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Have you ever wondered what to do with your CSA Facebook group when the growing season ends? Do you keep it open? Do you archive it? Do you kick people out who don't renew? Today's episode was inspired by a really thoughtful email I got from one of my listeners, Jenna, who asked this question and we're going to dive into my recommendation in today's episode. What are Facebook groups really all about in your marketing engine? 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 338 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. If you are one of my regular listeners, raise your hand. I'm so glad you're here today and if you're new to the podcast, make sure you subscribe to the show. Go check out my first 10 episodes. Especially if you're new to the marketing lingo and you need to learn the ropes because I designed them to be an on ramp into the marketing space. Another great place you can go is to just to get onto my email list that's free. When you do, I've got some really good stuff coming into your inbox. I have written probably like 30 emails in an email nurture campaign that will drip out to you every five days until they're done. And each one of those was written to guide you step by step through the key principles you need to know about marketing. Some of my best podcast episodes that are going to teach you really valuable nuggets of information. I think I share resources, free tools, I give away free trainings. It's just going to teach you so much. So get onto that list. You can do that by going 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, 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 for free. No joke, so that you can get started without missing a beat. As a podcast listener, you'll also get one premium feature for free for a full year when you use my code MDF2025 at checkout. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline use that coupon code and you'll be on your way. Start selling smarter this season with localline. And now back to the show. All right, well, I'm back. Thanks for tuning in today. I'm excited about today's topic, what's going on in my life. I have a couple of updates. I am in the middle of my CSA renewal campaign. We opened the doors on Saturday. It's going very well. And in next week's episode, I'm going to break down the whole promotion. How it went, lessons learned. I do this every year, so some of you may have already heard kind of my strategy and how I work it. But if you're new to my community, that's going to be a really good episode. And I'm going to tease out not only what I did in my pre launch and in my actual launch plan and what the offer was, but we'll talk through the response of the community and how I get so many people to buy in the first 24 hours. It's pretty cool. So I'll share those results. I haven't quite wrapped up the campaign yet, so I want to wait a little bit longer before I do that. But that should be next week's episode. I am just at the time of recording this, I am like five days away from the end of our CSA season. We have one more pack night. We have a big hog roast adios party for our guys and then we really kind of turn off for a few weeks. So I'm just, I'm really excited about having time away with Kurt. We're gonna go do something fun as a family and Honestly, we'll probably just chill. One of the things I've been convicted of lately, just in my prayer time, is I feel like I need to just get still. I need to go somewhere and be still and quiet and not listen to any podcasts, not listen to any music, not necessarily even try to read anything, but just to be quiet and let my mind go blank and see what comes in, what just comes up in my head, the thoughts that I have. I've noticed that my mind is always so busy thinking things that I don't make space for listening and receiving wisdom from the quiet. So I don't know if that resonates with you at all, but I think I have to actually practice making space for that. And I'm looking forward to. To doing that and resisting the urge to always be in motion and always being busy and getting my value and sense of value from activity, realizing that I am enough, even if I don't produce all the time. That is. That is a theme that has come up a lot for me in the last two years with my coach. And as I continue to heal and get stronger and stronger, my health is doing really well. Those of you who have been following me for a long time, I just want to let you know I'm continuing to make progress. Honestly, I feel like my gut health, the whole leaky gut thing and small intestinal permeability, I feel like that's done. I could be wrong, but I'm not having trouble digesting food or eating anymore. I don't think about it, I don't notice it. So that's like a big praise God. I do have some residual symptoms, new symptoms that I'm managing right now. Honestly, I think it's. I think it's from Perio menopause. That's all I'm going to say there. But I am. I am beginning to explore how to manage that and hopefully I will have energy again and my joint pain will diminish. So, ladies, if you haven't ever looked into menopause, it's coming. Just prepare yourselves. There's so much. There's so much support out there if you take the time to look into it. So I'm really encouraged. Okay, enough about that. We are talking about a very specific question today, and it was inspired by an email from Jenna and this is what she wrote. I decided that I would spend an entire episode answering it for her so that I could just send her the podcast recording early and she could listen to it and get her answer. But I thought it was a Good question. For a lot of people in my audience, it brings up a lot of kind of principles in marketing. So here was her question. It was about Facebook groups for her CSA. She says, I have a question about managing our CSA's private Facebook group, which we started this season based on your suggestion. Good job. Our customers love it. So thank you for the great idea. As our season ends in December and the next CSA won't begin until spring, I'm wondering how you handle your private group between seasons and moving on to the next year. Do you create a new group each year or do you maintain the same group and remove members who don't continue? I'm brainstorming the best approach and I would appreciate any tips. All right, well, first of all, Jenna, awesome question. And I know many of you listening have been here too. You start a private Facebook group for your CSA members, or maybe it's just for farm customers. You might not have a csa and it's buzzing with activity all summer long, and then winter hits and things slow down and the engagement drops and you don't really feel like going in there either. And suddenly you're wondering, what do I do with this thing now? Can I just let it go and drop it and trust that it will come back to life when I need it again, or do I just turn it off? Do I start over? It's a great question. So I want to unpack that today, and we're going to talk about how to manage your CSA Facebook group between the seasons, how you keep it valuable and active, and how to use it as a tool to continue to build community and loyalty, even in the off season. Because here's the big idea of today's episode that I want you to remember. I'm talking to you, Jenna, but also to anyone else who has a Facebook group. People come for the vegetables, but they stay for the community. That's a big insight that it took me a while to see. So maybe for you it's meat products, it's not vegetables. But they come for the veggies, they stay for the community. And so your Facebook group isn't just a communication tool. It's a community building tool, a connection tool. It's the place where belonging can happen. It's a ritual that your members, your customers, share and do together. And so when people feel like they belong and they start to make friends and connections and feel valuable, that's when they stick around. So to me, that is kind of the key point. We need to, like, spiral around as we're going through this episode. What can we do to build community with this Facebook group in the off season? Okay, let's just start out. Maybe this is obvious, but I feel like it's important to start out here. Like why does your Facebook group even exist for your csa? And you know, it is there to help members get questions answered or to find recipe ideas or maybe you do a little video unboxing of your CSA once a week and that's good for them to learn that information. But at your core the Facebook group is, is there to help people feel like these are my people, I am part of something bigger, I belong here, I add value here, I have ideas and people like me. Right. And so when you can create that feeling, that sense of belonging, you move beyond just being another vegetable, subscription or csa. You become a part of your members identity. Okay, so what do you do with the group when the season wraps up and you've got a few options here and they're all valid. I think it really just depends on what, how you have your business set up, what other kinds of marketing outlets you have, other kinds of products you have, what your product ladder looks like, how are you moving customers through your different offers and what is, what is the goal that you have for your business, what are some of the values that you have within your business? So let's just talk them all through. There's probably more than the three I'm going to suggest, but they each have kind of pros and cons. Option number one is to keep the same group year round. You add in people selectively who are invited by members even if they're not in the csa. You just, you let them in as the admin and you just let this group keep building. You don't necessarily cut them out when they don't renew. Okay, that's option one. And this is actually now what I do at Share Legacy Farms. This is not what I used to do when I first started the CSA or added this Facebook group in. I would religiously cull the group on January 1st. I would warn people that I was going to do this a few weeks in advance just in case I accidentally removed someone who should have stayed in. And I would only keep people in who had renewed as of that January 1st date. And part of it was I was trying to motivate people to make a decision to renew. I wanted to. I knew that that group was valuable to people and if I actually cut them out, it might be that fear of losing that piece would actually make them go and take care of it. And renew their share. That was initially one of the main motivations for doing it. At the time, it was also in my crazy content creation phase where I was just making video after video after video and they all lived in this group. And I was very zealous about protecting who, who got to see it. To me, it was very valuable and I wanted to keep the perception of that value high by limiting its access. When I would sell my CSA to people, I would create an offer stack so there would be lots of perks of joining the membership. And one of them was access to the group and access to this resource library and the resources that were in the group as well. Which is, in my opinion, one of the reasons why we are such a strong csa. Because we have a really tremendous onboarding process and training process and we teach people how to eat the food. I wanted to continue to protect that value. And so there was this thought in my head that if I just let anybody come into the group without necessarily having paid for it, that I cheapen this aspect of the offer. So that was kind of my initial reason for not letting people into the group unless they paid and why I would be so good about culling the group at the end of the year. But honestly, that got really tedious at the end of the year. It would involve several hours of me sitting in front of this Facebook app and trying to go through the list, compare it against my master list of are they a customer or not? Did they renew? It would take hours and it was so tedious. And after a while I was like, is this really necessary? Like, do people like, am I making this a big deal? And so I ultimately lessened my grip on this particular strategy and just decided I would be open handed and generous. When people request access into the group, they're usually invited by one of my members. And so that to me is a signal that they are probably interested in becoming a CSA member. And I see it as an opportunity for them to come in and see our community, see what's happening, and then increase with the hope that it will increase their desire for my product and become more familiar with what we do and, and the value that's in this experience and remove some of that risk of signing up. So that became a motivation for me to test that out. I'm like, you know what? I'm, I'm going to release my grip from this strict rule I have and I'm going to start allowing people in that are invited by my customers as long as they are in this metro Toledo vicinity. And could potentially turn into a CSA member. This may actually end up being an on ramp that warms up a customer and makes them decide, I want to do this. And so that was kind of my, my logic for it. So this is what I do now at Shirdlegacy. So I do keep the same group year round people request access and I will take a look at those requests. In most cases I say yes. And I do not go through the list at the end of the year and take out people who have no longer renewed unless I know that they're like, done, done. As a customer. What I want you to realize is that even though your product fulfillment may end, the relationship doesn't. And the CSA group can continue to be a place where you build that relationship, where you build desire, where you pitch new offers, where you showcase value. And they may end up wanting to come back as a CSA member again. Maybe they just need to take a season off, but they still find value from the group or it teases the value for them all year long and they decide, that's something that I miss, I wish I hadn't done that, I want to come back. Or their life opens up again and they can do it again. And it's top of mind because they've been seeing posts in the group and they're like, yeah, I want to do that again. Your Facebook community is also going to keep your customers connected through the off season. So for all those folks who did renew who decided they wanted to come back, they'll want to keep talking to each other. And that will be the case. The longer you keep the Facebook group around, maybe the first year that you create it, you'll notice that it's harder to keep them engaged in that off season. But the more you build the community in future subsequent seasons, the more those key thought leaders in the group are going to connect with each other, going to continue to share. More and more people are going to start to use that group as a show off place. Right? Like they're show and tell zone where they're showcasing how they're growing and then we'll just begin to grow momentum and it'll be easier and easier to keep the energy going in the off season. I like to think of the metaphor of pushing a flywheel. So when you first get something going and you have to get that flywheel spinning, it is a lot of energy on your part. You feel like you are the only one creating content. And that may be the case for the first two off seasons where you're just Coming in there every week and saying hi, or throwing up a post for with a poll or a photo or a throwback post or a prompt question and you feel like you're doing a lot of the heavy lifting. But eventually, over time, the flywheel really starts spinning and it has its own energy and momentum. And all you need to do is occasionally go and tap it to keep it moving. Because so many other people in the group will be helping with the spinning of the flywheel because they'll be posting and they'll be creating energy that's eventually going to happen. But it does take a few years. So if you're feeling like, ugh, this feels hard, and there's hardly anyone talking, you know, don't beat yourself up about it. Especially if you just started a year or two ago, like, that's normal. And as you create more and more value in the main season and those connections start to build, it'll be easier and easier for you to do this stuff in the off season. Now, remember, all of those posts from the past, they are like a giant search engine. And the longer you keep this Facebook group around, the more that search engine just grows and grows. I love it. Whenever I sit down to write my weekly email to my list, I always have a section in that email that talks about, I don't know, some kind of a cool idea from a member. And I will often just go into the Facebook group and type in the word, like pesto or mustard or, I don't know, like something that I vaguely remember, like a shashuka. And. And it'll show all the posts from the past seven years with that word in it. And I'll find a really cool picture of a shashuka. And then I can put that picture in the email and kind of talk about it as an exit strategy and share a tip. Right? So it's so amazing to have this search engine that's basically a curated content from my members, showing the growth of my members, stuff that I'm sharing with my customers and my emails, like they're pictures that my customers have given me. And so I'm so grateful that the Facebook group is basically a place. It's like a giant museum of art where I can go in and just see everyone's different ideas and how they've grown. So that is another major reason why I think you should not shut down a group after a first year and start from scratch. So really keep that in mind. Realize that the value of the content in the group continues to grow every year. You keep it around and you can tap into it and go in and find stuff. The group also lets, lets you share new offers in the off season. This is something I do a lot. It's the Facebook group is where my strongest customers hang out and so I know that I can go in there. In addition to sending emails to everyone, I can go into the Facebook group and post the same information because now they've seen it twice and they see it in a different way. They might hear it in a different way. So for instance, we offer a chicken share monthly Chicken share and I was able to post about that in February last year, which is in our off season and it created a big stir. I was basically able to create another pre launch for that product using email in the Facebook group because I had eyes on that item. We have a Thanksgiving share or feed the need bag in things around Thanksgiving time. That's a really cool offer and we start talking about that in November when our CSA is technically over. But it's something I can focus my content around for that month and it gets people coming back and getting excited about it and then they post pictures of the stuff they made from their Thanksgiving bags. Yeah. So I feel like there's value in continuing to pitch offers in the off season. Maybe you don't have offers yet and that's the opportunity for you to consider creating a couple of offers in those three months that you're off and using the Facebook group to feature them and get more eyes on it and get more excitement on it. This is also one of the reasons that people keep coming back to the Facebook group in the off season because they know that there are these ritual promotions that I do in the off season. I guess you could say that I'm not completely closed. So we do occasionally resurface and say, hey, we're doing. We, we need to get rid of a bunch of carrots. We're doing a quick pop up or hey, we're going to pre sell transplants for our spring plant sale. We always do that in February so that all those are pre sold. So we, we are pitching. We're just not necessarily fulfilling a ton. But you can do that, you can identify what those things could be in those off season months so that there's this illusion of activity and gives people a reason to come in and interact with the group. I think I've already said this, but people who used to be in the group who, who are actually CSA members at one point and then dropped out, but they're still in the Facebook group. They will some of them will long to come back and be a part of what's happening in there as a true member again, because you allowed them to stay and because they can still see what's going on. Now. One of the downsides to this particular option is that you have to manage engagement drops. People will naturally check Facebook less if your CSA is not in action and the challenge is getting them back into the ritual of using the group. Then in the summer, right. If they're, if they've sort of stopped doing it, you might have to create some off season activities to push the flywheel from time to time. 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, option number two is that you could archive the old group from last year and start over. Start a brand new group every single year. Delete the old one or archive the old one. I would recommend if you're going to do this option that you that you archive the old one, not delete. That means that people can still come back and see the content in there. You don't lose the search engine ability of it, but people just can't post Anymore. Now this can work if you have a large CSA and you just need to wipe the slate clean and start over. It keeps your group active, fresh, easy to manage. You don't have to worry about the headache of the admin of deleting people, which is really tedious and it can make joining the group feel like a perk, like it really protects that feature of only current members get access and you are integris about that and people can tell that you are and it feels special and there are only special offers that are only put into that group. The cons though are that you lose that sense of long term continuity, you lose those archived conversations, the search engine features and you have to reinvite and rebuild momentum every year. And getting them in the group is sometimes a point of friction, right? Getting them to click on the link that gets them over to Facebook and filling, you know, filling in the answers to those questions so that they can become a member. Some people just, you know, that's one more thing they have to do and that can be a barrier and you might actually have to concoct all kinds of schemes to try and just get them into the group in the first place. Option number three is to just keep it year round, but groom the members. This is kind of like a hybrid model where you, you keep the same group. Once the renewals are done though, you go and you remove people who don't rejoin and you're very strict about that. It sends the signal of being in the group is a privilege and you know, if you're not in the CSA you're going to lose access. It can make people value the membership more as a result. You could even take it a step further. I did actually do this for two years where you charge a small monthly fee for non members who still want to stay in the community. I did that one year and that I didn't have very many people take me up on it, but it created a perception of like, hey, this is a valuable group, so valuable that people are willing to pay to stay in it. And that's a message that my paying members saw too and I think had a positive effect on them. And it's just a great way to monetize your super fans who want to stay connected to you, but they can't commit to the full season csa. So just know if that's an option, it's a little bit of a logistical challenge to keep track of that and get that payment and all that and make sure that when the year's done that you remember to take them out and all of that. But it's an option. The downside to this is that it's, it's tedious to manage and remove people because their names are often different on Facebook than they are in your customer list. And so you're, sometimes I'm looking at these names, I'm like, I don't know if this is the same person. I'm cross checking it with my CSA membership list and I can't tell. So I accidentally remove people and then those people feel like I've just rejected them from the community. Some of them have gotten upset in the past. So you almost have to create like a warning to your group before you're going to do this, before you're, if you're going to call the group, just got to warn everyone, hey, I might make some mistakes. If I do, you need to request access again and let me know. And I didn't mean it. It was an accident. If you have other marketing outlets for your product, then I think there's value in having dropped out. Members of the CSA continue to be in just to see your stuff. If you. So for instance, we have an online store track. So some people decide they don't want to stay in the csa, but they become very good members or very good consumers in my online store track and I keep them in the Facebook group. I feel like that's a really smart move because they continue to see the types of, of products that we sell. They get ideas for how to use it in their kitchen too. Even if maybe they're not CSA members, but they're buying some of that stuff in the store and sometimes they, they decide to come back and become a CSA member for a year or two again. And I would like to think that because I'm top of mind, because they're seeing the content, getting value from this group, getting ideas for how to use the food they buy from my store. They that that is what makes them think, oh, now I want to graduate back into csa. So if you have another marketing outlet where a person could toggle between the two or do them both, I think it makes sense for you to not just offer it to CSA members but to, to allow other people in. Okay, let's talk a little bit about how do you keep engagement alive in the off season. Sort of the elephant in the room, isn't it? Because I think it's normal for activity to slow down once the season ends. I want to just normalize that for you. But slow down should not mean go dark. Remember, we Want to keep the flywheel spinning. So even though we're not doing the crazy amount of content creation that's happening in the main season, we do need to occasionally go in there and just make sure that that flywheel doesn't come to a stop. So here are five ways that I jotted down that you can keep your group alive during the winter. The first one is just running a challenge. Like a freezer challenge is a great one. How much can we clear out of our freezers this month? Everyone can post photos or swap recipes, cheer each other on, and it really keeps them engaged with their identity as a foodie, even when the farm isn't producing. Creating ritual content would be a second way. So think of like recurring themes. This is a really helpful thing that I use when I'm mapping out my social media plan, like a Throwback Thursday or what's for dinner Wednesday or Fish Friday or Soup Sunday or Freezer Friday. I know that we've used that one a lot. Creating rituals, suggesting rituals for your customers so that they have an idea of what might fit into that category that they could post about in your group. And that helps create consistency and it's a trigger, it's a spark for them. Sometimes people don't even know what to post in the group. So if you have a theme around which everything spirals, it removes that friction. The third idea is to share behind the scenes content, because there's stuff still going on in your life on the farm, even when the CSA boxes aren't being sent out from week to week. And it gives people a sneak peek into what happens on a farm during the winter. The greenhouse prep or the seed planning or the rest and renewal that you're doing. The equipment repairs, the soil testing, it reminds them that you know, the farm doesn't go to sleep. It's just kind of in shifting mode in the off season. And there's a really big story behind how food gets to their plate. And some of that story plays out in the winter. And here's some of the key things that happen. I've had a lot of people tell me that they really love learning about all these backstories. Like how the seed production and the production plan comes together is really, really especially interesting for my customer base. So don't hide that information. You can share that. Number four is to celebrate your members in the off season. So you could feature top contributors, you could share a member spotlight, you could look back through that archived material in your CSA Facebook group, pull out something, and maybe it was something Posted two, three years ago and repost it and you know, say hey, kudos to Bobcini for this really cool idea. Remember when we had all these peppers and here's an idea for next year. I mean just go back and resurrect something from the past and highlight the member who talked about it. You could even turn it into a contest if you want, where once a week or once every two weeks you give a prize to a post that you bring back from the past from the archives that you think is especially valuable and then that customer feels validated. You're also training your customers to continue to post in the off season and next season so that maybe they'll get featured in the next year. When you do this kind of thing, okay, everyone likes to get highlighted and get prizes and then finally to use it for early bird promotions. So this is my secret weapon. I'm going to be talking all about that next week. Make sure you tune in to next week's podcast. But I use the group to announce early renewal promotions, pop up sales, pre orders, the spring plant sale. Sometimes I just have a ton of extra eggs from our chickens and I just need to get rid of them. And I'll go in there and be like, I've got 30 dozen, first come, first serve. Text me in the comments and you know, this is when the pickup is. I'll leave them on a, in a cooler by my barn, put cash in the envelope. You know, I'll just, it can be something as simple as like, oh, I gotta move 30 dozen eggs. Which is not a big deal for us, but I can go into the Facebook group and just create a very quick offer and I often sell things in the comments. So this group is where my most loyal customers hang out and they love getting first dibs, being the first people to know about what's going on. Oh, I, you know we have a salmon share and a halibut share, our partnership with Citizen Salmon Alaska. And that's also sold in the off season as a pre order. And so that's something else that I'm pitching again in the group. So when I build my promotion calendar out, which is something I teach you how to do in for a marketing school, I have all my products that make me money mapped out and when they're to be sold and where they're sold and you know, most of them are happening in the main season but I have some big, some big ones that are happening in where I'm pre selling them in February, in March and in November. So there are still things that are plotted onto that calendar. And I use the Facebook group as a place to make people aware that that pitch is happening. Another thing I wanted to bring up here before I wrap up this section is you have the opportunity to seed the group. If you want to drive engagement, one way you can do so is to reach out to specific key customers and thought leaders in your CSA and ask them to make a commitment to post on a particular cadence in the group in this off season. And you get to decide what that is. So maybe you just contact, I don't know, five people. Let's just say five or it could be 10 people. And you just say, hey, I've really loved the stuff you've been putting in the summer in this group, and I want to keep the momentum of the group alive. Could I ask you to promise me that you will post once a week for the next three months something in the group just so that I know there are at least 10 people that are going to be posting in the group every week? And would you promise to comment on anything that I post? Right. Like, you could just create like a very loose agreement. You're not watching out for it, but, you know, maybe you reward them if they actually do it. You give them a little perk for helping you do that. But that's called seating the group. This is where you choose the people that you know will do a good job with this and you. You personally enroll them into this activity. And I've never had someone say no when I do that. So how do we use your group strategically? Remember, your Facebook group isn't just for engagement. It's a sales and a retention tool. It's a product awareness tool, too. Sometimes it for people who aren't CSA members yet, but they're in there, they become aware that the product exists. They become aware of how it is used, how people get value from it. And that will end up being enough of eventually enough information for them to overcome this obstacle. They have that fear of the risk, you know, that they're taking by. By purchasing the product that that will overcome that and they will finally be willing to say, yes, I want to do this. So here are a few ways that you can use the group intentionally as a sales or retention tool. Number one, make it a perk. So talk about your Facebook group like a bonus that comes with membership. Make sure you talk about that search engine, especially if it's been around for a long time. Be like, there is so much gold in here. You can basically just come in here and Type in any word, jicama, pesto, shashuka, whatever, and it will pull that up for you and you will have tons of ideas for what you can do with with what you're making. Use it to foster connection between members so you can encourage members to answer each other's questions. When they interact peer to peer, they're going to become more invested in the group and they're going to be seen and heard. They're going to feel like they belong. So we want to encourage that. If there's ways that you can actually reward that behavior, you might even start giving away a prize. I actually did this one year where every week I gave out a prize and the behavior I was rewarding was like behavior that I saw happening in my members in the Facebook group. So if I saw someone share a really inspiring post, or if I saw someone encouraging and commenting a lot, somebody got a prize that week and I told them why. So if you want to encourage more peer to peer interaction, then build a prize around it and highlight that activity. I remember doing a daily challenge question. I had a whole podcast episode about this. But this was part of my pre launch Runway for the CSA renewal campaign, where every day for five days, I think it was two weeks before I opened the doors to the offer. I seeded energy and momentum in the group by running this daily challenge question. And every day the question was different. They had all day long to answer it. And then at the end of the day, I would choose one person at random who would get a prize. And the questions were easy to answer. They were like, how many years have you been in our csa? That particular question is a really powerful though one if you think about it, because people are seeing the answers. Some people are writing 8, 9, 10, and then there's some who are writing 1, 2, 3. And those people who are saying the higher numbers are saying it with pride as if, you know, I'm a long term member, look at me. And then the ones down below are seeing all these people who have been in it for a long time. That's huge social proof. Like, yeah, this is so valuable. I've stayed in it this long. And you can just sense like, oh, I can't wait to one day be someone who gets to Write the number 10 in my comment. Right? But by asking well crafted daily challenge questions in the group, running a challenge like that, for instance, the question could be, who in the group has inspired you the most and why? Now you're giving everyone a chance to point to someone in the group that they really love who's been helpful for them. And now you've just validated like everyone's going to read, oh, did someone put my name down? And they're going to feel so validated if they see their name and they're going to want to continue to keep posting. Okay, so this is another way to foster connection between members is to come up with questions like that. And maybe you have to create a prize to encourage them to actually answer it. Leveraging peer validation. So when someone posts a photo of their meal and 30 people comment, have you ever had that happen? That's social proof in action. That makes that person feel like, whoa, I just scored a big one. People like what I do. People are thriving in the csa. Maybe I should renew. I can't leave my community because I'm a thought leader. Like, I know that that has happened in my group where there are people who have been so validated, who feel so important, like they can't leave because every time they post something, people love it and they say thank you. And they know that they're a master in the group, guiding these little apprentices behind them. And so that's their role now in the group and they don't want to leave that behind. They feel important. So giving people a chance to validate one another is really helpful. And then collect user generated content. Screenshots. Take screenshots of the posts that are coming through. The testimonials, the meals, the comments. It's marketing gold. And you can reuse those stories in emails where you're trying to promote your CSA in the future or in social media posts. You, you can put them on your website. This made me think of another challenge question that I had put out there. It was, what do you like about our CSA? And that pulled out 56 comments. And they were basically testimonials, right? People are telling me why they love us. And I can take screenshots of those and use them next year when I want to sell my csa. I can just put that in one of the emails and be like, hey, this is what some of the people are saying. So use your group strategically as a sales tool. There's so many potential assets that you can pull out of there and then use that to drive sales elsewhere. All right, so let's wrap up, let's revisit that Final question of should you remove people who don't renew? Here's my take. If, if part of the value of joining your CSA is access to the group, then yes, you should eventually remove non renewers. Especially people who are just no longer engaging in the group at all or no longer engaging with your brand at all. They should be removed because that's what makes it feel exclusive and earned. When you gate the experience, it feels more valuable. And you can remove people anecdotally by looking at the names and if, if they haven't become a customer, you don't recognize them at all. You know, you can just remove them and see what happens. But, and this is key, you can keep those people warm by making sure you notify them that you are going to remove them before you do. So one of the ways that I, that I have done this in the past when I used to do this is I would put up a post and I would warn the group a week before that I was going to be purging the group if they hadn't renewed. And that gave them a heads up to either renew or make sure that they got onto my email list so that I could send them any offers that way. So that was part of that post. Like, if you want to make sure that you continue to get offers and news from the farm, make sure you get onto my email list because you won't be hearing about it in this group anymore. Okay. That way they're still connected to your world and they might be able to come back later. You don't completely shut the door. So that would be my recommendation. Okay, so here's what I want you to take away from today's episode. Your Facebook group isn't just another task on your to do list. It's it's kind of the heartbeat of your farms brand. If you you're a csa, this is where the excite phase in the customer in the customer value journey happens. And if you don't know about the excite phase, you need to come into farm marketing school and just take the sales funnel class. Because I teach you the eight stages of the customer value journey. They all need to fire for your customer to turn into a super fan. And your job as the marketer is to is to move them from phase to phase and grow them as a customer. And one of those phases is called the excite phase. And it's right after they buy your product for the first time. This is the phase where you have a customer success path. You create a strategy and a path to make sure they're successful and fall in love with your product. And the Facebook group is one of the key ways that I institute my customer success journey. This is where the teaching happens, where I equip them, where I show them what to do with the product, where I make them feel successful, where they become a part of the community and find value in that. So Facebook groups can be the heartbeat of your customer success path. And it's where the loyalty happens, where the belonging starts to happen, the community is built, and where you continue to drive interest in new offers. Because remember, people come for the veggies initially, but they end up staying for the community. So you've got to build that community, that thing that keeps your farm strong year after year. And when customers feel seen and connected and part of something, they're going to keep coming back and they'll bring their friends. So this week I want you to mull over this information. If you have a Facebook group and you pretty much let it go dark in the winter, I want to challenge you to look for some ways to get that flywheel moving again. You don't have to do a lot, but find ways to continue to keep it occasionally active. Maybe it even means recruiting someone in the group, paying them to be your Facebook admin. I have a community manager who will do that for me. She's now kind of the face of the group and I can go and ask her to be responsible for those metrics. So that's another thought that might be the gem of today's episode for you. All right, well, Jenna, that was a really long answer. It was only supposed to be 20 minutes. How does this happen? I hope it was helpful. Today's show notes can be found at mydigitalfarmer.com forward/338. If you like today's episode, please share it with a friend. Go. Leave me a rating or a review, would you, on Spotify or Apple podcasts. I would love that so much. I just want more people to know about the show. And when you leave a review, somehow that helps me me get recommended to people when they're looking for podcasts. So please help me out. That'd be great. If you want to get onto my email list, I have some free stuff to send your way to make your marketing better. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and hey, this is middle of November and I want to invite you into farm marketing school. Are you thinking about doing some continuing ed in the off season? Is there like a marketing project? You know, you need to give it some time. You told yourself this summer that you were going to work on that when things were a little less crazy. And now here we are, it's winter time. I want you to think about. Is there a project you need to get done? Maybe you need to update the website home page and just tweak it a little bit. Maybe you need to create an email nurture sequence for people who first get on your list. Or maybe you want to just build a really good solid lead magnet in a subscribe form to get people on your list and you just want to get that done. Come into our marketing school. Pick one or two projects. I build them so that you can get them done in 30 days or less. I walk you through it step by step. There's a training video that you watch. There's templates that you can use to kind of customize for your own business to make it faster. And there's a monthly zoom call where I'm basically there to help you. If you have a question, you get stuck. We talk it out. We can look at your situation as a case study. So I'm here to support you. Think about joining. I I love our marketing school so much and I love the people that are in there. Consider joining. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS give it a try for a month, see if you think it's helpful. If you don't just drop out after the first month, most people stay. I think the average stay time is seven months, which is so amazing. I love that. Okay, that's all I got. Thanks for joining me today, you guys. I will see you next week when we talk all about the CSA early renewal campaign, my results. Excited to share that with you. Have an amazing week. Remember, I believe in you.