← My Digital Farmer Podcast
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- [00:00]
Corinna Bench
If you've ever wished you could feel more confident and competent in your farm marketing, like you finally had the skills and the support and the structure to do it well and get it done, today's episode is going to open that door for you because I'm giving you.
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Narrator/Announcer
A behind the scenes look at the.
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Corinna Bench
Tool I've built to help farmers grow those muscles and transform the way they show up in their business. Let's get started.
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Narrator/Announcer
Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to.
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Podcast Intro Voice
The My Digital Farmer Podcast.
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Narrator/Announcer
In today's market, it's not enough to.
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Podcast Intro Voice
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.
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Narrator/Announcer
How to find more customers, increase your.
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Podcast Intro Voice
Sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show.
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Narrator/Announcer
Well, welcome to episode 341 of the.
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Corinna Bench
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 their marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome to the show. If you are new, I'm really glad you're checking us out today. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. And I always tell people to go back and subscribe. Start listening at the very beginning, the first 10 episodes, because I designed them to be kind of like a crash course and an onboarding into the marketing space. It's a good place to just get started. But you can also pick your way through the archives. There's lots of good topics showing up. There are over 340 episodes now. That's just crazy to me. And I was meeting with Nina from Local Line the other day and she was asking me, how long have you been podcasting? And I was like, oh, I think it's only been like three years. She's like, no, man, I think it's longer than that. And so I did the math and kind of divided 340, you know, by the number of weeks in the year. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, no. I started this back in May of 2019. And when I. When I saw that, I was like, wow, this is crazy. I've been doing this for a long time. I still love it. Anyway, lots of good stuff on the show. And you can always go check out the archives. You can also get onto my email list if you want to learn some marketing tips. Because I'm going to send you an email every, I don't know, five days for maybe three months. And each of those emails is going to build on the next one. It's going to walk you through some of the key things that you need to know if you want to get better at marketing. So I invite you to do that. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com forward slash, subscribe and that's free.
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Narrator/Announcer
Today's episode is sponsored by my favorite e commerce platform for farms, localline. As the season winds down for you, it's the perfect time to get ready for a smoother year ahead. And if you've been thinking about switching sales platforms, localline makes it easy. Their team handles the heavy lifting so you can start next season more organized and efficient. Localline is the all in one sales platform built for farms and food hubs with tools for e commerce, inventory automation, subscriptions, barcode scanning, box builder, and POS. Farms using localline grow their annual sales by 23% and increase their average order size by 9.55%. Switching is simple. It's stress free. No setup fees, no sales commissions. And their onboarding team will migrate your storefront for free so that you can focus on what really matters. As a podcast listener, you'll also get one premium feature free for a full year when you use my code MDF2025. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline that's all one word. To sign up, use the code MDF2025 to get that free premium feature and start the new year strong and sell smarter with Localline. And now back to the show.
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Corinna Bench
Well, it's 7:00am as I'm recording this and it's still dark outside outside my house. No one is here because Kurt has taken Josiah to school. It's a good 30 minute commute to get there and back and Jed's already left. I decided to record my podcast early this morning before anyone came back and I'm sitting here with my chai tea.
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And my notes for today and I'm feeling very calm. There's not a ton to do today and so that's a nice feeling when you don't feel rushed. I'm enjoying this month of December. I have intentionally built it to be less busy and I'm practicing not filling my days with activity. And I have to tell you my friends, this is very hard for me. And I'm. I'm currently doing a focus.
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A study of the topic of abundance versus scarcity because I have noticed that scarcity shows up a lot in my backstory, and it's something that I have to daily face. Slay the dragon. Anyway, so this idea of just sitting here for a whole month and resisting the urge to fill my calendar, even though I could, because I don't have a lot to do right now, and that feels strange to just sit in this space of emptiness and enjoy the time off in my mind, I'm like, I should be using this to squirrel away some extra projects so I won't be rushed later on. And so to tell myself, no, what if you just practice sitting here and taking the reward and being still? And I have to tell you guys, it is hard. It is hard. And I'm noticing that maybe the reason that I don't. That I don't do this more often is because it's just been my pattern my whole life. So, anyways, that's a little bonus reflection for you before we get into today's topic. Just encouraging you to take some time to renew yourself and relax and take your reward.
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And expect it to be a little uncomfortable. This is a practice. If we want to be a different way in the world, it will involve practicing it at first before it becomes second nature. I don't know if it'll ever be second nature, but I really want to practice being that kind of a person. So this is some of the work that I'll be, I'm sure bringing onto the podcast next year as I really work on this with my own personal development. And as we talk about here soon, it's definitely going to be coming up inside of Farm Marketing School with our students. So.
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Today I'm going to spend the entire episode talking about Farm Marketing School because we're doing something exciting in the school over the winter months, and I want to make sure everyone out there knows about it. Farm Marketing School is open all year long, but in the winter months, there's kind of an added extra layer because I can really engage with the group a lot more since I'm not so heavily busy with our own farm. And I know that some of you who have been listening to the podcast for a while have been thinking about joining the school. And yet something might be holding you back. Maybe it's you don't have enough information about what exactly goes on in there, or you don't have enough time, or you just haven't made the decision.
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To make this your focus to finally give it the attention that it deserves. Now, I bring up Farm Marketing School every week in this podcast. Today I want to give it a little bit more scrutiny and give you some details about the value of the school, what's happening inside, what typically happens to farmers who stay in the school for several months and actually do the work when what's that transformation that they see in their business, how is the school structured, what kinds of topics are even inside, who is it ideally designed for? And who shouldn't join Farm Marketing School? This is just going to be a really open, honest peel back the curtain view of my signature program.
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Today I am talking to all of you who have been thinking about joining the school and you're not sure if this is the time to do it or if this is the year to do it or you're waffling back and forth. I know I usually don't make a lot of big decisions in the month of December because I'm kind of like turned off and I'm just trying to end my year well. But maybe come January, when you're turning your eyes towards the future horizon line and you're making decisions about the person you want to be, the type of farm business you want to be, and you're plotting out the milestones to get there, it's possible that you may decide, this is the year that I really want to make marketing a focus in my business, where I'm going to give it the attention it deserves for at least a few months and try to build a few elements in my marketing machine. And I know that Farm Marketing School is a, is a tool and a resource that can help me do that really well, efficiently in a few months time. And it would be, you know, a really good ROI for my, for me. So this is a podcast.
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That'S going to just spell it all out, take it all in. If you're not ready to do Farm Marketing School now, just know that this episode will be here. You can come back to it in the future. And listen, if and when you ever do kind of get a yearning to.
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Make this be your focus for your business, I think at some point in every farmer's career, they will need to address the marketing and sales funnel of their business. It may not be the very first thing you think about. You might be very focused on just getting your production systems in place, but you will soon learn that running a farm isn't just about growing the thing or creating the product, but it's also about making money. And, you know, Becoming financially stable. And there's a lot of elements to that, but one of them is definitely learning how to create revenue. That's the marketing and sales arm of your business. And you need to learn that skill. It is a skill. And if you aren't going to learn it, then someone on your team team needs to learn it, or you need to learn it and then hire someone and train them and delegate this away. But it is a really key engine and Farm Marketing School is designed to help you build it. So what is Farm Marketing School in a nutshell? Well, it's a monthly membership and it teaches farmers, specifically direct to consumer farmers, I would say. That's who I focus on, how to build a simple yet repeatable marketing system. And this system is the thing that drives the sales and revenue of your business.
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And the way that I do that is I've structured it into guided projects or execution plans. And each of these projects has a topic that it focuses on. It's designed to help you build a very specific marketing asset. Things like build your first lead magnet, update the homepage of your website so it has the right stuff on it.
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How to write a weekly email and what kind of stuff should be in that email and create that system and that structure. Right. Those are examples of the projects. It also provides you with the implementation tools. So lots of templates and examples, swipe files and coaching. So we have a monthly zoom call that's live where anyone in Safari Marketing School is invited to come. It's always the second when. Excuse me, the third Wednesday of the month from 1 to 2pm Eastern Standard Time. And people can bring whatever they want to the table. Sometimes it's questions or troubleshooting or someone sits in the hot seat and we talk through ideas. And I'm not the only one giving ideas, but other people in the room are sharing their thoughts too. So there's like this collective wisdom. But sometimes it's a celebration, like, hey, I did this really neat thing, here's an idea. And the whole group benefits from that. So there's this supportive community and we're all learning from each other. And all of that is then stored in the membership platform. So you can go in and watch these zoom calls that have happened from the past. You can even do a search for a key phrase and any.
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Video or teaching content that had that phrase or word in it kind of comes up and it takes you right to that section of the video. So you can jump right in and and learn that piece. You don't have to sift through the entire content to find it. So there's a really powerful search element in there as well. But all of these different projects are designed to remove the confusion around what do I do next when it comes to marketing? What am I even supposed to be working on? And to take the guesswork out of it. And you start running your farm like a confident marketer. That's what I've noticed. It doesn't happen immediately, but the longer you stay in and the more kind of pieces you build in your marketing funnel, you begin to stand up straighter as a farmer and feel like, yeah, you know what I'm learning. I know the framework. Like, this framework makes sense.
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Narrator/Announcer
I can see it what it should be.
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Corinna Bench
I'm building each piece little by little. And as you begin to put the pieces into place, you start to feel really good about yourself. You see it all coming together as you're coming to the Zoom meetings. And you keep hearing the same things over and over again. You're like, okay, okay, I know what I need to work on. This is where I'm going. This is the direction I need to go. And you just feel this confidence that, like, I know what I'm supposed to do. It's coming together. And then you show up differently when it's time to pitch. You show up with more confidence to your customer base because you're like, yeah, I'm doing it the right way. I'm confident that I'm building the plan. I'm building the plane right? So you're not overwhelmed anymore and you're not winging it anymore. You have the plan, you have confidence in the plan. You have a toolkit you can trust, and you start to see your sales slowly growing. And that's like this feedback loop of like, oh, I'm doing that. Like, it's working, right? You see your marketing finally starting to work. And you can imagine if I just keep doing this, it's going to keep building, there's going to be a cumulative effect, and it just, it's going to really start to grow. So I think the real transformation is that you finally feel capable of marketing your farm and you start showing up consistently in the right ways at the right times, which just grows your revenue, it grows your customer base, and grows the energy around your farm business. So that was a really long winded version of trying to explain what the monthly membership is all about. But that's kind of what I'm trying to get at. I. I designed Farm Marketing School. I started it a couple of years ago.
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It's always been a dream of mine to equip farmers with these tools and resources for how to be a better marketer. Because it came out of my own story. I, as I'm sure you've heard this, I feel like I tell this story a lot on the show, but I didn't know what I was doing. When we first started our business. I actually was a reluctant partner with my husband. He was the one who was really passionate about starting, in our case, a CSA farm. And I just wanted to be a mom. And I was just writing a newsletter for him to help him. Cause I could sense that he needed that support. He wasn't a very good communicator or writer. And that was something that came easy to me. That was all I did at first. Just kind of dabbled in that. And slowly I began to take on more and more of the sales part, like trying to find new customers. But the first seven or eight years of our CSA was business. We did not have a plan. We did not have a sales strategy. We just, I don't know, was a lot of nose to the. To the grind and trying to figure stuff out. And when it started to get really hard, when we were trying to scale and jump to 400 customers and this was the only product we had, right? We. I didn't even know about the concept of a product ladder. So that's probably why it was so hard for us. We were selling a product that was high price point with no gateway product into our business. So it was hard for me. I give myself a lot of grace now. I'm like, no wonder that was so hard.
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I wouldn't do it that way if I didn't do it over again. But I just didn't know. I didn't know that there was a process, a marketing framework. And when I finally got serious about studying marketing to try and make this easier and I learned how I should have done it, I was like, oh, man, oh man. And then I began to implement some of those systems, those different mechanisms in my business to hit all of the different pieces of the marketing funnel. And I saw how it worked. I'm like, oh, man, farmers need to know this. Like, no one's teaching this to us. And I can start to share my success story through the lens of like, the CSA model. And that's originally what I did. I just formed a Facebook group and started teaching it. But I'm so passionate about making sure farmers learn this. There's just a gap there. This wasn't being taught now more and More. There are other people that are doing this, which I'm so, so grateful for. There should be more of us out there talking about this because this is a key skill. And I'm kind of convinced that this is one of the reasons that farmers. There's sort of this reputation that we carry, right, that we don't, we don't make a lot of money as farmers. And I think some of that, not all of that, is because we just haven't been taught.
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That farming is a business. Like, we haven't learned some of this marketing and sales stuff. And if we knew what that was, we would be making more revenue. We would be able to apply it to our. To our business style, to our industry, and figure out how to be more profitable with it. So that's. That's kind of the passion. I hope you can hear it in my voice. Like, I just feel like I could help here. I can contribute here and share what I've learned along the way. Now, not all of you are CSA farms, and I'm no longer just a CSA farm. We have an online store, like a retail thing that is doing really well for us. And we have a wholesale thing that's starting to grow too. So we have lots of different irons in the fire and are diversifying how we make revenue. But.
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I just feel like this is a skill set that I can tell my story through the CSA lens and the online store lens. But all of these skills are transferable to however you want to market your business, whatever product you are selling. So I just began to teach the different things I was learning. And as I went along and I was making these videos and workshops, and then I did this like, small group accelerator kind of mastermind experience for six months, one year. And that was so fun. Shout out to all of my accelerator members. And I just decided, how can I use this content that I've created with them and put it into a school format and.