← My Digital Farmer Podcast
My Digital Farmer Podcast
335 Rinse and Repeat — This Simple Farm Marketing Hack Will Save You Time
00:36:53
As farmers, we live and breathe systems. We know when to seed, when to transplant, when to harvest. It's all about rhythm and routine. So why do we make our marketing so much harder than it needs to be? When I finally embraced this one simple mindset...
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If I had to sit down with a farmer and share, I don't know, like, the top five insights or tips that I wish someone had told me a whole lot earlier. When it comes to marketing, the thing I'm going to share with you today is definitely one of those things. It's not rocket science, but for some reason we resist it. And so today I want to challenge you to embrace it in your marketing. It is a game changer. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast, where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers and increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 335 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I am your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today? A big shout out to my super fans, my growing audience. I'm so glad you're here. If you're new to the podcast, maybe a farmer recommended it to you. Welcome. I'm really glad you're here and I hope you get a lot of value out of today's episode. I want you to know there are so many episodes in the archives that are really, really good. So please subscribe to the show to make sure you get future episodes. But be be sure that you go back and look through all the different archives and see what looks good to you. I always tell people to start with the first 10, especially if you don't really know a lot about marketing, because I designed them because very intentionally to be an onboarding ramp into the marketing lingo to teach you the ropes. Another place you can go to learn that stuff is just to get onto my free email list. I send a weekly email out that talks about the weekly podcast, but when you first subscribe to it, you get onto my email nurture sequence. And so like every day, I'm sorry, every five days you'll get an email from me for about three months. And those emails have been very intentionally Stitched together, they build on each other. They teach you the fundamentals, the principles of marketing. They point to the really good episodes. I give you some free workshops. Yeah, like really good stuff. So you can subscribe to that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Localline. If you 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. This episode is going to be dropping on October 21, and when it drops, there's going to be some exciting stuff going on live at my farm that week. That is the week that I am running my annual CSA Early Renewal promotion. This is the campaign that I probably spend the most time on of the entire year because it generates about 60% of our farm's annual income in one week. And so I have to give it a lot of extra attention. I have built an entire system around it and the campaign is now already planned. I've written the emails, I've scheduled them, I have the social media posts scheduled. I have my flowchart that's showing me day by day what's happening. So I should know the results by the time this podcast drops or at least have a pretty good idea of where I'm going to end up. And I will probably do an episode either next week or the week after that where I share my results with you. I do that every year just because it's fun and I know I always have new people coming into my ecosystem who don't know how I do that, but that's sort of my Claim to fame. The whole CSA early bird renewal campaign and you know, getting 80 to 85% retention is kind of how I started the my digital farmer career, how I got noticed and discovered. So it got me onto the Farmer to Farmer podcast with Chris Blanchard and we were interviewed by him and yeah, suddenly I was very eager to share my story and all the things I was learning about promotion. So if you are interested in learning the step by step of how to build a really great CSA renewal campaign, I have a course that I put together many years ago. It is still as good as ever and actually it now lives inside of Farm Marketing School. Used to have to buy the course separately, but now you can just join Farm Marketing School month to month and that course is inside there. So if you've ever been like, oh, I really, I think I want to get that course, but it seemed a little out of your price range, just know that you can now get it for a whole lot less by joining Farm Marketing School. And you can go binge it and watch it right now. So you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com fms and it's all inside there waiting for you, along with 15 other possible marketing projects that you can take and start building your marketing system. All right, let's jump in today to today's episode. I have like two sentences on my notes page today. I don't have a lot pre written out, so this is going to maybe sound a little more off the cuff. We'll see how my extemporaneous speaking skills are. And this is what the sentence is on my notes page. It says rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. I want to share a marketing hack that I have only recently discovered in the last maybe two years that I've really leaned into it. And man, I wish that someone had told me this concept a whole lot earlier. We're in year 17 of our business. I wouldn't say that I got good at marketing until year eight or nine. That's kind of when I discovered all the principles that I now utilize and that I teach to other farmers in Farm Marketing School. My first eight years was really just like, I don't know, holding the business at an arm's length away. I didn't really fully embrace a role in it because I was primarily focused on being a mom and I sort of was in charge of marketing, but I didn't know what I was doing and so I didn't really want to fully embrace it. And so the results showed, right. I hadn't fully Committed to learning it, to trying to do it well, it was sort of like, I don't know, a love hate relationship. And then when I finally said, I need to figure this out, I'm taking on this role, I'm taking responsibility for the metrics, I had a different shift in my mind happen and I started to take it more seriously. And, and then I really started to see things change. If I could go back and, and do some things differently, I would put in some of these systems into place a whole lot sooner. And one of the core aha moments or breakthroughs that I had a few years ago was this idea that you can rinse and repeat your promotions. Just like you have systems as a farmer for production that you rinse and repeat. I look at my husband and he has this schedule, this calendar that he follows every year. He knows, kind of, he knows when we want our first week of CSA box harvest to be. And so then he kind of goes backwards and he figures out, well, if that's when I need to be able to harvest, that's this is when the transplants need to be in the ground. And so that means this is when they get seeded in the greenhouse, and so that means this is when the beds get prepped and this is when the seeds get ordered. Right? Like there's a schedule, there's a rhyme and a reason for how you have built your production systems. And you rinse and repeat them, you put them on a calendar and you hit the deadlines. And when it comes time to seed those cucumbers again, it's not necessarily hard to do. You don't have to relearn how to seed cucumbers. You know how to see cucumbers and you know how know where the trays are and you know exactly which seed you want. You just have to go and execute and do it right. And so it's just a matter of getting the job done and making sure you do it at the right time. The same principle is true within your marketing system. Really, all we're doing, once we build the machine and we declare this is the month we will do this promotion, and this is the week in the month of July that I will release watermelons, most likely, right? And we can identify what these different promotions are. And then as we go through the year for the first time and we have to sell it in some way, either through social media or through email or whatever, or through collaborations, the very first time is always going to be hard. It's new territory. We don't know what we're doing. We're kind of testing things out. We try out an offer, we price it a certain way, we might package it a certain way, we name it a certain way. The way we fulfill on it the first time is kind of clunky because we're just sort of figuring it out. And once you get through it, the first time you evaluate, you think to yourself, well, that wasn't very profitable. I'm going to change it the next time we do it. And the second time you do it, you make those adjustments, but you keep the things in the process that worked. See if this is something you've ever thought before. When it comes time, you're looking ahead maybe to next week, and you realize, oh, man, I gotta. I gotta sell this product. It's gonna be coming into harvest and I know that people love this thing and I have to. I have to move it. And how many of you kind of take a sigh because you just feel like there's so much to do, there's so many other things on your plate. And the idea of putting together an email promotion or some social media posts to really do a good job of selling this, or the idea of pre selling this and creating a campaign around it, it just makes your brain hurt. And so you avoid it and you put it off and you put it off because it just feels like too much energy to put out. What if there is a different way? And so that's what I want to talk to you about today, that it doesn't have to always feel hard to sell. The trick is to embrace this principle of rinse and repeat. And basically what this means is that we take the sales process that we used the last time we sold this product and we literally copy it and we do it again. Now, the context for today's episode, the reason why it came up for me as something I needed to talk to you about, is because I just finished putting together my annual CSA early renewal campaign. And normally in the early years, when I first started doing this, this was a process that I dreaded because it took so much brain power and energy. I would sit down for many, many days and I would rewrite all the emails from scratch. I would rewrite all the social media posts from scratch. Everything was a rewrite. Even though I had done it the year before, it didn't occur to me to just copy it and duplicate it. I would kind of sit down and redo it. I felt like I couldn't do the exact same thing because people would notice. People would remember if I sent that email with that picture in it again, they would be like, wait a minute, I remember this email. Like I actually thought people would think that. And so I felt this pressure to make something new and fresh as a promotion every single year. And so I'd sit there and I'd rewrite and rewrite you guys. That is so time consuming and exhausting. And what I'm here to tell you today is that that is a fallacy. If you're telling yourself that, no, let that go. Because I promise you, after doing it now for four years, literally copying and pasting the emails, the same ones, I switch out the pictures, but it's 98% the same email copy. No one seems to notice. And people still get just as excited as ever for this promotion. And so that has been a freeing concept, this idea that I can copy the stuff I did last year and no one's going to care, no one's probably going to notice. And that makes it so much easier and so much faster to get these promotional projects complete. So I found my Google Doc from, from 2024. I have one for the Early Bird campaign. And in this Google Doc this is like my source of truth. I have copied and pasted every single marketing asset that is in the campaign. So I link off to the broadcast emails for each of the days so I can easily find them and duplicate them. I also have copied and pasted the text so if I want to quickly scan it and read it and remind myself what was in there, I can do that. I have linked off to the canva file for all the graphic images that were used in last year's campaign so I can quickly find it and go just adjust them the next time I build it. I also have a play by play copy and paste of the social media copy for each day so that I can see what was said again, just to quickly skim it and glance it and remind myself what I did. Right? It's all in there, every little step by step. And I even have kind of like a stage manager does when you're working in theater. I have a a step by step plan for each day, almost like a schedule. So I know beginning October 2nd, when the pre launch begins, that this is the content that's going out to start to build excitement for the promotion. And they don't even know that I'm starting to stir the pot. But I know that this is a strategic post or a strategic activity, right? I have like the play by play of like here's the social post that's Going, this is the day that the field to table dinner's happening. Here's when we're doing a gleaning here. You know, it's just all mapped out so I have all these things in one spot. And this kind of a process of documenting the experience, documenting the promotion step by step is what makes it so easy the next year when you have to run the campaign again, to be able to do it and to do it quickly and with confidence, it's really just a matter. There's not a lot of brain power to it. Like, I had to spend a little bit of time brainstorming the offer, what the bonus would be, but most of it is just legwork, like just doing the job of duplicating emails. Honestly, I could probably hire my virtual assistant, Bonnie, and ask her to execute all the stuff. It's just really that detailed. So as you create promotions in your farm's schedule throughout the year, you may notice that they tend to repeat themselves every year or every quarter. Have you noticed that, like, you always sell your Thanksgiving turkeys at the same time, right? You always have a clean out the freezer bulk sale thing around this month. If you haven't noticed that yet, or maybe you're just getting started in your business, I want you to know you will begin to create a rhythm within your promotional calendar. There will be certain times of the year where you sell certain things based on the holidays and on demand, on customer need, based on when the item is in season and when people are hungry for it. And you will want to pay attention as you create these different offers and as you play in the sandbox and experiment, you will want to pay attention to what worked. And if something worked really well next year, do it again. Make a note of it so that you can do it again. Now there's just gonna be this temptation for some of you to think, oh, no, the next time this comes around, I have to be clever and cute and I have to come up with another, like, theme for this promotion and reimagine the whole offer and the whole sales process. And I have to make it hard. No, no, no, no. You do not rinse and repeat if something is working really well. If you had a promotion and you knocked it out of the park next year, do it again exactly the same way. That's a sign when you knock it out of the park that you have optimized your offer. And if you can make it even better, great. You know, try to make it just 5% better the next year. But like, for the Most part, you don't have to make it hard. This is a I cross the finish line celebratory moment. When you have a great offer that, like that, that just sells itself, then next year, just do it again. 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. So I thought that I would share a few kind of observations and tips with you as you try to create this structure so that you can rinse and repeat stuff. And so I have a few notes here. Remember I told you I have a few sentences on this piece of paper. I'm going to start reading them. So the first one I wrote, promo calendar. I really encourage you at the very least to try and create a promotion calendar once a year. And a promotion calendar does not have to be complicated. This is really just you get out a piece of paper. Or it could be a digital calendar. I use a physical calendar that I print out and I usually get a bunch of post it notes and I just write down some of the different promotions that I'm going to have throughout the season. I usually have at least one every month. In the off season, there might be A few months where there's nothing there. But I try to map out, like, oh, this is when I have typically sold my CSA renewal campaign. So this whole month is going to be all about that. My whole focus is going to be there. And so I just kind of block that off, right? And then I'm like, oh, yeah, I have a meat CSA now where we do a monthly chicken bag. And last year I promoted that in February and it went really well, like gangbusters. So I'm just going to block February off again. Since it worked so well last year, we'll do it again in February and we'll probably use the same exact strategy that I did last year. And I mark it off right? So the first thing to do is just have a promo calendar that allows you to see all the different places where you are going to pitch and to make sure that you don't have things too close to each other, to make sure that you are hitting your cash goals and revenue goals so that you have enough cash on hand. And sometimes you'll have like a few months that are really empty and you know that your cash flow is going to be low there. And then that becomes a signal like, I have to create an offer for that month, right? So this is the very first tip. If you've never heard of a promotion calendar or you don't have the first clue to go about how you go about building one of those, I have an entire project inside of Farm Marketing School that will in 30 days help you build your first one. And the very first time you do it, it does not have to be super complicated. Like, just get into the practice of creating one. The second tip I wrote down here is that as you go through your seasons, your quarters, document your promotions and put them into a Google folder. I have a Google Doc for each individual major promotion on my farm that's in my promotion calendar. I don't have one for every weekly email. You know, oh, I'm pitching this. Our special this week is watermelons. Like, I don't have a special Google Doc just for that, but for the bigger promotions where we're really gearing up and we're getting a lot of revenue around one signature product. Each of those items has its own Google Doc. And then each of these Google Docs lives in a Google folder. And as I come upon those different promotions in the promotion calendar, I'm like, oh, it's going to be time to sell that monthly chicken share again. I can go to the Google Doc for that promotion that I Built the year before. And I can see what did I do last year? Oh yeah, I started it on this day, ran it for seven days. Here was the bonus. Here were the four emails. Here were some of the pictures and it's just, it's all there, right? And I know these were the results. So I'm just going to repeat it and I can just grab it. So I encourage you to create some kind of a documentation process. The very first time that you do this will be work. It will be an extra 20, 30 minutes to sit down and create that Google Doc and link everything up so that it's easy to find. But you're going to thank yourself the next year because now it's so easy for you to go and rinse and repeat. Another hack that I have created that makes it easy for me to rinse and repeat is I have a Google Sheet where I log my important weekly emails. Hopefully you have a practice of sending a weekly or a biweekly email to your list. And what I have on that Google Sheet is the date that it was sent and the subject line of the email. That's the most important piece. And then I link it. I have the URL address for the email itself inside ofkit and.com so that I can click on that link and it takes me to the copy of the actual email. It makes it easy then to duplicate it if I decide that I want to use that email again or use kind of the guts of it. And then I have a section on that line where I explain in, in a nutshell, like, what is the value inside this email? Like what's inside of it. So that if I can't tell based on the subject line, I can see on the, that one column, oh, this is the email where I talk about, you know, how to cut a spaghetti squash down the middle, like through the belly button instead of the long way. Or this is the email that includes this special offer, right? So I don't do this for every single email, but for the ones that, that include some kind of a unique offer, I will document it. It's almost like I want to have a cheat sheet or A, a CliffsNotes version, right? A place where I can go and quickly access the email that I sent last year where I pitched the xyz. And that just makes it really fast to redo all of this stuff. Number four is to keep track of key statistics in your online store, at your market sales. Because we use localline as our platform. It's, it's really and every, everything is done as a pre sale. It's not. We don't really handle cash anymore. This is really nice because I can easily run a report inside of localline and see, you know, how much did we make? What was our average order value, what's the order frequency, how many new customers or the active number of customers that week. And I am documenting and logging how that number is shifting from week to week and then month to month and quarter to quarter. And I'm trying to get it to go up by 10% each quarter within the main season. But I'm also taking notes on this store stats Google sheet of not only what my revenue was in aov, but what was I selling, what was the special offer that week in the store or the things that surprised me like, oh, these items were just flying off the shelf and I wasn't expecting that to do so well or wow, you know, this year, this week I did a special bonus where I offered a four pack of pawpaws with a pudding recipe and if they spent $50 and I had 10 extra $50 orders, which is, you know, really, really high for me. And so that just is a good thing to remember so that next year when it's time to sell things again, I always go back and look at the tab for the year before in that month and I say, what did I do last month? Did I have any special offers? Did I do anything kind of cool that maybe I've forgotten about? Oh, here it says that I did this four pack of pawpaws. I totally forgot about that. That's right. That did so well. I should do that again. Do you see how this works? Like how this helps you? So those are like some of the kind of hacks that are systems that I've developed from my farm business. You're going to create some more. But this is just to get your mind spinning. Like how can you be documenting your promotions as you go? And when you have wins, things that go really well, you got to put that somewhere in a place, you know where you're going to see it again. And you have to create a system or a process the next year where you always go and check back on what did I do last year, Right? That has to be a part of your workflow. So save, document the process, make a crib sheet, make it in a Google sheet, put it in a Google Doc, I don't know, whatever it has to be for you because we want it to be easy to replicate. If it's documented, if you have a place to remind you of what you even did. You're not going to have to work so hard to get creative. But I also just want to really emphasize and stress that we do not have to reinvent the wheel and get super creative with promotions year after year. When we're pitching the same product, we can pitch it the exact same way. You can use the same picture, you can use the same catchy tagline phrase that you used the last year. Your customers, once they're loyal to you and they become loyal to this product, they are waiting for you to pitch your Thanksgiving share, for instance, right? They're, they're not planning on going anywhere else. They're. They're waiting to buy theirs because they know that you sell it in pre, sell it in August or whatever, right? They come to create these buying habits and so they will wait. And they're. When they get the email from you, they're probably not looking through it with a fine tooth comb and saying, ah, this is the exact same email as last year. I promise you, they aren't doing that. They're probably just skimming it because they've read it before. They know how it works. All they care about is that the email has arrived, they see the subject line and they go and find the buy now button. Right? So I want to just release you of this pressure that I felt and maybe you felt to always make a big deal and rewrite and do a whole shebang year after year, no, it can be easy. My friends and I can't believe I've spent 30 minutes talking about this one principle, but it is a really important one that I didn't learn for like 12 years. So learn it now. Rinse and repeat only. Your new promotions have to be hard. And even those don't have to be hard. You can kind of follow the same patterns, but anytime you create a new product or you're launching a whole new kind of marketing angle, yes, that's going to take some extra energy. But you eventually get into this rhythm. It's beautiful. I love it. Like every year when I put the promotion calendar together, it's so easy. Do you want to hear what it is? Here we go. Off the top of my head, in February, I sell my chicken shares, my monthly chicken bag. It's a collaboration I have with Anderson Farms. In March, we pre sell our spring plant sale. Make a lot of money. In April, we pre sell our salad, our chef salad share, Chef club salad share thing. In June, our CSA kind of kicks up and our store begins to start. So I begin to do like weekly emails with the store offer in August. I do bulk corn. That's always a big money generator. We do tomato canners in September. We have a field to table dinner in September. That's another big product promotion energy draw for our, for our farm. October is the CSA renewals. And then I have my fish, my salmon and Halit share. So that's also something that I do in, I want to say it's in May and then there's one for Christmas time, so in November. And then we do Thanksgiving shares or Thanksgiving bags. Feed the need bags in November. I feel like those are the big ones. And I know those off the top of my head because those are my, my big marketing peaks in my calendar. Right. There's probably a few other things that do well for us throughout the year. I'd have to look at my calendar, but like that's, that's my promo plan. And each and every one of those has a little document where I can quickly go and find exactly how I promoted it in the past so that I can duplicate it and repeat it. Okay, so I don't know how this landed with you today, but if you haven't started documenting the stuff that you're pitching right now, like if you're in the middle of gearing up to, to build a big promotion that you're going to launch in a couple weeks, write it all down, create yourself a little cheat sheet, link off to everything, copy and paste those emails so that next year you, this is going to take you, I don't know, 20% of the time you spent doing it this year. And if you have the time, go back and document all the stuff you've already done this summer. Maybe that's a project you want to work on this fall inside of our marketing school where you just get that all on paper as you work through your promotion plan and you make it so that streamlined and easy next year. All right, so that's my hack for the day. I feel like I could do an entire episode on like things that business owners learn after 10 years. This is definitely one of those aha moments that I would have on that top 10 list. You can rinse and repeat. The sooner you learn that, the faster it will be. You need to build a marketing system, my friends. Like you have a system for everything else in your business when you systematize how you sell and you begin to create patterns and rhythms. Oh, it's just so easy to go back and push the button and redo it all again and again. If it works and it does really well. There is no reason for you to change it the next year. That's actually a sign that you found the secret sauce and you want to serve that sauce year after year after year until it stops being yummy. That was a weird metaphor. All right. That's all I got today. I hope that was fun. I hope I drove the point home. My challenge to you is that you would at the very least take the time for the next promotion that you're working on to do this process. If you don't have time to go back and do all of it, that's okay. That maybe moving forward starting today that you'll commit to beginning to document this process in a year from now. You'll be so glad that you did. Now remember, you can come inside Farm Marketing School and you can take that promotion calendar. Building a promotion calendar project is going to teach you the whole system, but you can then work on this stuff as part of that project too. It's really, really good projects. One of my favorite ones, today's show notes, can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 335. If you like today's episode or you want to share it with a farmer, just grab the link and send it to them. I'd really appreciate that. I'm trying to make this resource available to as many people as possible. If you want to get onto my email list, remember you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe easy to remember and you'll get that email like every five days for the next few months. I'm going to help you learn the ropes. Thanks for joining me today, everyone. I can't wait to see what you do this week. Remember, I believe in you. Have a great week. Bye. Bye.