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Today we're getting festive with a fun spin on the classic Christmas song the 12 Days of Christmas. I'm going to walk you through 12 marketing must haves for your farm business, one for each day. So whether you're new to farm marketing or you're looking to refine your strategy, this episode has something fun in store for you. 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, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 342 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 your business a profitable business. Welcome back to the show. A big shout out to all of my regular subscribers. And if you're new to the podcast, I'm glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe to the show and go check out my first 10 episodes. I designed them to be an on ramp into the marketing lingo. Another place you can go to learn the ropes is to get onto my free email list, because when you do, I'm going to send you an email like every four or five days for three months. By the time you finish, you're going to know a lot more than you do now about how the marketing framework works and you're going to just feel more empowered. You can get on that list by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. Today's episode is sponsored by my favorite e commerce platform for farms, Local Line. 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 local line grow their annual sales by 23% and increase their average order size by 9.5%. 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 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. Well, thanks for hanging out with me today. Before we get started, I want to make sure that I wish all of you a happy holiday, Merry Christmas and a wonderful time with your family. I'm actually not going to be dropping a podcast next week or the week after that, so we'll take two weeks off. That's by design. There's just a few weeks every year where I pause the podcast and that just gives me a little bit of a break. In December I don't have to record quite as often and I appreciate that. So I will be back in the saddle the first week of January with more content for you to improve your marketing. And if you are inside Farm Marketing School, remember that we are going to be doing a book study next month All About Money Mindset. Make sure you've gotten that book and you started to read it. And remember that I have four secret podcasts only for you guys to listen to on the topic of money and we'll be kind of talking through some of that material over the next couple of weeks. Really excited about that. Incidentally, if you want to join the fun inside of Farm Marketing School this winter, please go to mydigitalfarmer.com fms and sign up. And you can not only dive into the individual marketing projects and start building each of those systems in your business, but as a side bonus, you can also be going through this material with us and looking at some of the money myths that are running around inside your head that are keeping you from taking the action required to kind of build the business the way that you want. I know it's been a real eye opener for me, so I'm looking forward to exploring that topic and learning about it myself. Like, I am not an ace at this yet. I'm getting a lot better with the help of my own coach and I at least know how to have a conversation about it now. So that's kind of what I'm hoping to do with all of the people inside of our marketing school. Okay, today is going to be a fun episode. You guys, I've been waiting for months to do this. I actually wrote the notes for this. Oh, maybe like six months ago when I was brainstorming different topics. So this is a special Christmas edition of the My Digital Farmer podcast. Because today we're going to get festive with a fun spin on the classic Christmas song, the twelve Days of Christmas. All right, we all know this one, right? On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me. Okay, don't worry, I'm not gonna sing. But that was my. My one moment where I sang. But we're gonna. We're gonna do a fun spin on that song. I'm gonna walk you through 12 marketing must haves for your farm business, one for each day. So whether you are new to this show, new to studying farm marketing, or you're looking to refine your strategies, or. Or maybe you've just been kind of tuning in for a year or so, but you haven't really connected all the dots and really seen how the all ties together. This episode has something for you because it's going to summarize and review the most important things that I think you should be paying attention to. And if you are inside of farm marketing school, you'll notice that many of the things on this list correspond to things that are inside of our marketing school. Actual projects that are going to help you build each of these pieces because they are all important. When we have all of these different elements in place, then everything finally connects. The sales funnel connects, and people move through your business the way they're supposed to. They get coached along almost like the runners in a relay race. We can pass the baton to the next phase and then to the next phase phase, and they start to move and they start to buy, and we just need to build this system. So this particular song today is kind of celebrating all the different pieces that are in this sales process. Okay. So as I go through them, I'm going to kind of highlight different things. I'm going to point you to specific episodes in my podcast archives where you can dive deeper into each concept. I won't be able to review all the details and why they're all important in each part of the song, but I can tell you, hey, if you want to learn more, go listen to this episode where I go into detail about how to do it and if you've listened to me for any length of time, you know that most of the time my episodes are very step by step and very detailed. And so that's going to be a goldmine for you to kind of show you, hey, these are the places to go to really learn the nitty gritty. All right, are we ready? So we're going to start with day one. Not the partridge in a pear tree, but on the first day of Christmas, my farm gave to me one weekly email. Oh, you knew I was going to say that. Yes. Sending a regular email every week to your audience is the best way to stay connected with them, to nurture them, to build trust, to share your story, to get them to like you, to share updates, and yes, to pitch offers from time to time. And when we get into this rhythm of sending a weekly email, even if we don't have something to sell, it keeps your farm top of mind and the person opening it, whenever they open it and they find value inside, like they find a story that just inspires them or lights them up. They learn that when I open this email, there's something good on the other side. And that is a. A very powerful thing. We want to train into our people. So don't send an email if it's bad, if there's nothing valuable inside, please don't do that. I'm not saying to do that. You should just make sure whenever you send an email that it's really good, whether it has an amazing offer on the inside or it's going to tell them. Here's something that I have that I know you genuinely want, like a promotional email email. But it could also just be a fun story that happened this past week on the farm, or it could be a lesson that you learned personally that you think they would also connect with. Or it could be a really cool picture that you took this week that drove a. A lesson or an idea in the email could be a lot of things, but that email needs to drive value and it needs to build connection. Right? So if you want to learn how to write these emails, how to plan them out so that they are interesting to read, I'm going to refer you to episode 92, which is called why you need to send a weekly email to your list and what to talk about. Okay, so write that down, episode 92. I'll also put it in the show notes so you can just go there, click right on the link and it'll take you to that episode. Okay, so that's the first one. I feel like out of all of the things that you could build in your marketing sales funnel, the weekly email is probably the first and most important thing that you should do. And this is what I coach inside of our marketing school, because you go in there and it's a little overwhelming because there's so many things you could build. But if you're just getting started, as you build the other things, you should have the rhythm of writing a weekly email because that's the thing that creates the relationship. You can kind of just do that on kind of standby every week. You can be pitching offers as things come up. In the meantime, you're building the machine in the background that's going to kind of run things on autopilot eventually. But for a while, you're just pushing the flywheel of like weekly email, weekly email, weekly email. And that will go a long way. That will also bring revenue into your pocket, which is what we're all about. Okay, so on the second day of Christmas, my farm gave to me two engaging lead magnets. All right. Yeah, that's right. These are free resources that attract leads into your ecosystem and basically help you grow your email list. So these do not have to be complicated. It could be a checklist, it could be a recipe guide, it could be a planting guide or a plant sale catalog. It could be a gift giving guide for this holiday season. It could be a vegetable storage guide. But it could also just be get onto my produce availability list. Or I tell a fun, you know, I tell a fun story in my email every week. If you want to hear one of my farm stories every single week, get on my list. It could be just something as simple as that. It just needs to be something valuable to the audience, something that they're willing to trade their email address for. And we want to make sure that the thing that you're offering has alignment with the thing you're eventually going to pitch them. That's really important. So don't try to get them on your list with a tool or some piece of content that has no relation at all to your offer that you're eventually going to pitch, because then you'll attract the wrong people. There won't be alignment between the lead magnet and the offer coming later. Now, if you want to learn more about lead magnets, I'm going to send you to episode nine. It's called the Anatomy of a Great Lead Magnet. This is a really good training. And if you've never heard of lead magnets or you don't know how to build them, that's where you want to go. There's also an entire project inside of farm marketing school that coaches you through step by step, how to build your lead magnet, how to come up with the idea, how to create the actual lead magnet itself, if it's maybe a checklist or a guide, how to create the subscribe form for it, how to set it all up technology wise so that it works in your email service provider. The confirmation email that goes out and delivers the lead magnet. Yeah, all of it. So that's the step by step. If you want some help in getting that started too. Okay, so that's day number two. And by the way, it doesn't have to be two lead magnets. I just needed to fit it into the song. It could just be one lead magnet. Okay, let's move on to day number three. On the third day of Christmas, my farm gave to me three key metrics to track. What are the most important metrics that you should be keeping track of in your farm business? Do you know what they are? Because if you don't, I need you to go listen to episode 50 called 3 Ways to Increase your revenue. You guys, these are the only three things that matter. If we can keep our eyes on these three numbers, you can double your revenue very quickly. And too often we pay attention to all kinds of other numbers and give them a lot more importance when in reality, it's these three that move the needle. They are the levers you have to pull. And I am shocked at how many farmers do not know what these metrics are. And even when I tell them what they are, I'm shocked at how many farmers don't know the number itself when I ask them, what is that metric in your business? And so it's important that you know this and that. You're trying to get them to go higher and higher every single quarter, every single year. Now, I know you're wondering, what are those metrics, Corinna, But I'm not going to tell you because I want you to go and listen. Listen to episode 50 because it will all be explained there. It's a really good episode and a very important concept. I will also say there is an entire project inside of farm marketing school that talks about this metrics dashboard that basically gets you to set up the metrics dashboard in a Google sheet so that you are tracking these three metrics and you find out what they are and you make a plan for how you want them to go higher. It's a really good class and it also teaches you some of the other metrics that, that you could be and should be measuring so that you can decide how to do so if you want. Paying attention to our numbers is really important. So the numbers are what talk. If you don't know your numbers, it's hard for you to know if you're making progress. So I really wanted to go listen to that one. Three key metrics to track. Okay, let's move on to day four. On the fourth day of Christmas, my farm gave to me. Four marketing peaks. Yes, four marketing peaks. You're probably like, what does that mean? These are the key times during the year when you run big promotions. So I want you to think CSA signups or spring plant sale or holiday inventory blowout. Okay? So for a deeper dive into how to plan what those marketing peaks might be, I want you to go listen to episode 85, which is called how to plan your promotional calendar. This is part of the process of building a promotional calendar. You sit down and you think about when are my revenue and cash flow needs going to happen? When are the big moments in the year when I bring in a lot of revenue? When are the big promotions happening where this offer just goes crazy and I make a lot of money? We want to know when those are and we want to plan them intentionally and we want to pay attention to where the gaps are. Because sometimes when my farmers do this work, they discover they have, you know, a three month period where there is a marketing valley, not a peak, where there's just nothing going on, there's no sales coming in, and that can create a lot of anxiety. And so then it's our job to create an offer in that gap so that we have kind of a mini peak. But the goal is to have four peaks a year in your marketing promotion calendar. In case you didn't know that, that's typically what's done in most industries for big peaks. Now, I'm not saying they don't sell all year long, but there's four big revenue peaks. Now if you want to learn how to plan a promotional calendar and just kind of map out the key promotions of the year, this is a really important part of your marketing kind of process. I do it every year at the end of December and early January for both digital farmer and for shared legacy farms. And if you want to learn the process for how to do that, you can take the project inside of farm marketing school that teaches it to you. And the whole goal of that project is by the end of those 30 days, you have your marketing promo plan ready to go and launch for the next year. It actually doesn't take. I, I feel like it takes about eight hours total. If you add up all the time that's involved, maybe a little bit less. This is not a super, super detailed deep dive into how each of the promotions are going to work. It's more like the big picture. Like, here's what, what we're going to do, when we're going to do it, what days, what my revenue goal is, and some of the marketing channels that I plan on using to promote this. And that's kind of the gist of it. And you're, you're mapping them out in the calendar itself. You're plotting them so that by the end you have this document that includes everything you're going to sell and the big marketing pushes you're going to have and which ones are your marketing peaks. All right, so again, if you want to listen to more on that, go to episode 85, how to plan your promotional calendar, and. Or check out the farm marketing school project called building a promotional calendar, which will help you get it done. Okay, let's move on to day five. In the song on the fifth day of Christmas, my farm gave to me five content pillars. Yes, these are the core themes that you focus on in your social media strategy. And frankly, anywhere that you are showing up, whether it's YouTube or on your marketing website, in your blog, and they're different for everyone. But this is where you need to kind of brainstorm. What are the key things that we are known for, the key values, or maybe it's the modalities, the way that you want to show up and create content. What are the topics that you're talking about? A lot. It could be a feature, the key product features that you want to focus on. It could be stories in your farm's history that are important to the narrative and they come up from time to time. It could be education or certain tips that are important for people to hear. It could be frequently asked questions that come back around into the rotation over and over and over again. Right. So if you want to figure out what are the things that should be getting repeated in my marketing and messaging, then you can go to episode 23, which is called finding your brand's content pillars, to learn more. And there's an exercise in there to help you brainstorm them. And then inside of farm marketing school, there's an entire project, a very popular one, on how to build your social media calendar and or your social media plan that you kind of reuse from month to month, the template and inside of that project there's a section where you're thinking through what are my content pillars. So this concept is definitely talked about in more detail in there. Okay. All right. Day number six. On the sixth day of Christmas, my farm gave to me a six email nurture sequence. All right. This is one of my favorites because the nurture email sequence was, was one of the most powerful and early tools that I built. When I first got started with this digital marketing stuff with my own farm business, I built my lead magnet first and then I built my nurture email sequence. And I saw so much traction the moment I started publishing that nurture sequence. Like it just warmed people up. They were writing me back saying, oh my gosh, I love your emails. And I could just tell it was activating them and exciting them and getting them ready to buy. And I hear that again and again from the students in farm marketing school who come in and do this project. So what is an email nurture sequence? Well, this is an automated email series that you write in advance. You plug it into your email service provider and it's triggered when a person joins your email list for the first time. Okay. And it's designed to warm up those email leads and move them closer to your first gateway offer to making a purchase. Sometimes the email nurture sequence has just three emails. Sometimes it's more like six. Really depends on how valuable your first gateway offer is. Like if it's an expensive item. In the early years when I was just pitching a CSA share and that was like the gateway item, I needed a lot of emails to nurture them along because it was a pretty high price point. You don't need as many if the first thing they're going to buy is a pretty easy ask. And most people will say yes. But in either case, you're going to learn how to set one up when you go to episode 1663. How to build an email nurture campaign to warm up your email list. Really good episode again. There's an entire project inside of farm marketing school called the email nurture sequence where for 30 days you work with me to get it done, to actually write the email nurture sequence, plug it in, get it set up technically in your email provider. Nowadays, you guys with channel ChatGPT and AI, these can be written in record time. In fact, I got onto a call with one of my farm marketing school members, Jill. Shout out to you, Jill, I know you listen to the show. We met up for a one to one call and her Request was help me put together my email nurture sequence. And so it took about an hour and 15 minutes. But we used AI and ChatGPT with with us on the call and we built, I think she did like five emails. Now she had to come prepared with a few items. She had to sort of brainstorm some of her thoughts and have gone and researched some of her past emails that she's written so that the AI bot could like know and learn her voice. But it was astounding what it came up with and she was able to make a few adjustments but she walked away from that know in 90 minutes with her rough draft. So it is really easy now to do this kind of work if you know how to coach the AI tool. All right, let's move on to day seven. On the seventh day of Christmas, my farm gave to me seven coupon codes. Yes, coupon codes are a great way to incentivize purchases and create urgency and build a irresistible offer and track promotions. So one of the things that you need to get really good at over time as a marketer is building offers. And sometimes you're going to build an offer that doesn't gain traction because it's just not, it's just not a good offer. But sometimes you build one that's really good and people love it. And coupon codes are one of the tools you have at your disposal to help you build irresistible offers and to help you track how well they do. So if you have an email, excuse me, an e commerce provider, make sure that you get one that has the ability to use coupon codes because they're just so powerful. And if you want some ideas for how to use coupon codes in your marketing and to create better offers and to just move people through your funnel, go listen to episode 264. It's called 15 Creative Ways to Use Coupon Codes for Online farm sales. Part one. Yeah, so there's two parts to that, but episode 264 is where it all starts. There's also an entire project inside of farm marketing school about coupon codes. It's basically a 30 day project, although you can get it done a whole lot faster. But it's meant to be a project where you just go in, decide what your coupon codes are going to be for a particular period of time, get them set up and have your kind of your promotions ready. And that's, that's the goal of that project to get used to how do my coupon codes work in my e commerce provider? And what do I want them to be. And how long do I want them to last? And is it for anything in the store for a particular product or are they limited in number? Right. You get to make all these decisions. So. So definitely a fun thing to play around with. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. All right, farmers, it's the off season now and you know what that means. It's time to start working on your business, not just in it. This is the time to step back and sharpen your marketing systems. Evaluate, set yourself up for stronger sales next year. Year. And if you're like a lot of farmers, you know you need to do this, but you're not quite sure how to go about it. And that's why I created Farm Marketing School. It's my monthly membership. It's going to help farmers like you build a simple, repeatable marketing machine that actually works inside you. Get bite sized, step by step projects that make marketing easier. So each month you pick what project you want to work on. Like maybe you want to finally write your email nurture sequence or you want to build your social media plan. Well, I walk you through exactly how to do it. You set up the system so that it's a repeatable thing you can do every month. And you're not doing it alone because every month we meet live on zoom so that you can get coaching and ask questions and hear what's working for other farmers. It's like having a marketing mentor and a mastermind rolled into one. Now, each project is designed to be completed in under 30 days. Some of them are even faster. So you make steady progress without letting marketing take over your life. And it's so encouraging when you see progress actually being made little by little. And this winter, I'm doing something fun. It's brand new. I'm doing a special focus on money mindset. We're going to be doing a book study and some other guided exercises and discussions to really help us unpack how we're thinking about money, how that's affecting how we run our business so we can start charging what we're worth and sell with confidence and feel empowered as the CEO of our farm business. So if you're ready to stop winging it and finally build a marketing system that brings inconsistent sales, please come join Farm Marketing School today. I would love to have you in my community. Sign up for your first month and join the fun@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS that's mydigitalfarmer.com FMS I'll see you inside. On the eighth day of Christmas, my farm gave to me eight value added products. Oh, I love value added products, you guys. I wish I had discovered these a whole lot sooner because there is so much revenue in these products. These are things like jams, salsas, dried herbs sales, salad dressings. They're things that increase your revenue and they attract more customers. I feel like more of my customers want to have things that are already processed and pre made that they can use to jazz up their meal that are ready to go, ready to heat and so you can learn more about how to do this to kind of brainstorm what it could look like for your business by going to listen to episode 285 and it's called Boost yout Farm's Revenue with Value Added Products. Insights from Kendall Ballantine. So Kendall is another brilliant marketing guru. She lives in British Columbia in Canada and she and I are good friends. If you're not following her, I think she has a podcast now too. She is so smart when it comes to social media, especially email marketing, but she has a pretty cool gig that she's doing with her farm business, selling prepared foods to her audience. And these prepared foods are using her meat products. So I just think it's brilliant, a brilliant concept. But she also just talks through value added in general. I think it's a really powerful episode to go listen to and think through and be like, could I do something like that? Value added is where the money's at. So the more you can create systems in your business to develop value added products and or maybe collaborations with other people who make them for you and then you just, you know, sell them with a profit margin, the better. Okay, so I just want to encourage you to dive into the world of value added if you haven't already. Let's move on to day nine. On the ninth day of Christmas, my farm gave to me nine product badges. What is a product badge? All right, these are the labels or the tags that you can put onto your products in your online store that highlight a specific feature or a value or just label them a certain way. Common ones that you all are probably using already are things like best seller or fan favorite or on sale today. But we can think of even more creative ones. The more descriptive, the more fun filled they are. Sometimes even festive when you think about the holidays. I also like to play around with use cases where you suggest a way to use it simply by how you label the tag. For instance, makes a great hostess gift that could be a product badge if this particular product has won an award, you could use that as the product badge. Whatever the case is, it's really, it's really kind of fun and I think important and worth your time to brainstorm a list of different kinds of product tags you could be using on your products in your online store or maybe even on the signage at your farmer's market. Because the minute you put a badge on there, you stamp it with a certain label. Now it adds value for the customer. I think that one of my best episodes that I've ever done on this podcast is about this topic. It's episode 151. It's called Creative Badges for, for your product descriptions. And I really encourage you to listen to that one over all of the other ones I'm going to share today. I just think it's so good and it's going to expand your mind and show you what's possible. It also includes a download link in there for getting the PDF guide of just all the different brainstorm ideas of product badges that I at the time could think of that I had seen. And just that one page alone is worth so, so much. So go check that out, episode 151 and start thinking about what kind of product badges could I be using? Maybe this isn't a practice you're really taking advantage of. Maybe you're just using Bestseller or kind of the, the standard ones right now. But get fun with this because I know that I have bought things before from other vendors just because the product badge was kind of fun, right? Just different and quirky and it made me laugh and it gave a sense of humor and showed the personality of the brand. So check that one out. It's a good one. All right. Day 10 on the 10th day of Christmas, my farm gave to me 10 ready to use social media templates. I love, love social media templates. Now what do I mean by this? So a, a template for social media is when you have taken the time to be strategic about what you're going to be posting in your social media every month where there is a content strategy, a content plan. And when you take the time to do this and you're thinking through like, what is this post, this style of post going to accomplish for my brand and for moving my customer closer to buying. And once you identify what those are, then you realize, okay, these things need to happen on a regular basis on some of these social media channels and it gives you clarity about the kinds of things that you have to be posting on a regular basis because they're like the templates, right? Like they're the patterned things, the ritual things that show up and keep moving people through the funnel and then you've got a little bit of white space in between those must haves where you can be creative, you can just post organically from time to time. But there should be certain things that always show up in your social media rotation. And what I encourage my farmers to do in farm marketing school is to identify what is this template, what is this social media plan and create social media templates like where you literally go in and you're creating the design. Like for instance, you always have a lead magnet that drops once a week. And so you create a type of post that looks very similar. It's maybe the same exact one, the same style and, and you've just got it there in the Canva file and you just go in and execute it every single week. Maybe you tweak it a little bit, right? But you have a template, you're not having to rebuild it every single time. Or maybe you have another post once, once a week that answers a frequently asked question and you've got maybe five of them that rotate. But the post that you have built inside of Canva, the graphic has a certain kind of look to it. It's just, it's the FAQ style post. It's a template, right? So identifying what are those key 5 to 10 messages that need to be in the rotation, knowing what that is, putting those in place and then having one day a month where you go in and you activate them, where you plan them, you stick them in, you schedule them so you know that at the very least those things, those messages are going out and, and moving people along. And then you have the freedom to post things as you go throughout the month. As life happens on the farm, as cool things happen, knowing that the most important messages, that backbone of messaging is in place. Okay. And those 10 things, it's not always 10 things, but I just arbitrarily those 10 messaging points are, are pretty much the same every single month and you're just recycling them and rescheduling them from week to, from, from month to month. So if you want to learn how to build a really good social media promotion plan, that is probably the most popular project inside of farm marketing school. It's the one I'm most proud of and it'll get you results. It's a good 30 day project build. And what's cool is that you're going to be able to build with the help of AI, you'll be able to build that so that you can do a lot of it using ChatGPT once you've built the main system in future months. So really, really good. Go check that one out. But there is a podcast episode, episode 159, and it's called EIeIo what to post on social media. So if you've ever wondered what kinds of things do I even talk about, that podcast will be helpful. We talk about some of that in even more depth in the project inside of Farm Marketing School, which is all about how to build your social media promotion plan. All right, we have two more days left. We're on day 11. On the 11th day of Christmas, my farm gave to me 11 monthly offers. Oh, my friends, it all starts with a good offer. When you first start your business, you need to have something to sell because you won't make any money if you don't have a product to sell. And more than that, not just a product, but you need to build an offer around the product, so you dress it up in such a way that it is irresistible. Learning the skill of how to build offers is one of the most important first things that you should learn when you are in business. And it is a process. It takes a while to get good at this. It's also. It's also something that you're going to fail at in order to find your success. And I don't think there's any way to avoid that. So as you go along learning how to find your best offer, know that to get there, you're going to have some bad offers first. And that's just the way it is. And you shouldn't shame yourself. It's just the way that you get good at it is by throwing out a few that aren't so good. And you just got to let that roll off of you. But the point is that you need to learn how to create good offers and you should have more than one. So at first, when I was creating this checklist of things to sing in the song, I had this listed as number two, two monthly offers. Because there is an argument to be made for you need to have a signature offer, like all roads lead to what in your business, what is that thing you're trying to take them to? But in reality, as you grow your business, you want to have more than one offer. This is how you make money in your business, by having more things to sell, by getting your customer to buy more than just one thing. You want them to get all the things in your Product ladder. And so that's why I said, no, we're going to make this be number 11 because I want you to work on creating more and more products for your customer to buy. Like, you should have a gateway offer, the thing they buy first. Then you also have what I call the signature offer. This is the thing where you're trying to take everyone to. It's sort of at the end of your chain, your product chain, and then there's things in the middle that, that they also get a chance to buy. You're always coming up with ways to bundle things or things that are complementary in some way. And you're developing new products, you're collaborating with other vendors. And yeah, this is the fun, the fun part of building a business. So learning how to build an offer is a really key skill. You want to keep your, your audience engaged all year by planning offers for every single month you should be trying to buy pitch something every month of the year. And this is the fun part of building that promotion calendar where you have to think through what would I sell them this month? What, what's going to be the main revenue driver or outlet this month? And plotting all of those into your calendar. So to discover how to map out your sales, you can go to episode 85, how to plan your promotional calendar for 2021. That was the name of it. It's an oldie but a goodie. But you can also come into farm marketing school and you can take the promotion, excuse me, the, the build a better offer class. There's an entire project all about how to build offers. And you get introduced to the different offer formulas that exist and you kind of ask yourself, do I like some of these formulas? Can I imagine using them in a farm business? And you also identify some new ones that maybe you don't see on that list that might work for you. And the entire month you spend playing around in the offer sandbox, you actually try some of these offers out on your audience just to see what happens in a spirit of curiosity and play to discover some data. So I really encourage you to check that particular project out inside of farm marketing school. It's a four week project. Okay. Day 12, our last day in the song. On the 12th day of Christmas, my farm gave to me 12 Google reviews. All right. I wanted to make sure that I brought up reviews and testimonials because they're an important part of the customer value journey. They're actually one of the steps that we want to coach all of our customers to go through at some point in their journey with us, it's towards the end of the journey. So if you've gotten a person to leave a review, then they are really close to the final step of Superfan. Now. Reviews build trust, and they make it easier for new customers to say yes. They also help with your SEO. You're more likely to show up higher in Google SEO search engines if you have more reviews than other businesses. They obviously create social proof. A person who is new to your farm reads them before they decide to buy. So if you don't have any, they're going to be less likely to to purchase. But it also does something positive for the person who makes the review. They shift in their mindset. They turn into a loyal buyer in the process of saying, I really like this business. And so we want that shift to happen in their mind. It's a psychology thing. Once they've made the shift, it's really difficult for them to unshift and go back. So we want customers to leave reviews even if it doesn't happen on Google, even if it just happens as a social media post where they share something that that they've made with your product and they talk about how amazing it is that counts. Okay, so we want to coach this kind of behavior. So if you want to learn more about how to collect reviews, you can check out episode 128. It's called why you need to be getting Google reviews. And there is also an entire project inside of farm marketing school called reviews and testimonials that gets you to actually do the work of setting up the mechanism in your business that will coach the reviews to. Whether the person that they get sent to actually decides to do them or not is a different story. But you create a mechanism in your business so that a person is invited at a certain point in the journey to leave a review. And there's lots of different ways that you can set this up. You also, in that project, learn how to collect them when they happen so that you have these testimonials in a certain location and you can pull from them as you do promotions later. Because we use these testimonials to help us pitch offers in the future. So. So we want to be collecting them. And so when we have a strategy and a process and a system for finding and storing those in a location, then it makes it a lot easier for us to grab those curated items. Okay, all right, so let's review all 12 items real quick. Okay, so we're going to pretend to sing the song right now, and we're going to go backwards. All right. So you gonna do it with me? You gonna sing with me? Here we go. On the 12th day of Christmas, my farm gave to me. 12. Google reviews 11 monthly offers 10. Ready to use social media templates 9. Product badges 8. Value added products 7. Coupon codes 6. Email nurture sequences Five content pillars. Oh, I sang that wrong. Five content pillars. There it is. Four marketing peaks, three key metrics to track, two engaging lead magnets and one weekly email. There you have it, Corinna Bench singing on a podcast. 12 marketing must haves for your farm this Christmas. I hope this episode gave you some inspiration, reminded you of some of the key things that really make a difference in moving your leads and turning them into sales, and gave you some practical ideas to take your marketing to the next level. Now, before I let you go, I just want to remind all of you that that I am hosting a special class. A free class to anybody who wants to learn how the sales funnel framework works. If you've never learned the marketing framework, this is definitely a class you want to come to. Um, it's happening on every Tuesday of the month of December. So December 30th is the next time I'll be hosting one at 10 o' clock in the morning Eastern standard time. It'll go about an hour. You can register for free by going to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/webinar. I would love to see you there and the zoom link will be sent to you in the confirmation email. Today's show notes can be found at mydigitalfarmer.com forward/342 I'll put all of these different links to the different episodes in there. If you like today's episode, please leave me a rating or a review. If you liked my voice, leave me a rating or review. If you didn't like my voice, don't leave me a rating or a review, but share this episode with someone else who maybe needs to hear it. If you want to share the link, text it to them. I'm trying to get as many people as possible to know about the show. Thank you for doing that. Remember, you can get onto my email list too. I have some free stuff to send your way to make your marketing better. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe. And I'm also on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. Would love to connect with you there. Inside of Stories. Thank you so much for joining me today for spending part of your holiday with me. Merry Christmas. And I'll see you in the next episode in a few weeks after the New Year. Remember, I believe in you. Have a good one. Bye. Bye. Ra.