming up here in a few weeks. You got a little bit of time to think about it. You don't have to go crazy. Just decide, and you're gonna feel a little giddy and a little maybe a little scared and be like, I have no idea. This might not work. This might totally flop. Or it might be super fun. And just make something simple, right? Choose one or two of these ideas and run with it. Simple plus fun equals memorable marketing. My friends. There's a formula for you, okay? So don't be afraid to be fun and playful with your campaigns. And these kinds of giveaways are very shareable. They'll build these emotional connections and you're creating an experience for your customers, a fun experience. And anytime you can create a positive momentum, fun, playful experience for people, they associate that with their brand, with your brand, and they end up coming back and wanting to have that feeling again. Okay, so let me know what you decide to do. If you think of it, you can DM me on Instagram ydigitalfarmer and tell me what your giveaway promo was. I'm curious and my hope is that this does create energy, momentum, and hopefully some sales and new customers for you down the road. All right, my friends, that's all I have today. Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 318 and if you liked this episode or if you want to share it with another farmer because you think it was cool, then just grab the URL link for the episode and send it over their way. I would love for more farmers to find out about the show. Don't forget, you can also get onto my email list because I have all kinds of cool ideas like this to send your way when you subscribe@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe thank you for joining me today. Have an amazing week and remember, I believe in you. Goodbye. It.