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My Digital Farmer Podcast
323 The Secret to My 60-Cent Leads — How I Found a High-Performing Facebook Ad by Accident
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Corinna Bench
What if finding your next high converting Facebook ad didn't mean starting from scratch? What if it was already hiding in plain sight on your farm's social media feed? Today I'm sharing the story of how I stumbled onto a high performing Facebook ad that grew my email list by over 500 people in just 30 days. And what you can learn from my story. 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 well. Welcome to episode 323 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. A big shout out to all of my regular listeners. Really glad you're here. And if you're new to the podcast, maybe one day you'll become one of those binge listeners too. I hope so. Make sure you subscribe to the show. Go check out some of my earlier episodes. You can just scroll through the back archives. There's so many good titles, but I do tell people if you're kind of new to the marketing space, go listen to the first 10 because I designed them to be kind of like an onboarding and training into the marketing lingo. You can also get onto my email list that's going to help you a ton. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe when you do, I'm going to send you an email about every four or five days for maybe three months and I'm going to share with you the best of the best stuff that I have, like key foundational principles you need to know one nugget at a time. I'll point you to some podcast episodes that are really good, some key people you need to be following, resources, swipe files, examples, templates just to get you going. It's really good. So go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Localline. 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. All right, let me set the scene for you. I want to tell you the story, the backstory about a post on Facebook that took off. Do you ever have one of these where you just are going about your day, you post something like you always do, and you come back and look at it a few days later and you notice that it got a ton of action? Well, that's what happened to me. About six weeks ago. I posted a very casual organic feeling post on our farm's business page, his Facebook business page. And like I teach my farmers all the time, there should be a mix of content, of what I call anchor content that's showing up on a regular basis so that you're constantly educating new people that come into your world how to start doing business with you. Right? And this is one of the things that I teach in my social media planning class inside of farm marketing school and it's something that I've practiced for a while. So this particular post was an anchor post. I answer a common frequently asked question this time of year, which is can I buy from you if I'm not a CSA member? This is a question that's been coming up a lot, especially in the last year because we use used to just sell a csa. That was the only way you could buy from us. And then we began to shift to another option for people who were dropping out of the csa. We wanted to be able to still serve them. And we also saw an online store option, a custom sort of, hey, I just want to build my own order option as a way to potentially pull in new CSA members to our traditional CSA model. So we now have both ways that you can buy. And this has created a little bit of a conundrum for our customers and prospects because they're under the assumption that they can only buy vegetables from us as a csa. And so I have to constantly be beating that drum and saying, no, you can buy just once a year or once every six weeks or whenever you want from our online store. So this is a, a common post that will go into my rotation from time to time. This particular post, however, was crafted by ChatGPT. I'll be honest about it. So I had been working more and more inside of the AI model and it had composed it, put some emojis in it, and so I had thrown that particular caption in. Now, the photos that were in this post were my husband Kurt, packing asparagus on a dark evening in our pack shed. So there's kind of the lights in the pack shed, but the green of the asparagus is really popping. And then I had some other photos of just produce that were alongside that. I think I had raspberries, cucumbers, lettuce. None of those things were actually for sale, but they were meant to kind of show people who saw this post like, hey, here's what's coming down the pike. So there were no text overlays on these pictures. It was no fancy graphics made in canva trying to promote get onto my email list. It was just real farm moments. And then this casual organic sounding post of answering that question, can I buy from you if I'm not a CSA member? And I basically said, yes, you can. Here's how you would do it. Here's how you can order. Step one, step two, step three, here are the pickup sites. I mean, I just was very specific. And then there was a link to subscribe to my produce availability list in that post. Okay, so here's what happened next. When I checked back later, I had lots of shares and comments and views. You know how you can go into Facebook insights. And you can see this like bar graph that lights up blue and you know, zooms over to the right. And that's how, you know, oh, there's a lot of traction on that one. Well, I always have a few of those, but this one was like off the charts. I'm like, what was that post? And I went back and looked at it and I thought that's interesting. The the post that's basically promoting how to buy from me and my availability list is doing really well. And that's not typically what you see, right? It's usually the behind the scenes stuff that does well. Not my promotional posts or my lead magnet posts. Those usually just get a few interactions. So it was clear that this post had struck a chord. Now, at the time, I was not spending any money on Facebook ads. In fact, I haven't for quite a while. But I had this idea. I wonder if I should invest some advertising dollars in that particular message. So I want to just pause here and make a key point. Namely that sometimes the best way to find an ad isn't to create one on purpose, isn't to go sit down in the ads manager and just try to write one from scratch. It's the one that your audience shows you they care about because they've previously engaged with it. And there's proof in the pudding that yeah, this one's going to do well if you decide to turn it into an ad. Today's podcast is sponsored by Taste the Local Difference. Is your marketing to do list starting to feel like a second full time job? When your list of tasks is growing longer by the day, or you've got a highly technical project like logo design or setting up your e commerce shop, you need farm marketing experts like Taste the Local difference. With over 20 years of experience, TLD is my recommended go to marketing agency for purpose driven farmers and local food entrepreneurs. Because working with these businesses is not only their passion, it's their sole focus. No wonder most of their clients see an average of 200% return on their investment within the first year after service. So whether you need a marketing plan to reach more of your ideal customer, or a graphic design for labels, packaging or advertising, or a beautifully built website fully optimized for web search, the farm marketing experts at Taste the Local Difference can help you with all of that and more. And they have a special offer just for my Digital Farmer Podcast listeners. Go to localfoodmarketing.com podcast to learn more. And when you fill out a no obligation marketing inquiry form, just mention my Digital Farmer and you'll get 10% off any marketing service up to $300. That's localfoodmarketing.com podcast. And now back to the show. So I had an aha moment and I told myself, all right, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna turn this post into an ad. Now I have the same resistance that I know some of you guys have, like, I don't like to spend money on advertising. I really love to do things organically, and that's pretty much how I've built my business. But I've gotten a little bit more open to the idea of releasing my hands, releasing my fists that are holding and gripping so tightly to the purse strings, and saying, you know what? I can test this out. I can beta test this. I'm willing to try it. So I went into the Facebook ads manager, and I copied and pasted the words of that post, put it into the ad, and then I added the images and graphics. I chose the website leads, I think lead generation objective. And then I defined my audience as, you know, people living in the Toledo, Ohio area plus 20 miles, kind of that you're able to select a radius around a central point. And that's because I wanted to try to pitch this to local people. I didn't want followers from other states because I know I have farmers that are following me all over the place. I didn't want those people clicking on the ad right and me paying for those clicks. So I really limited it to just the people that could potentially turn into my customer. And I started out with $5 a day. As I recall, I could be wrong about that. But I think it was just $5 a day. In my mind. I thought to myself, I'm willing to do this for 30 days. That's $150. Like, yeah, I can do that. And I'll check back in here in about a week and see how it does. I'll give the algorithm a chance to churn through some of this and find my kind of customers. So when I came back a few days later, the results were blowing me away. I almost, like, didn't quite believe it. I looked at it and I thought, there must be a mistake here. This is crazy. Facebook was showing me that my cost per lead was around 34 cents when I went and looked inside of convertkit or kit.com, which is my email service provider, and I looked at that specific form, the subscribe form. I had duplicated the subscribe form that I was taking people to so that it said facebook ad subscribe Form. That way I can see what are the results for this particular campaign in real time. And that particular number was showing me a slightly different number. And when I did the math, it was actually looking more like 60 cents per lead. Just as an aside, this can sometimes happen where your Facebook ad is counting it as a conversion because somebody's clicking on the link. But that doesn't mean that someone actually fills out the form and submits it. That's being counted by Kit.com so in reality, that's the number that I should be looking at, the number of subscribers who completed the form and ended up in my email service provider. So I'm taking that number and using that to help me compute my cost per lead. $0.60 per lead, though, is a fantastic return on investment. I'm very happy with that. I went and checked earlier this morning because I knew I was going to do this podcast and I'm now at around $0.75 per lead, which means it's going up a little bit to be expected. Still incredibly happy with that. I have so far to date added 503 email subscribers to my farm list in around 30 days. Now, I started this campaign at $5 a day. When I saw it working like this, I said to myself, real fast, we need to scale this. And so I kicked it up to $10 a day for a week, and then I moved it up to $15 a day again. In my mind, I'm justifying this as a very good investment. If the results continue to bring me this kind of cost per lead, then, yeah, I should be milking it for all it's worth right now while there's interest. So I decided to turn this little case study into a quick tip podcast episode. And again, the key point here is sometimes the best ad isn't the one that you create on purpose. It's the one that's proven itself organically in your social media feed, the one that your audience shows you that they've liked because they're engaging with it. So I recommend when you go and turn your post into an ad number one, that you don't boost the post that's doing well, but that you actually go and rebuild it in the ads manager so that you can control the objective, you can do the targeting, you can set budget. There's some more, like, detailed things that you can do in there. And I would encourage you to start small. $5 a day is completely acceptable. And then if you see that it's tracking and doing well, then you can scale up. Now, why did this work so well? I've been really trying to rack my brain about that. When a post performs well organically, it's already validated, right? Your audience is telling you, we like this, we care about this, we're sharing it, we're commenting. And so it's pretty likely that when you put it out as an ad, it's Going to continue to do that for more people that Facebook is trying to help you get in front of. It also feels very natural. It blends in, which I think clicks increases the clicks and the engagement. This was just a picture of my husband packing asparagus, which happened to be in season at the time, and a bunch of other vegetables, which is the kind of stuff that we post, right? These are real photos. They're not things that I've doctored up or that I've built on Canva. They're not a polished looking graphic. They look very organic, like something that a person would post on Facebook from their phone, from their real life. And so I think that that helped as well. So look back at your farm's social posts in the last two or three months and which ones have gotten unusually high organic engagement, and consider is that a post that I could somehow turn into an ad and duplicate as an ad? Now, one of the questions that I wanted to bring to your attention was why am I focusing on list building? Why spend money on ads to build your email list instead of on an ad to promote a product? Well, this is a big deal for me. I never spend money to promote a product. I always, if I'm going to spend money on Facebook, it's going to be for list building. Now, there's a caveat here. The reason why I feel like that's a smart move for me is because I have a really robust email marketing strategy behind the scenes. I have an email nurture sequence that is really good, that has high open rates. Once somebody subscribes to my list, they get subscribed to that, they get warmed up. I send them a bunch of really good content so they know like and trust me. And then eventually they're getting on my weekly email. Then they start to see my offers, and they're more likely to turn into a customer at that point. So I have a very rigorous, disciplined schedule of sending the weekly email, making a weekly offer, and then this really beautiful email nurture sequence that empowers them and trains them and teaches them things. So I spend money on growing the email list because if I can get a person on my list, I own that email address. Now, that is, that is mine. It's not something I have to depend on Facebook to go find to decide. It's going to show my content to people. Like, I now have access to their inbox and I can nurture them. I can send them offers and do a whole bunch of other things to try and get them to notice me. So I'VE seen new store orders come in in the last two weeks as well through our local line online store. We just started our csa and so that means our online store orders have begun as well. And there are new faces. There were five orders just in today's pickup site alone, which is a really good number for me. I have a Google sheet that I work from that helps me kind of target very specific goals. I am trying to get my number of new customers to go up by 15%, the order frequency in the AOV to go up by 15% this year. Those are some of my goals. And so I have to have a way to get new customers to come into the door. And this is making it happen. It's so exciting. And these new customers spent an average of $40 on their first purchase. Who knows if they will come back again? I'd like to think they will at least once or twice this season. But I'm going to be tracking the average order value, the frequency of some of these new customers, and then the customer value for one year of these new customers as well. And that's going to be a piece of data that I can compare against this cost per lead of 75 cents and be able to see, well, how much am I willing to spend up to to acquire a lead if I know that I'm making this much on the other side. So I just kind of wanted to share that with you. Why I've decided to invest money in list building as opposed to a specific offer. I think it's a wiser move for me. A lot of times it's a whole lot cheaper as well. Cost per lead. The timing of this matters as well. Right now I'm recording this in early July. I ran this campaign or I started this campaign at the end of May, and that's kind of when the season turns on. This is the best time to grow your email list. When you're moving from spring to summer, your customers are excited to start buying produce from you and you have a long stretch of time. I have like four or five months now on which I can try to pitch offers and make money. I'm not going into my winter season where there's nothing to sell them. So there is a chance here to take this list that I'm growing and monetize it. So it makes sense for me. If I'm going to throw money at this and scale it, this is when I would do it. I sat down and talked to Kurt about it. I said, hey, I didn't necessarily have this in the budget. This is going to be like 300 bucks a month for Facebook ads. But it's so worth it because look what the results are showing us. This is going to grow our email list by like 1500 people. And that's going to put us in a really strong position in the future. And I just think this is a no brainer. And he was like, absolutely, do it now. Because a lot of those people, you know what, you know, a percentage of those people are going to turn into paying customers. And that's of course, what we're all about. 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 style, 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. So my challenge to you today is to learn from this. Go review some of your top performing organic posts this season, Go into your insights and if one jumps out at you, you're like, oh, you know what, that could be an ad. Just pick one, beta test it, turn it into an ad run, run $5 a day behind it for seven days. That's $35 you're gonna spend and just see if something happens. If you're one of those farms that has been burned by Facebook ads, And you've tried to create ads and it doesn't do anything. Did today's story give you something to chew on? Have you ever tried doing what I just suggested where you followed the energy of an organic post and you used that instead of trying to create one from scratch? Because I've done the other way too, where I try to make an ad and put money behind it. It doesn't do very well, but this is the first time that I've seen a lot of excitement about around something I did organically and decided to go in and turn it into an actual ad and see it do so well. So I just feel like I'm on fire. Suddenly things look brighter. I'm really hopeful about our online store kind of blowing up because of this accidental discovery. And so I wanted to share it with all of you. So prioritize list building, my friends. Make sure you have an email nurture sequence ready to go behind the scenes so that people, once they get on your list, are getting warmed up by that. You can come inside. For our marketing school. We have a whole project that teaches you what should be in that, how to go about that. And frankly, you can use ChatGPT nowadays once you kind of understand what needs to be in there. And if you know how to prompt the AI tool, you can get that written with the help of ChatGPT in under two hours. And I just did that with a farmer inside of our marketing school. We got on a one on one call together and in one hour we had written out five of her email nurture sequence emails. So shout out to you, Jill, you know who, who I'm talking to. It was so cool and I could just see her light up and suddenly this thing that felt heavy was no longer heavy. But if we have a strong email marketing campaign waiting in the wings, then this kind of work of setting up an ad to grow our email list is going to be like gold. All right, now I will put a copy of the actual caption into the show notes. If you're wondering what did that ad that did so well say you can go look at it. It's nothing special. It's not like it's this work of art. But I think you'll see it does have emojis in it. And it's very specific. It's very clear by the time you get done how it all works. And I don't know, I don't know if that's what it was or if it was the pictures. But if you're curious about what the copy was of that caption. I will include it in today's show notes which you can find at mydigitalfarmer.com forward/323 all right, that's all I have today. It was a quick tip. I hope you got a lot out of this and if you enjoyed this episode please go share it with a farmer friend. You can copy the URL and just text it to them or go leave me a rating or review because that helps more farmers hear about the show. Believe it or not, there's this whole algorithm thing so that would help me out a ton and I would love to hang out with you on Instagram. You can follow me. Ydigitalfarmer I love to show up on stories. That's where you'll find me most of the time. And remember, you can get onto my email list by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe thank you for joining me today everyone. Have an amazing week and I'll see you next time. Remember, I believe in you. Bye bye.