
Instagram Stories are one of the most underutilized and powerful tools in a farmer's marketing toolbox. They’re fast. Raw. Relatable. And they let your audience peek behind the curtain of your farm life, creating trust and connection in just a few...
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Corinna Bench
Are you struggling to stay consistent with Instagram stories? Maybe you're not sure what to post that will actually help you sell more of your farm products? Well, in today's episode, I'm going to break down eight easy Instagram story ideas that you can post every single week that are going to build trust, nurture your audience, and drive sales. These are simple rinse and repeat concepts that you can turn into a system. 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 324 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 strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? You know what? I just did that intro without reading my script. That's awesome. How many of you have that introduction memorized? Raise your hand right now. A big shout out to all of my regular binge listeners. Welcome back to the show. And if you are new to the podcast, I'm glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe to the show. Go check out my first 10 episodes. I always encourage my newbies to do that, especially if you're a little green when it comes to farm marketing. You can also just kind of scroll through the archives though, and see what tickles your fancy. There's over 300 episodes now. Really good stuff in there, but I encourage you also to get onto my email list. That's another great way to learn the ropes. When you do, I'm going to send you an email roughly every four to five days for for about three months. And each of those emails has been hand selected for you to give you the key principles you need to know up front. The most important podcast episodes to go listen to influencers you should be following. Tools you should have in your toolkit. The skills that you need to learn first, the pieces of your sales funnel that you need to get in place first. All really good stuff. I even give you some freebies and some free trainings, so get on that list. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/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. Do you use Instagram stories in your farm marketing? Today's episode is inspired by the fact that I just released a new project inside of Farm Marketing School on Instagram Stories and this is a seven day Instagram Stories challenge. The whole idea behind it was just to get farmers comfortable using the platform. I initially came up with the concept because I think some people aren't doing stories yet simply because they can't figure out how do you do them, how do you use the features? How do you stitch the things together? What buttons do you press? So that was my initial impetus for designing the challenge was just to give you a bunch of demos and tech videos to show you what was possible. But inside that project I'm also weaving in some strategy and some content teaching too. In terms of like, what kinds of stuff should you be thinking about as you're creating the stories themselves and how are you using that to get people to actually purchase your products? So as I was building that I thought, you know, I don't know if I have a whole lot of stuff on my podcast about Instagram stories specifically, and I use stories a lot. In fact, it is my go to social media method. I take the time to schedule things on my public facing business page for Facebook once a week. But I am just organically, natively in the Instagram platform all the time, every day, usually posting seven to 10 stories. I love it. It just comes very natural to me. And I have had a lot of interest in learning the ropes as far as what's possible with fun filters and the different stickers and using the different engagement strategies. I just enjoy it and have fun. So it occurred to me that there might be some people out there that don't use stories yet or don't know how to do it, or maybe you're just sort of kind of doing it, but there isn't really a lot of strategy. And I mean, I don't know if I'd call myself, like, super duper expert like some of these people on YouTube, but I feel like I'm pretty good at it. I feel like I'm better than average and that I have something to contribute on this topic. So that is what inspired today's episode. I'm going to share with you some Instagram story ideas that you can be using. This is the most common question I get from farmers, like, what do I even talk about, much less how do I actually execute it, with all the, you know, what do I press and how do I swipe left and right and all that. So today I just want to talk through that topic of what are the different categories of things you could talk about when you're making a story frame? And if you want the specifics and you're intrigued at, like, hey, I'm going to learn the how to and the tech of actually building a story and using all the different features, well, then you can go inside of farm marketing school and take that Instagram stories challenge project. It only takes seven days. And it's really cool because you, you literally, it's like 10 minutes a day. The idea is that you just take the prompt that I give you for the day and you, I have a little short video that shows you how to do the thing, and then you practice doing it by making a story that day. And then the next day, I teach you the next thing, which builds on day one. So every day you're learning another skill. And you're now you have two things in your toolkit, right, that you can use to build the next set of stories. And it allows you to slowly get more and more confident and proficient at it. But if you want to kind of learn the deep dive, that's where you can go into farm marketing school. That's@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS and you'll learn that real, real good in like seven days. But today I want to focus more specifically just on what do we talk about? And so the first, what, the first topic that I want to bring up here is the limited time offer. Because after all, this is what we're all about with social media anyway, right? We're trying to grow our email list and we're trying to make people aware of the products we sell and pitch them. So one of the things that you can be doing once a week is posting a story about your limited time offer. And this could mean you're promoting flash sales. You are offering like a seasonal bundle. Maybe you're restocking something or you're saying, hey, there's the online store that's closing in two days, you need to pre order and here's the cutoff date. All that kind of information could be something that's going in a story. And what I want to emphasize in this particular element is the limited time section of the offer. I mean, I've got my CSA open, you know, most of the, most of the fall and winter for new people. But if I have a special offer around it, that special offer goes away after a certain amount of time, maybe after seven days or maybe after 24 hours, the bonus or the free gift changes or whatever. And so I want to make sure that I'm emphasizing in this story the limited element of the offer. Now why does this work? Well, it creates urgency. People will buy when you put a deadline on it or when something limited goes away. And that encourages immediate action for people to click on that link that's inside of your Instagram story. It trains your customer to pay attention to your stories, to wonder, oh, what's it gonna be this coming week? And they wanna go up to your stories section and watch it every day just to see what might show up today. So some examples of a limited time offer might be our chicken bundles are only available through Friday night at this price. Here's the link and you include as a sticker the link sticker, which takes them directly to the product page, not to your general online store, but to the product page link. Maybe you could say, hey, get our tulip bouquets, there's only 20 left and they're going to be gone by this evening. So, so again, you build in that urgency, link them off to where they can pre order those or last call for our tomato canners. And maybe you have people. I always have people pre order those because I always sell out and I have to kind of dole them out in batches over the course of four weeks. So I have people kind of pre order those, and when they're gone, they're gone. And people know that now and they are eager to make sure they get onto that list. So the way that you put this together, I mean, it does not have to be complicated. This is literally like a different story frame for here's the deal. Another story frame for here's the link with the link sticker and then a third story frame where you say, here's the deadline, here's the special offer, you know, by the time you have to get it done. By now you can expand that out and make it a few more story frames if you like. But it really doesn't have to be complicated. Now I will show you. If you get inside of the Instagram Stories challenge, there are all kinds of demo videos for how to actually construct the story itself. But I'll give you sort of a teaser here. This is kind of a play by play of how this would work technically. First, I would take a screenshot of the product itself, and then I would crop that image and then I would make a blank canvas inside of Instagram Stories. That's really easy to do if you don't know how that works. You just, you're inside of Instagram Stories. You have the camera on facing you, and you just snap a picture of yourself. And then you go up to the where the three dots are in the top right corner and you click on that and then you hit draw and then you're going to hit select color. So you're going to pick a color from the color wheel and then you'll tap on the screen and hold it and it will turn it that color, which is pretty cool. So now you basically just covered up that picture of yourself that you took. Right now it's just a blank canvas of the color of your choice. Then you're going to click on the sticker face and you're going to add an image. And you'll go to that screenshot that you took initially and you'll push that, click that, and it'll put it right on top of that blank canvas. You can then size it, move it around wherever you want it, and then you'll add a text box sticker and you can pitch the sale through a text box. And then be sure to add a link sticker which takes them to the direct link for your product page. And then just come up with some kind of a phrase that says shop Our chicken bundles now or shop chicken bundles here. And then make sure you explain when the deadline is so that they have that sense of urgency and go by. Okay, so that was super technical. That might have just made your brain go blah. But I just want to show you that inside of the farm marketing school project we do kind of walk you through all of that step by step. You see the screen, me doing it for you, and so you can kind of go mimic it on your own account. Okay. So that's just the limited time offer concept. Let's move on to the second idea for an Instagram story. And this one is a frequently asked question. I love these. I see these a lot, and I do them a fair amount. This is where you are answering common questions that you get about your farm or your products, maybe about your buying process, your pickup sites, your pickup logistics. And this is one of the easiest ways to get customer feedback and engagement at the same time. Did you know that you can be using stories to figure out what your customers like and what their questions are to help you do market research? Now, the classic way to do this is to use the Instagram questions sticker. You simply take a picture inside of stories and then you add the question sticker. It might say something like, what questions do you have about our farm or how our CSA works, or how our online store works, or how we raise our animals? Right. You just fill in the blank there, and then you wait for people to respond. Then you create additional stories that basically answer the questions that your customers give you. Plus, it also will show you what are some of the patterns of FAQs that you get over and over again. The more you do this, you'll notice that you get the same kinds of questions over the course of many months. And that will be a tip for you in terms of, this is the stuff I need to be sharing with my potential leads before they're ready to buy. And you can create assets in other places in your marketing funnel, maybe on your website homepage or sales page or on your online store page, or maybe you create a YouTube video about that question where you answer it. But you can create answers for those questions in other places because you know that it's a thing. And that's because you found that out by doing this FAQ stories post on a regular basis inside of Instagram stories. Now, FAQs are also great because they establish your authority, because when you're answering the questions that your customers are giving you, you are embracing that role of the guide, and people start to See you as someone who gives advice, someone who knows things, someone who's an expert. It builds trust, it reduces friction for those new buyers because they're now having those objections removed. Remember, every frequently asked question is really just an objection in disguise. So when you are regularly addressing those FAQs in your stories, you are removing the obstacles, the boundaries that are keeping people from moving forward to buying. And it's saving you time by answering the same thing over and over again. One tip that I have here is that as you make these FAQ Instagram story posts, that you consider dropping them into one of your highlights. So I have a highlights that's called FAQs. And sometimes when I have a new FAQ or a more updated version of an FAQ, I'll just save it to that highlights reel so that a person, when they're coming and discovering my account for the first time, if they go to my highlights stories, they can binge through those and they can possibly run into that FAQ and watch it. So think through what some of your FAQs are right now. I know you know what they are. You've got to have at least five and, and sometime over the next month, try to hit every single one of those FAQs in an Instagram story. Do a little video where you answer it, save it to your highlights reel, and then just put that into your rotation that I'm going to bring this up every seven days. I'm going to answer this question and then continue to probe your audience and ask them what are the other questions they might have. So for a CSA farmer, one of your FAQs might be what happens if I miss my pickup site? If you are a meat producer, it might be what's the difference between grass fed and grain finished. If you're a flower farmer, how long will this bouquet last? Or how do I get to your U pick farm? Where are you located? If you make jams, do your jams contain pectin or preservatives? I don't know, I just made that up. Maybe that's not a good question. Okay, so just brainstorm what they are and maybe use that as inspiration for an Instagram story topic this week. All right, let's move on to the third idea for an Instagram story. And that is testimonials or reviews or social proof. A lot of times this might be a screenshot of a customer review or a dm. Maybe it was a tagged post or some kind of user generated content. I get these all the time where CSA customers will Post a Instagram story of something they made for dinner that night with their CSA box and I'll get tagged. And I love to share that this is basically showing to the big wide world that your product works and that your customers are proud of it, are seeing a transformation, are loving it, and there's no better marketing than word of mouth. So I love doing this one. It shows up on a regular basis and I'm always checking to see if somebody has tagged me in a post. So here are some examples of how this could look. This could be a screenshot of a customer that's raving about your microgreens and you snap a photo of that. Or it could be a video of a CSA member unboxing their veggie share. It could be a tagged story showing pork chops that are being grilled by one of your customers. The important thing to remember when you're using testimonials and stories is just to make a little bit of an effort to make them look pretty and make them easy to digest. So rather than grabbing the entire screenshot of the DM thread that has all kinds of other conversations going on, you just crop out the parts that don't apply, and you just focus in on the few words that are truly the testimonial. Right? So that the person who's looking at the story isn't distracted by the busyness of all the other things around the testimonial. That's what I mean by make it easy to digest. And sometimes it's just as simple as cropping that image within your story and then using the edit function. Now don't forget, you can also create a highlights section for your testimonials. You could name it something like love notes or raves or testimonials. And that means that when someone comes to your account for the first time and they go and look at your highlights section, if they see that category, they may be tempted to go through and binge watch all of your highlights that are testimonials. Think about saving testimonials and screenshots that are for your gateway product or your signature product. Because remember, we want to entice people who are just finding out about your brand. We want to show them the path of least least resistance. So let's have a lot of credibility and a lot of excitement and social proof around those early gateway products so that they'll enter your brand and then you can kind of take over and continue to show them. Here's what's next. Here's what you should buy next, but really do a lot of work on social proof for your main product or your gateway product. Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at 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 a logo design or setting up your e commerce shop, you need farm marketing experts like Taste the Local difference. With over 20 years 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 ideal customers, 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 and any marketing service up to $300. And now back to the show. All right, let's move on to our next one, which is behind the scenes content. I use this one a lot. This is sort of my go to because I like to just walk the farm every morning with my dog and then I usually do it again later in the afternoon and my crew's out there and I love to just tell the story of what's going on during the day. Oh, here they are hoeing, here they are planting, here they are twining tomatoes. A lot of people don't know all of these different behind the scenes steps that go into actually producing food at a larger scale. So this could be those daily moments, those tasks behind the scenes that give your customers a peek into your farm life, into the production aspect. It could also be how orders get packed. It could be at the point of fulfillment at the pickup location. And again, we want people who are watching this to mirror themselves, right? It's almost like they're looking at it and thinking, I could be a customer that's participating in this. And it's a humanizing effect too, I think, because people see how much work goes into getting the food to the table and I think it just makes more value, puts more value into that product. Okay, so this could be delivering CSA boxes, bottling your syrup, labeling your jars, clipping bouquets at sunrise. It could be washing your carrots in your huge carrot washer. It could be weeding the tedious aspect of weeding. It could be showing the bugs that are crawling around on your arugula or radish leaves and how you now can't sell that product. Like tell the good and the bad can be packing CSA shares. Don't forget, you can also have a behind the scenes highlights section in your Instagram stories highlights area. You could call it BTS for behind the scenes or our life or farm work. Just come up with something short and snappy because you are limited in characters for that. Okay, number five, the product in action, how to actually use your product. So this could be like a tutorial where you are in the kitchen showing people how to prepare that particular meal or how do we store this particular vegetable? I always have to train people with carrots, for instance, that you need to take the tops off the carrots if you're going to store them for a long time in your fridge because otherwise the roots get kind of soft and floppy and nobody likes that. So it could just be a quick tip like that. So you want to just share these real life moments of your product being consumed, being stored, being used. And this is going to help the customer visualize how they might one day use it. So not only is it going to teach them something, if they're already a customer, they might be like, oh, I didn't know that. And they'll be able to apply it and they'll be grateful and just thankful that you taught them some new information. But it will help future customers now visualize themselves one day doing that. It moves them just a little bit. Step closer to saying yes and buying that for the first time. Sometimes people don't buy your product because they don't know what to do with it. I mean, all these poor people who see me post about celery root, right? What an ugly vegetable. It's all got this like nasty hairy skin on the outside. I don't blame them for not touching that thing with a 10 foot pole if they see it at the market because they don't know what to do with that. So if you start to show them, well, here's what you have to do. You have to wash it off real good to get the mud off and you have to cut off the hairy skin and look at what it looks like on the inside. Did you realize it had this consistency? I Like, to cube it, right? You just have to coach people through it. And now they can imagine themselves doing that themselves. They're not intimidated anymore by the hairy looking skin on the outside of the vegetable. So look at your. At your product through the eyes of a newbie and try to imagine what they're thinking about it, what are they confused about? And you have to overcome some of those obstacles and just train them. It increases product desire. I wanted to say that, too. So the moment you tear down some of those walls and show them what's on the other side of the scary celery root skin in, and you start to talk about what you do with it, and this is a powerhouse of celery flavor, even more so than normal celery, and how it just kind of dissolves like butter when you put it in your instant pot stews. Like, that gets people excited. And now they have desire for this product, Right? So maybe you have a pork roast coming out of the oven, or you have a salad that you just made with your CSA greens, or it's a chef cooking with your peppers, and they somehow shared that story with you and you can pass it on. Or it's a customer that set their table with your bouquet and they shared that picture with you, right? The product in action. Show them what could be possible with it. Sometimes people don't even know how they can use it. And so all it takes is a suggestion that, hey, did you know that you could use your dill flowers not just for pickling, but it could just be a beautiful centerpiece in your kitchen and it's very fragrant. Oh, never thought of that. And now I have people who buy the pickling flower bouquets for bouquets, not because they pickle. So we sometimes just have to show them what's possible. Now, you could also create a highlights reel of this. Maybe you could name it ideas, and then a person might be scrolling through that and they could watch a whole bunch of Instagram stories that you've kind of piled up in there over the course of many weeks that are full of random ideas for how to use your product. All right, let's move on. Number six, this is where you do a deep dive into your best seller. So think about what is your featured product or your signature product or your gateway offer your gateway product. And you just do a personal product recommendation. I know you've seen this done. This is where you might see, like, an influencer who's showing up, holding up a product and talking about it and saying, I love this. So much. This is how I like to use it. And just maybe doing a demo of something in the kitchen. So an example might be, you know, here's why our garlic scape pesto is so amazing. It sells out really fast. It has these particular flavorings and undertones. Or maybe you're like, hey, this is our most popular pork bundle. This is what you get with it and this is why it's so popular. And here's a little tip about xyz. Or these are the three most loved flowers that are in all of our bouquet subscriptions and you actually show them and talk about them and what they smell like. Are you tracking here? So you need to identify a either your featured product that week or maybe it's your best seller or that gateway product or your signature product. The thing you're known for. This is educating your customers. It's encouraging repeat buying, and it's encouraging them to try selling something new. Every time you have a new product that goes in front of them, they're like, oh, that sounds interesting. And they ascend through your product ladder. This could also be a highlight in your highlight section of Instagram. You could name it our faves or best sellers or even start here. 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. Okay, our seventh idea here for an Instagram story topic is a how to tutorial. Some of these overlap with some of the other categories a little bit, don't they? But you could just have an all out how to tutorial where you're teaching them how to use, how to store, how to cook, how to arrange your products. These are awesome because it helps your customer succeed. Like you are giving them the success path and sometimes they just don't know this information. So you've got to break it down for them and these get saved, which is something that the algorithm loves. They also get shared with friends. So another reason that you should definitely be throwing a tutorial in from time to time. So for example, how to store herbs so they last longer or three ways to use your eggs beyond breakfast. These are some ideas I jotted down. How to arrange flowers like a pro or how to roast a beef brisket. That would probably take a while to show, but you could break it down over the course course of a day in your story and keep them coming back and then save that. That would be a really good one. I need to learn that, by the way. Okay, so think again about what are the questions your customers have. What are the things you know they'd be curious about? What are the things they they need to learn before they're going to want to buy that thing and then teach it and then unlock the door for them. Right? So you could name this highlight tips or how to or tutorials or you could even name it if it's like your chicken tips. It could be chicken, it could be pork, beef. Or you could just organize it by your categories of products. Okay, my last one here is a new here or start here post. Now you don't need to do this every week, but maybe once every two to three weeks. You should probably have a start here story. This is where you do a short introduction of who you are and maybe a little bit about your farm and how people can buy. You always have new people coming into your funnel who are discovering you for the first time on social media. And it's kind of like they just get thrown onto the highway unless you have occasional on ramps that allow them to get to know you a little bit. So yes, I know that a lot of your people will already have know this information, will have seen that story before. But you have new people coming in and you just need to have a regular. Hi, welcome. I'm glad you're here. Let me just introduce myself to you and your folks who have heard that stuff before. They'll just skip through those and that's okay. So try to have this in the rotation every three weeks at least every month. It's also a way for you to set expectations. So if there's something that they need to know about how the whole buying process works, you're cluing them in on that. So this might just be like, hey, I'm Corinna. My husband Kurt and I, we run shared legacy farms in Ohio. We are a certified organic vegetable farm. We have a 400 member CSA farmily membership where you get a weekly box of veggies every week for 18 weeks. But we also have a lot of customers who just buy from week to week in our online store and get whatever they want. I could keep going, but that's kind of the, the gist of what we do. And I might explain, hey, if you want to start buying from us, the best way to do it is to just buy from our online store. Minimum order 15. Here's the link. And then I put a link sticker, or maybe I want to say, depending on what time of year it is, I might actually say, you know, the best way to start buying from us is to get our four week CSA trial membership. And it's called the sampler. I have five left right here. Here's the link. It'll take you right to the page. Sign up now. You'll have to choose your pickup site and the first day will be in two weeks. Right. So this one you could name. Start here in the highlights section and really think through, like, what are all the different things a brand new person should know? And start stacking those as stories in that section. All right, well, there you have it. That's eight different ideas for how to create a story. I will review them very quickly once again. The first one is limited time offers. The second one is FAQs. The third one is testimonials or social proof. Number four, behind the scenes content. Number five, your product in action. Number six, your best seller or your featured product or a personal product recommendation. Number seven, how to tutorials. And number eight, start here or new here. That's something that you might do every three weeks. Okay, if you are loving these Instagram story ideas and you now want to build a repeatable strategy, then you might want to come inside Farm Marketing school and join me there for the new project called the seven Day Instagram Stories challenge. We'll do it together. You'd get one prompt a day, lots of support. The goal is to make an Instagram story every day for seven days using the skill that I taught you that day. And by the end of the week you have down most of the basic and not so basic features that you can call yourself pretty proficient. And then it's just a matter of practicing them over and over again, doing reps to get faster at it. I don't have all the super fast hacks, but I got a lot of them and so it's a good place to go to learn how to do Instagram stories. Well, to learn more about that, just go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS all right, well, thank you guys for joining me today. The show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 324 if you like this episode or you want to share it with another farmer, you can just copy the link for this episode and text it to them. Go Leave me a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. That really does help more people find out about the show when they're in the podcast platform and scrolling around looking for things to listen to. And if you want to get onto my email list for some more farm marketing tips that are free, you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe thank you guys so much for joining me today. Have an amazing week and remember, I believe in you. Sam.
My Digital Farmer Podcast - Episode 324: "8 Instagram Story Ideas You Can Use for Your Farm Every Week"
Release Date: August 6, 2025
Host: Corinna Bench
Farm: Shared Legacy Farms, Elmore, Ohio
Website: MyDigitalFarmer.com
In Episode 324 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast, host Corinna Bench delves into the realm of Instagram Stories, offering eight actionable ideas tailored for farmers aiming to enhance their online presence, build trust with their audience, and ultimately drive sales. Drawing from her expertise as a CSA farmer and marketing specialist, Corinna emphasizes the importance of consistent and strategic social media usage in today’s competitive market.
Corinna highlights the effectiveness of promoting limited-time offers to create a sense of urgency among followers. By showcasing flash sales, seasonal bundles, or restocking notices, farmers can prompt immediate action.
Addressing common queries not only engages the audience but also establishes authority. Using Instagram's question sticker, farmers can gather questions and respond through subsequent stories, effectively removing potential buying obstacles.
Sharing customer reviews, tagged posts, or user-generated content serves as powerful social proof. Corinna advises cropping testimonials to focus on key messages, making them more digestible and impactful.
Offering a glimpse into daily farm operations humanizes the brand and adds value by showcasing the effort behind the products. This can include activities like planting, harvesting, packing orders, or even challenges like dealing with pests.
Demonstrating how to use, store, or prepare farm products helps customers visualize their use, bridging the gap between interest and purchase. Tutorials on cooking or handling products can increase desirability and reduce apprehensions.
Highlighting best-selling or featured products can guide new customers towards popular items, encouraging repeat purchases and the exploration of new offerings. Personal recommendations add authenticity and trust.
Creating comprehensive tutorials that teach customers how to utilize products effectively not only provides value but also increases the likelihood of product use and satisfaction. These tutorials can be segmented across multiple stories for depth.
Periodic introductory stories ensure that new followers receive essential information about the farm, products, and purchasing processes. This creates a welcoming experience and sets clear expectations.
Instagram Stories Challenge: Corinna introduced a Seven Day Instagram Stories Challenge available through Farm Marketing School, designed to help farmers build proficiency in creating engaging stories with daily prompts and support.
Consistency is Key: Emphasizing that regular posting and rotating through the eight story ideas can lead to a balanced and effective Instagram presence.
Utilizing Highlights: Corinna recommends organizing stories into highlights categories like FAQs, Testimonials, BTS (Behind the Scenes), and Tutorials to make valuable content easily accessible for both new and existing followers.
Engagement Strategies: Incorporating interactive elements like question stickers not only boosts engagement but also serves as a tool for market research, allowing farmers to tailor their offerings based on customer feedback.
Episode 324 serves as a comprehensive guide for farmers seeking to harness the power of Instagram Stories to boost their marketing efforts. Corinna Bench’s actionable tips, grounded in real-world experience, provide a clear roadmap for creating engaging content that resonates with audiences, builds trust, and drives sales. By implementing these eight Instagram story ideas, farmers can develop a consistent and strategic online presence that supports the growth and success of their agricultural businesses.
For more insights and strategies on farm marketing, subscribe to the My Digital Farmer Podcast and join the community of forward-thinking farmers transforming their businesses through effective online marketing.