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My Digital Farmer Podcast
328 Five Consumer Marketing Strategies Farmers Can Steal to Sell More
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Ever had a marketing nerd moment in a grocery store aisle? That was me last week. I was shopping for soap and paper towels when I spotted two clever packaging choices that completely reframed everyday items—and stopped me in my tracks. And that got...
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Have you ever stood in the grocery store aisle and had a marketing nerd moment? This happens to me all the time. And today I was shopping for paper towels and soap and two brands stopped me in my tracks with some really clever packaging strategies. In today's episode, I want to break down those two moments, use them as a springboard to teach you five powerful marketing strategies that big consumer brands use all the time to innovate and reframe their products. You can use them too. 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 competent 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 328 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? Welcome back to the show. Big shout out to all of my super fans. Welcome back. If you're new to the podcast, I'm glad you're here. I hope you turn into a super fan. Make sure you subscribe to the show and if you are new to the marketing lingo, I suggest you go check out my first 10 episodes because I designed them to be an onboarding into the marketing space to to help you learn the ropes. You can also get onto my email list. That's another great way to kind of learn the insider language of marketing. So you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe when you do, I'm going to send you an email roughly every four days for like three months and I'm going to drip out the most important tips and fundamentals that you need to know. I'll point you to the really good podcasts and free trainings so some tools that you should have in your toolkit. The first things you should be building in your sales funnel, really just walking you through and holding your hand. So Again, go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends @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, folks 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 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. Okay, here's a little behind the scenes moment. You have no idea how much time I spend on the intro to every podcast episode. You know that little blurb before the music starts. I have to somehow like fit in a curiosity building introduction in like 30 seconds and it is so hard to get it to fit and sometimes I have to record it like 10 times and I just know have one of those moments. So I am sitting here like laughing. If you guys only knew how. That is actually the hardest part for me of the episode every week is figuring out how to get it into that small space. I mean I could just make it longer, but then I have to move the audio files and all of that stuff around and takes a lot of time. I don't want to go into it, but I'm just having a little chuckle moment. Just be aware that that's always a stressful part of recording the podcast. All right, well in today's episode we are going to analyze my recent grocery store shopping experience. I had a different topic in store for today and then I went grocery shopping and I just saw all of these marketing things going on by these big consumer brands and I was like, I didn't bring my phone with me. I'm like, oh, I wish I could snap a picture of this and throw it onto an Instagram story and just point out what they're doing and try to encourage farmers to like, what would this look like for us to do this similar strategy, but for our products. Anyway, I kept seeing them maybe because when I spotted two of them, then I was actually kind of looking for them and I kept finding other examples. And I came home and I'm like, this has got to be what I talk about because I have a lot of energy for it. And my motto is follow the energy. So that's what I'm doing today. I am going to break down those two moments and use them as kind of my springboard into this conversation around five marketing strategies that the big consumer brands use a lot. And they use them to innovate their offers or even reframe their products and suddenly turn it into something incredibly irresistible. And I want to show you how you can apply these ideas to your farm's marketing. That's my hope. Whether you're selling vegetables or meat or cheese or flowers or value added goods, I think there might be an idea here for you today. So let's dive in. I have five different ideas. The first one was inspired by my Sparkle brand paper towels. Yes. I had to buy paper towels today and I was actually walking up and down the aisle looking at the different brands. Normally I just go right for Brawny, but I was disappointed in the paper towel rolls that I bought from them last time. I don't know if they changed something about it, but the texture of the towel is really weird and so I wanted to get a different one. So I was actually looking at the paper towel rolls. I usually don't take the time to do this. And I grabbed a two pack of the Sparkle brand because I want to test them out before I kind of commit to a new brand. And I just threw them into my cart. And then as I was doing so, I noticed that there was some artwork and copy and, you know, marketing wording on the packaging. And it was showing how the these paper towels have perforated edges to form like mini squares. So you know how paper towels have perforated lines so you can tear them off? Well, a few years ago, you've probably noticed this too. They shortened the paper towel. Like it's not as big as it used to be. It used to be like almost a perfect square. And then they almost like they made it a little bit smaller. So so that what you tear off is more like a rectangle, like an 8 and a half by 11 size piece of paper. And now this particular brand is taking that little rectangle and it's actually turning it into two squares, mini squares on top of each other so that I could, if I Wanted just tear off like the top part and use like a small handkerchief size, not even like a really small square square. And I just thought to myself, huh, that's interesting. I probably won't use it that way. But I did notice that they were innovating the usage size or giving you an option as a consumer to use that in a different way. And would that cost someone now to buy this paper towel brand over another? So what is the lesson here? This is where you modify the product's shape or format to change its use case. Sometimes all it takes to create a new product in your product suite is to reshape the old one. You either alter the size or when you, when you alter the packaging or the portioning of something even slightly, you now create new use cases that help it serve different customer needs. And I think this kind of innovation is often overlooked by us as farmers. But it can create new demand without changing what's actually inside the packaging. I'm thinking like, especially for like meat producers, if we think about how our customer actually wants to use the product, maybe the, the way that you're bundling it in the freezer paper is a little bit too much volume. And they would really love to have it be a little bit smaller, like 3/4 pounds or half pound portions. Cause that's how they're actually using that particular cut. And they'd love to be able to just pull out one or, you know, a smaller portion than what it is now. They have to thaw the whole package and they really only want to use half of it. And so all you have to do is just change the portion size based on how you know your customer is actually using it in their kitchen. I'm thinking like veggie growers offering snack packs of cherry tomatoes instead of, you know, a big quart of them. What if they're in a smaller container so that it's real easy for a mom to just grab them and hand them to their kids or put it in their kid's lunch pile. Or baby cucumbers that are marketed as a school lunch snack, in case they haven't thought of that idea yet, or for hiking trip or you know, make a suggestion for how a person could use the product in their everyday life. Cheese makers. You could sell pre sliced cheese squares for charcuterie boards or maybe like a wine pairing night and just suggest that that's how it could be used. Flower farmers, maybe you have a mini bouquet in a mason jar and you label it a desk flower for a teacher or an office Work. And now you've given a suggestion to the consumer for a way that it could be used. Oh, it could. You know, it doesn't have to just be for your kitchen table or your grandma when you go visit her, but you could also give it to your teacher. So that's just a general suggestion that was inspired by the Sparkle paper towel example to modify the product shape, modify its format, and change its use case. Okay. The second idea was inspired by Dove Bar Soap. I had to buy some bar soap, and this idea is to reposition the product based on the benefit. What do I mean by that? Okay, so I had to go buy some bar soap. We use bar soap in our house. And I like Dove. And as I was there, I was just kind of ready to go get just the basic, normal Dove brand. Sometimes I get sensitive skin one. That's all I was looking for, and I could not find it. I eventually did. It was on the very bottom. But the three shelves were full of, like seven or eight varieties of Dove Bar soap. I've never seen so many varieties. They must be doing a new market research thing or trying to launch a new line so that the varieties there were like eight packs or something. And they. They had names like Relaxing, Rebalancing, Coco Shea Butter, Gentle Exfoliation. I think there was another one like Cucumber Coconut or something like that. So they. They were themed around feeling or scents, like the actual smell. And I was just struck by that. I. I noticed myself wanting to get the Coco Shea butter one. For whatever reason, I must like that flavor. I was. I don't know if I was thinking about chocolate, but then I saw some of the other ones, and I was like, oh, relaxing. I could use some relaxing. And then I actually noticed, oh, my gosh, they're using marketing terms. And I actually caught on to what they were doing. But one powerful marketing strategy that you might consider is to stop selling the product and instead start selling the result that the customer wants. And then you use that result in the name of the product somehow. So people like to buy benefits, not features. This is a very classic marketing teaching point that I hear a lot from my gurus. So when you name your product in a way that reflects how it will make someone feel or what it will help them achieve and become and transform into, it becomes more emotionally compelling and therefore easier to say yes to. We are always trying to sell to emotion. It's a very powerful trigger for people. Okay, so, man, I don't know, like, what. What does this look like for us? Is there a way that we could be just beta testing, naming our product in a slightly different way, or adding some words, some adjectives to it to again suggest a feeling? Now, the one that I thought of for myself, just because I'm still very much in the gut healing world, and I have been talking more and more about that with my audience, and I plan to really lean into that in the year ahead. You know, part of me is like, man, could we create something with the word gut healing in it, some kind of product to suggest that this product is going to help heal your gut. Now, I'm going to start attracting all kinds of people who are into gut health, and they're going to trust that I'm a thought leader in this space. They're not going to have to think about what are the products that are gut healthy. They'll just see me collecting them all together, naming it the Gut Healthy box, and they'll just say, I'm on it. I'll take that. Right. If you sell salad greens, I don't know, like Detox, the clean greens Detox salad mix, or if you're a pastured meat producer, like a. I was just, like, brainstorming you. This is not maybe amazing, but like creating a strong start breakfast trio, like, where you market that to parents who are trying to feed their kids, you know, a protein before school, a mood lifter bundle for herbs that might brighten people's spirits and feelings. I don't know. This is just me trying to come up with ideas for the podcast, but I want you to just think about that. What is the benefit that your customers are actually trying to achieve? What's the feeling they're going after? What's a problem they're trying to solve? And is there a way you could weave that into the name of the product and make a suggestion that, you know, if you end up buying this prop, this product, it's going to solve that problem or it's going to give you this benefit, something to think about. So I want you to just see if this particular strategy jumps out at you. If there's an obvious yes for you here, you might want to explore that. 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, the third idea for today is to create a variety pack or a sampler experience. I. I've talked about this before in many different ways, but it is a common innovation and I saw it all over the place in the grocery store. It works. I mean, it works. So let's talk about it. The brand example that I want to use here is actually coffee. So Keurig comes to mind. Whatever you feel about Keurig. I do not use Keurig brands, but Keurig offers a variety pack of their K cups. They feature all different kinds of flavors. There were different roast levels. There were even like a collection of the popular brands of coffee like Green Mountain and Dunkin and Starbucks all together. So they're putting all of these together in one package and it lets a customer try before they commit to a large box of a single flavor. And they may discover that they like a lot of different ones. And now they suddenly start buying more of the product because there's several of their favorites. Right. It's going to cater to households that have different tastes. We're not going to assume that everybody in that family loves the hazelnut flavor, right? Maybe the husband likes something else and you have to have multiple flavors. It's also very giftable. It feels like the perfect kinds of things to give to a coffee lover as a kind of discovery experience. Bath and body works, candles, soap, samplers, like, are the obvious other ones where I've seen this Done scents. Spices is another category. Just going into the spice aisle at the grocery store, you'll see all kinds of spices with beautiful colors. So when you package multiple items together as a sampler, you're lowering the risk for the customer. You're inviting them into an experience. And these like try it all packs are encouraging exploration. They're building confidence in your product line. And I think they're especially effective for new customers to start dabbling in your brand or as a giftable offer, which is a completely different customer avatar. So really think about, what does this look like for your business? Is there a way you can apply this concept to something you already sell? You know, if you have. If you're a vegetable farmer, maybe you offer a grill pack, and that changes from week to week based on a different set of herbs that might be in season, different vegetables that could be grilled. So maybe it's zucchini, onions, peppers, and herbs one week, and then the next week it's swapped out, and it's not zucchini. It's, I don't know, cabbage and peppers and onions and garlic. If you're a meat producer, you might create, like, a family favorites sampler, and it has the favorite starter cuts from your beef, pork, and chicken line. And now your cus. This new customer has been exposed to all three branches of your proteins, and they may decide not to just stay in the chicken land. But now they're going into porkland and beef land as well, and now their average order value is higher or their purchase frequency is higher, and you make more revenue per customer. Even a flower grower. I was trying to think, like, is it worth it to do some kind of a discovery line where you have three mini bunches of seasonal blooms and they can try each one out? I don't know. That one's a little tricky for me for the flowers, but there might be something there for you too. Okay, all right, let's move on to number four. Number four is all about repositioning the occasion for consumption of your product. And this was inspired. Don't Hate Me. This was inspired by Taco Bell. They have this thing called the fourth Meal campaign. Have you heard about this? It's been around for a while now, but it's been on a lot of marketing podcasts that I've listened to, and it's highlighted as sort of a brilliant innovation on their part. They created a whole new meal time after dinner to get customers to come back late at night. If you think about it, if you're a restaurant, you you're kind of locked in. You only have basically three meals that a person typically eats in a day. Right. That's the habit that we're in as humans that we eat three times a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner. And so there's only so many times that a person, even if they came to Taco Bell every day and ate every single meal there, which, oh my God, just don't even go there. But there is a limit to the number of times a customer could buy from them. Right. The frequency lever can only be pulled so often. And if you want to try and make more revenue, well, you've got to try to get them to come back again. So how could you do that? Well, Taco Bell's like, let's just create a fourth meal time. Let's go after those people that get the midnight munchies, and let's create a whole slew of products for that 11, 11pm hour for all those college kids. So this is just something to think about. What if your product isn't just for dinner or, or breakfast or gifting, but also for a moment your customer hasn't thought of yet? And when you name and define a new occasion for your product, you give people permission to buy again. And therefore more often you pull the frequency lever and you make more revenue. So you're not changing the product, you're just changing when and why they use it. So I had to go to ChatGPT to help me come up with some ideas for this one. But here were some of the suggestions. Like, if you're a vegetable farm, you could market your salad kits as a post workout recovery meal. Are you catching how that works? So now this particular product is getting lumped in with an occasion, a ritual that your customer might have that they do every day. Oh, I work out every day. Okay, well, here we go. We're gonna attach this product to that time. You know, if you're a meat producer, a late night grilling kit for bonfires and summer nights to suggest a time period that one could grill that may be outside the normal scope. I don't know, like maybe a bedtime tea ritual. If you sell herbal teas, flower growers, a first day of school bouquet, or a congratulations bouquet, which is kind of generalist, that could cover a lot of ground. Again, just naming it as a congratulations bouquet. Now somebody walks by you during the farmer's market and they see that and they're like, oh, do I know anybody that I could congratulate? And now all of a sudden you've given them an idea for why they should buy that product. It's not just for birthdays or anniversaries, right? So the magic is in naming the moment. And so if you can define a new moment, then you own it. So think on that one. That one is the one I'm most excited about out of all five of these for my brand. Okay. And then the last one, number five, is to incorporate a lifestyle message or some kind of identity hook into your product or your offer. This one, I thought of the brand Yeti. You know, the, the Yeti coolers and tumblers. Because when you buy a Yeti tumbler, you're not just buying a cup, right? You're. You're buying into this rugged, outdoorsy, high quality lifestyle. Somebody sees you carrying that around that Yeti mug and I don't know, it's like you're in this club and everyone does like a secret nod and they just look at you differently. So people don't just buy products, they buy stories, they buy values, they buy identity. When your product is positioned as part of a lifestyle or a belief system, it taps into something deeper. You're helping your customer say, this is who I am. And that kind of emotional connection is what creates lasting brand loyalty. So I want you to think about, how could you do this with some of your products? Is there a way that you could begin to position your logo or some of your signature products as part of an identity? I'm thinking of my friend Jamie, who is an accelerator, and I love how she had this name for her VIP Meat consumer. Meat producers excuse meat customers. She called them the meat elite. And this is a great example of like a phrase that I think could connect with someone who's really into meat. You know, they're all about being a meat snob, a meat connoisseur, and like being called a part of the meat elite, that feels like something powerful. And so was there, is there a way that you can incorporate that name into a product? You know, is the membership of joining the Meet Elite, is that something that would pull someone in? They're buying into the product that they get as being a part of Meet Elite. But they're also like really liking that name and that identity and saying, yeah, I am elitist about my meat. So again, look at the words that are a part of that product. And can the words somehow tap into this idea of identity? Okay, all right, that's it. That's my five ideas. Remember, you don't have to create something entirely new all the time. Sometimes it's just about changing the way your product is used. And you can look to your customers, do some research there, ask around, find out how are your customers actually using your product. You may be surprised when you do a little research that they're having to tweak it a little bit so that it can work for their purposes. And that might give you an idea for how to package it differently or position it differently. So change the way your product is used. You can be changing when it's used. You can make, you know, suggest a new time that it could be used. You could change the feeling or identity attached to it, or you could bundle things together in new ways. So all of these little marketing shifts can just unlock a new revenue stream. It helps you stand out. It makes a person do a double take like I did with the paper towel roll and, you know, give me a suggestion for, oh, I guess I could use the paper towel now for smaller applications. Maybe I'll choose this one now and this will be my brand because nobody else is doing that yet and it ends up deepening my customer loyalty to that product. All right, if you liked today's show, please go share it with a farmer. You can get the show notes@mydigitalfarmer.com 328 and if this kind of marketing breakdown is your jam, I want to invite you into a deeper dive with me inside Farm Marketing School, where I teach farmers like you just how to create simple, repeatable marketing systems that will actually grow your customer base. Every month, in addition to all the marketing projects you get access to, you can come into our monthly Zoom call that we have on the third Wednesday of the month. We talk for an hour. We talk about whatever you want. We have idea brainstorming, troubleshooting. We do some mindset coaching, get some inspiration, see what innovations people in our group are doing and get ideas. So encourage you to come in. It's a lot of fun. Sign up for your first month at mydigitalfarmer.com fms and start turning your great products into some irresistible offers. There's really good stuff in there, so love to see you inside. Thank you so much for joining me today for another episode. Remember, I am now on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I would love to connect with you there. If you want to get onto my email list, I have some free stuff to send your way to make your marketing even stronger and grow your confidence. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and thanks for joining me today. I hope you have an amazing week. And remember, I believe in you. Bye.