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I got a podcast episode idea in the middle of Aldi grocery store. Seriously? I saw a sign hanging over the aisle and it said, shop Aldi first. And I thought, hmm, that's good. Hidden inside that one little sentence are five little marketing gems that I want us to explore today because I think every farm business can learn from them. So 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 366 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 strategies so that you can grow a profitable farm business. How's everyone doing today? Big shout out to all of my digital farmers. Welcome back. If you're new to the podcast, so glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe to the show and go check out my first 10 episodes. If you need kind of a 101 marketing course and you want to learn the ropes of marketing because a lot of the language and concepts and frameworks are taught in those first early episodes that I did many, many years ago, they are still as good as ever. Another place to go to learn the marketing lingo is to just get onto my free email list. You can subscribe@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe easy to remember. And when you do, I'm going to send you an email like every four or five days for several months and each one builds on the next. I share the core frameworks. I point back to the really good episodes that I think you need to listen to. I teach you the stuff you need to know. I give you freebies, show you who should be following. It's a really good kind of basic 101 marketing course. If you read every single one of those so you can get on that, it's free, go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe if you don't have time to read all of them, Just tuck them into your folder in your Gmail. Get to them another day. Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at localline. If you run a csa, sell direct or wholesale, or manage all three, summer is when it all happens at once. Packed markets, weekly CSA boxes, and a harvest that keeps coming. Localline helps you handle your busiest season with less stress and more control. In 2025, farms and food hubs using localline grew their sales by 33% with average order values up 31%. That's real results across operations of all sizes. On the platform, localline brings everything together in one platform. CSA management, wholesale ordering, automated inventory, box builder, and pos. Run all your direct channels from the same place, whether that's your CSA market, sales, farm stop or a food hub. And through their marketplace partnerships now, you can reach chefs and buyers nationwide through Cisco Gordon Foodservice and US Foods. With a low barrier to entry, switching is easy too. There are no setup fees, no sales commissions, and their team will migrate your storefront for free, even mid season. And it only takes a few days. As a podcast listener, you'll get one premium feature free for a full year when you use my coupon code MDF2026 at checkout. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com forward slash, local line, all one word, and then enter that coupon code MDF 2026 at checkout. Make the most of peak season with local line. It's streamlined, it's efficient, and it's built for growth. And now back to the show. All right, well, welcome back to the show. I hope you guys are hanging in there. I know this is the crazy one of the really busy weeks of the season. We have few of those throughout the year, at least on our production team, where it just feels like we concentrate a lot of hours into one day and we cram pack it all. I hope you're still making your marketing a priority. Remember, this is a really key system that you have to have dialed in to your business. It's great if you know how to produce a lot of food, but you also need to get back better at selling it. This is how you make your money. We need to know our numbers. We need to know how customers typically move through the customer journey. We need to know how to attract our ideal customer. We need to know where they're hanging out and we need to know that perfect first offer that's going to get them into our brand and then how to continue to get them to come back. Right. These are all some of the skills that we just need to practice getting better at. So it's one of the things I'm passionate about. Today we are going to be focusing on a slogan. We're going to basically do a case study of a slogan because I think it has some really powerful marketing lessons in it. A few weeks ago, I was walking through Aldi. Do you guys even know what Aldi is? I feel like they're fairly well known, but I don't know if I ever saw them in Texas when I lived down there. Actually, Aldi is a grocery store. I first discovered them when I was in Austria. I lived in Austria for a year when I was in college. They were known as HOFA H O F E R. But I recognized the brand, the logo. When I came back to the states, they had a different name there, Aldi's. They have just this model of a grocery store where you. It costs like, a quarter to access the cart, so there's a lot of budget things going on in there. And then all the. The items are just kind of on palettes. They don't do a whole lot to, like, dress up what it looks like on the inside. A lot of the basic staples, but at really reasonable prices. They don't offer everything in the world. In fact, I usually can't get all the stuff that I like to have on my grocery store list from that location. But a lot of the basics are there and really good prices, a lot of organic stuff. I feel like it's kind of the. The budget version of Trader Joe's. Anyway. We have them all over the place here in the Midwest. And so I was walking through Aldi doing my grocery shopping when I saw a sign. And let me be clear, I don't normally stop and study grocery store signage, but this one caught my attention, and I'll tell you why in a minute. The sign said Shop Aldi first. And I. I remember thinking, well, that's kind of a weird slogan. I mean, why not say save money at Aldi? Which is kind of what I think of first when I think of all these. Or just fresh food for less. You know, kind of a generic phrase. Why specifically shop Aldi first? And as I kept pushing my cart down the aisle, it hit me that I think the reason why that slogan jumped out at me is because that is exactly how I think about Aldi's. That is exactly how I use Aldi's. In fact, that's exactly how a lot of my friends I know use Aldi's. My friend Kendra was just Telling me this a few months ago, I remember her literally saying, oh, I always shop for Aldi's first. And then I go to other places. And I remember, like, nodding my head, being like, me too. Me too. I do that, too. So we go to Aldi first, and we load up on all the staples. The produce, the eggs, the pantry items, the things we know are going to be cheaper there. And then if we need something specialty, like buttermilk, for instance, they never have buttermilk. I'm always asking them to carry buttermilk because I just go through it a lot, and it's like one of the few things that I have to go to the other store to get, but I go somewhere else for a handful of other items. And so suddenly, that sign totally made sense. It was brilliant, because Ollie wasn't trying to convince me to do all my grocery shopping there. In fact, it knew that I wasn't. They weren't trying to be everything to me. They were simply saying, start here. And the more I thought about that, the more I realized that there's a really powerful marketing lesson inside that one little slogan. Actually, there are several. There are lessons about customer psychology and positioning, and we could talk about customer research, and I'm even going to point out a copywriting formula that I think we could steal as a farm business from this case study. So today, I just want to unpack this, this moment, this shop, Aldi first sign, because it's a smart piece of marketing, and what can we learn from it? How can we use the principles hiding inside of it in our own farm business? I'm going to share several lessons with you that make this particular slogan work so well. Not all of them are going to apply to you, but I bet one or two of them will. And I'm hoping that as you listen and we kind of talk this out, it's going to make you think about, oh, how could I be applying that principle in my own farm business? What is a small tweak that I can do or a small action step that I can do that's going to basically get at the same thing and hit that same target? Okay, so I hope you get something out of this. I just had fun. I w. I was wishing as I saw that sign, I was like, man, I would love to talk to someone who also loves marketing and just geek out about why that's such a great slogan. Okay, so here we go. You're going to be my. My friends having this. This conversation with me. The first principle that I want to point out here is Aldi's is not trying to be everything to everyone. Aldi understands its limitations. So they don't carry every brand of potato chip, they don't carry every sku, every specialty item in the world. And instead of hiding that fact, they embrace it. Do you see that? Like, their message is essentially, look, we know we're not a one stop shop. We don't have absolutely everything here. But you should start here. Like, it would make sense to start here because you're going to get most of your stuff here and save a lot of money in the process. And that's, you know, really honest and frankly, very attractive to me because I'm always, I don't know, lately I just feel like my grocery bill has really, really increased significantly, especially with all my weird dietary needs. I'm making a point to invest more in healthy food. And so I am paying more attention to seeking out different sources that align with my values, but that also pay attention to my pocketbook. Right. So I think a lot of farms make the mistake of feeling like we have to be everything to everyone instead of asking ourselves what is the thing we're really good at? So maybe you're the sweet corn farm. Like, people just come to you for your sweet corn or you're known for your tomatoes. And I know you sell other things and they buy other things too, but you're known for your tomatoes. Or maybe you are the flower farm. People just call you the flower farm because you have the most gorgeous cut flowers or you're the Thanksgiving turkey farm. Like, that's what they think of first when they come Thanksgiving, you're on their minds. So you don't need to be known for everything. You just need to be known for something. And I think that's what all these sort of showed me as I was looking at that. I'm like, well, they are definitely in the top three grocery stores in our neighborhood. We have Kroger, we have Meijer, we have Walmart, and we have Aldi. There's probably another one I'm not thinking about. We used to have Whole Foods, but they're not around anymore. Those are the big chains. And when I anecdotally just kind of talk with my friends and stuff, most people are shopping at Aldi's and one of those other three, and they do kind of a combo thing. And you tend to be loyal to one of those other three. But Aldi's is always in the mix. And somehow Aldi figured that out and they're just embracing that. They're like, yep, we are going to be known as that place that people come to first and get all their basics out of the way. And we're not going to take on the hassle of carrying all those other weird items that maybe don't move as quickly or that are hard sit in our inventory forever, which is brilliant. Okay, so just be thinking about that as the first lesson. The second one that I noticed was that they're optimizing for first shop behavior or first stop behavior. And that's the part that really fascinated me. Aldi isn't trying to capture every grocery dollar from their customers. They are just trying to become the first stop. Because if they get people buying the milk, the eggs, the produce, the pasta, the chips, the bread, the pantry stables, they've already won a huge percentage of the grocery budget. And they're, they're playing a different category or different game. They're not playing how do we get a hundred percent, but how do we just get the first pass? And the first pass is a powerful stance to have. If you can get your customers to come to you first, you have a greater likelihood of cross selling and catching their attention with other items that they'll just add into their cart to increase the cart value. Right. So I want you to be asking yourself, where does my brand, does my farm fit into my customers actual shopping habits and journey? Are you the first stop? Are you maybe the seasonal stop? That's also a great position to be in. Are you more the special occasion stop? Are you the meat stop? Are you the produce stop? So just know what your role is. Where are you in their actual habits and way of being? If you could follow them around with a, with a camera for a couple of weeks, what is your brand doing in their life? When does it show up? When do they think of you? When do they go and purchase from you? How often are you coming to mind? And when you know that you can use that information, you can either change the behavior by switching a few things in how you run your business, but you might actually just decide, okay, well that's how it is. So I'm going to leverage the heck out of that and talk that up to continue that behavior, encourage that behavior more in future clients. Okay, so optimize for first stop behavior. Do you understand what the word optimize means? It means we're constantly trying to improve and tweak to make it better and better and better around a certain principle or element. And so Aldi's is optimizing all their systems, all their marketing all their messaging around this desire to be the first stop. So they're not going to move heaven and earth to try and get people to come in and, you know, buy all the other weirdo fringe things? No, they're just going to be known as the first stop and that's going to get them some major dollars. Okay. The third thing that I noticed when I was reflecting on this shop Aldi first sign was that they remove customer guilt. And it's a little subtle, but I think a lot of businesses act like customers are cheating on them if they shop somewhere else. I feel like my customers sometimes apologize, like, oh, I went and bought some other stuff at another farm. And I'm like, that's okay. Like, amazing. I love that farm. Or it's like they're ashamed to admit they shop at Walmart if they're also shopping for my csa. I don't know. I just get that vibe some. Maybe they don't, but Ollie doesn't, doesn't do that. In fact, they do the opposite. Their message is, of course you're going to other stores. We want you to go to other stores. I don't want to give you buttermilk. I want you to go buy your buttermilk at Meijer. Okay, that's okay. Just come here first. You're welcome here to buy whatever it is that we have. And yes, go do the rest of your shopping somewhere else. So they're validating their customers buying habits and buying behaviors instead of fighting it. There's no shame. And so that builds trust. And I want you to think about that. I don't think most of you are doing that knowingly or unknowingly, but it's something to consider. I think sometimes we pressure our customers to buy everything from us, but customers don't think that way. Maybe they buy their vegetables from you, but they get their meat from somewhere else and they go get their dairy from somewhere else and their bread from another place. Right. That's normal. You don't have to win the entire grocery budget. You just need to win in your category. So what is your category and are you optimizing around that category? Are you embracing that category and giving them permission to shop outside that category without guilt? Okay, lesson number four. They probably discovered this through customer research. And this might be my favorite lesson of all. I don't think a marketing team sat in a room and dreamed this up, this shop Aldi first. I think they listened because I have literally heard my friends say, I always shop Aldi first. And then I go other places. And I've said it to myself. Maybe Aldi noticed the pattern. Maybe they actually did some surveys or talked to customers and discovered that sentence and that pattern. Maybe they had a focus group. They probably had a focus group, but maybe they just paid attention. Either way, once they noticed that customers naturally described Aldi this way, they leaned into it and then they amplified it by starting to use this slogan as one of their core taglines. This is the real marketing lesson here. Customers are constantly telling us how they use us, when they use us, why they're using our products, and what role we are playing in their lives, in their actual habits. If we were to follow them around with a video camera for a couple of weeks and see how our brand, how our products interact with their actual lives, we would learn so, so much. And most businesses are ignoring these clues. We have an entire project inside of Farm Marketing School. It's called Customer Research Bootcamp. And it's one of the first ones that I built. And it to me, it is a vital process that every farm business should go through at some point. I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't do that work until maybe my eighth or ninth season of business. That's when I finally took the time to get on the phone and meet up with 20 of my best customers in my CSA. And I asked them questions like, how are you using my product? What are you doing with it? What are you making with it? What were some of the issues that you had when you first started our csa? What were some of the problems? Why did you decide to join our csa? Why did you decide to keep doing it even though you were running into these obstacles? And it was amazing, everyone. I learned so much from these phone calls. I don't think you need to do 20. I actually think you only need to do 10 now. And that's what I coach people in the Customer Research Bootcamp class just to take the time to meet with 10 people who are actually your ideal customer and find out the answers to some of these questions. Because when you do, you will see patterns. You will see how your customers are using your product, when they are using it, why they are using it, and what role you are serving in their life. And as a marketer, you want to be collecting that data and then using it and leveraging it in later on in how you do your marketing. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School, my monthly membership for farmers. Before we dive back into the episode, I want to speak to a very specific kind of farmer first. A Second, if you're a year or two into your business and things are working, but your marketing still feels kind of scattered, like you're posting, you're sending some emails, you're running promotions, but it all feels disconnected and you're not sure what's actually driving sales. I just want to say that's not a lack of effort, that's just a lack of structure. Because most farmers don't need more ideas. What they need is a system that connects everything together. And that's exactly why I built Farm Marketing School Inside. I teach you how to actually design your marketing so that it works like a machine, a system, not a bunch of random tactics. We map out your full customer journey. We build your email engine, we create intentional promotions and product pathways. So your marketing starts handing off from one piece to the next like a relay race, instead of you running every leg yourself. And we do it through 30 day project builds. So you're not just learning about marketing, you're actually finishing things. You're actually building the marketing assets in your marketing machine. Your sales funnel, your promotions, your lead magnet, your weekly email rhythm, all your marketing assets. And that's when the shift happens. Marketing starts to feel lighter, the flywheel starts to spin. Sales start to feel more predictable, and you finally feel like, okay, I'm on the right track. I know what I'm doing. If that's what you've been longing for and what you've been missing, then I want to invite you to join Farm Marketing School. Just for a month. Come inside and see what it's all about. You can learn more@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS and now back to the show. Okay, the final lesson from this little slogan was that Aldi's turned the customer language that they were hearing in their research into marketing, that was that Shop first formula. So they took a customer behavior that they noticed, I shop Aldi first, and they turned it into their marketing campaign. Shop Aldi First. It's brilliant. Not because it's creative, but because it's true. And tru is way more powerful than being clever. They didn't feel like they had to try and get everyone who was coming to their store to also buy, you know, the buttermilk and all the other 10% items that weren't on their shopping list. They didn't say, oh, we got to get all that stuff in our store and add that to our inventory. No, they just said, we're going to be known for this stuff and we're going to let them go to Another place and get that other stuff because we've got 90% of their budget right here, and that's what we're going to ace. I love that. I love that they owned it. So what I want you to be thinking about is what our customers. What are your customers already saying? Maybe it's, we get all our sweet corn from you. That could be a tagline right there. Maybe it's, you know, you're our Thanksgiving turkey farm, or your CSA helps us eat more vegetables. We're eating way more vegetables because of your csa. Or we buy all our flowers from you. These statements, they may seem kind of boring and commonplace, but if that's what lots of people are saying, then you need to repeat that back. Right? Those are. Those are marketing gold mines. So to. To wrap up today's episode, I thought I would give you kind of a listener exercise here to help you try and uncover some of this data for your own farm business. And you may not be able to do this with your first pass through this episode, so maybe you just have to let it wash over you. But I encourage you to come back to this point in the recording and maybe come with a pen and paper and jot down your answers to some of these questions or do this exercise with your. Your team, your sales team, if you have a sales team at market or with your business partner. So I'm just going to go through questions that I want you to reflect on, because some of these are going to hit you and there's going to be an answer that comes to the tip of your tongue, and it may be some marketing goal that you can use. Okay, so number one, what do customers consistently buy from us? Can you answer that question? I know they buy a lot of things, but what are they consistently buying? Where they come in? Like, that's. That's what they want every time. Number two, what do customers consistently say about us? That's another powerful sentence. So I know, for instance, my in laws who are, you know, in their 80s, 70s and 80s, they're still farming. They have a roadside stand, and they still go to the market primarily to sell their sweet corn because they are known as the best sweet corn in our region. People will drive a long way to come and have Big Dave's sweet corn. So, yes, they sell tomatoes and they sell zucchini and all the other things and flowers. But customers consistently say, I love your sweet corn. What role do you play in their life? Can you answer that? Are you the sweet corn farmer? Are you the tomato grower for them? What are we known for? Can you easily answer that? All right, then I have a few fill in the blank exercises. Sometimes the answer comes a little bit easier when it's in fill in the blank form. So you might see a little bit of overlap here. But let's just do this work. Fill in this blank. Think of us first when you need fill in the blank. Maybe it's sweet corn, local flowers, Thanksgiving turkey, fresh vegetables. Maybe you're known as the place that's really good at gifts for food lovers. What are you Think of us first when you need blank. Okay, try to get specific here. There might be one or two things, but, you know, you don't need to have a list of 5 or 10. Just make a decision. Okay, here's. Here's the start here formula. Start with us for blank. So what do you want to encourage people to buy first? Maybe it's your summer, your summer produce. If you do meat and dairy and all the things, maybe you just want them to start with your produce. Maybe it's start with us for your garden. If you have like garden transplants or your greenhouse, maybe it's start with us for your growing season. Then there's the known for formula. We want to be known for Blank. People know us as the farm that blank grows the best sweet corn in town, helps families eat more vegetables, supplies Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe you're known for your delivery, but you're the only farm that delivers. I don't know. What is it for you? The when blank then blank formula. Let me parse this out. When customers think about blank, we want them to think about us. So summer tomatoes. When our customers think about grilling meat, we want them to think about us. Maybe it's canning season. So when they start thinking about canning or jamming or doing a U pick with their grandkids, they. They think about your farm. What is it that you want them to think about and then connect it to your farm. That one's really powerful because it ties your business to an occasion, an event, or a ritual. Okay, then there is the first stop formula we want to be the first stop for. Just like all these does. So not trying to get people to buy everything from you, but to come to you first and get what they can and then they'll go supplement somewhere else. So what are you the first stop for? Is it. Is it just produce summer produce? Is it local food? Is it meat? Maybe it's a specific kind of protein. I know that we are the first stop for spring garden plants now in our region because Those who have bought from us tell me over and over again how our transplants compared to the ones they end up having to get from other places. Because we only sell like 25 varieties, we don't do every tomato under the sun. And so they often have to go to other places to get a few other things. But they always tell us that our plants are so vigorous and robust and strong and yield so strongly they don't die or get disease. So they're like, what are you doing to your plants? People are just bought in now. Like we are the first place they go to get whatever they can first and then they supplement somewhere else. There's also the, the go to formula. So we want to become the go to source for local flowers, grass fed meat, a2 dairy. I don't know, you fill in the blank. It's another way you could think about it. And you know, I was thinking about that start here formula. I want to go back because one of the, one of the common mistakes that I see that comes up again and again in my coaching calls with farm marketing school members, with farmers in that, in that school, is that there is not clarity about what your first offer is, what you are known for, what you want them to buy first. There should be alignment here in terms of your messaging, like what you're saying, hey, buy this first, start here first. We want to be known for this first and what you actually try to get them to buy first. What I've noticed when we sit down and talk through the funnel, the sales funnel for many of my farmers, where we try to troubleshoot, like why isn't this working? Or what's going wrong. A lot of times one of the big issues is that they just don't have the right first offer. The offer isn't quite dialed in. Like there's a difference between an offer and a product, right? The product is just the thing itself. But the offer is how you're spinning it, the pricing around it, how you're bundling it, how you're naming it, how you're talking about, how you're marketing it. And sometimes people are leading with the wrong first offer. The gateway offer just isn't the right first thing. They're trying to get people to buy maybe the most expensive thing first, which makes sense because we want to make a lot of money. But that isn't the obvious first step for people. If the obvious first step for people is I buy your breakfast sausage because I love it and I eat breakfast sausage several times a week, or I buy your ground Beef, because I eat so much ground beef. It's like a staple. Then it makes sense that that should be your. Your. Your lead offer and where you say to start here. And then you capture them as a customer, you get them on your list, they start to buy that consistently, and then over time, you begin to get them to buy and experiment with other things and grow as a client. So I just want to remind you that figuring out what you want to be the first stop for is a powerful exercise. And then you want to be you moving your marketing and your messaging. You want to train your team to push new people to the. The thing you're known for first and trust that they'll come back and they'll slowly grow and buy other things. Eventually you'll increase that lifetime customer value. Okay, I also have a. Another quote. Sorry, another formula. The customer quote formula. This is where you are trying to figure out what is it that your customers are already saying? Like, what are the quotes? If you could listen in and find the things that. The phrases that are coming out of their mouth, what are they already saying? So we always come here for the sweet corn. This is where we get our tomatoes. And then just ask, well, could that quote become your marketing? We always get our sweet corn from bench farms. They have the best sweet corn. Right. So your marketing could become your sweet corn destination. Like we are known as the sweet corn farm. We are your sweet corn destination. So this is the heart of the Aldi's lesson, right? They're not trying to be remembered for everything. They're just trying to own one category, one occasion, one need, one habit in their customer's mind that's optimizing for positioning. So what is coming up for you as you've listened to all this? This case study was coming up for you for your business. Hopefully a couple of ideas have jumped out at you. Or maybe you can go through that exercise and try to figure out some phrases or something that you want to really lean into this coming season and cycle your marketing around it. You know, when the watermelons come in, if you are the watermelon people, then let's really lean into that. Just be the watermelon farmer. The melon farmer. Talk incessantly about that for weeks. And you know, when they come and get your melons, guess what? You can cross sell. You can get them to buy other things, too, but own the category that you think you're known for. All right, let's finish this. The. The lesson from this episode isn't just that Aldi made a great slogan, although it did. The lesson is that they they understood exactly how customers were already using their store. That's a powerful sentence. They understood exactly how customers were already using their store and then they stopped fighting that reality. They didn't look at what they didn't have yet. Instead, they embraced what they did have, what percentage of the market they had, what people were wanting from them, what people were consistently shopping for from them. And they started marketing it and that became their Shop first formula. My challenge, my homework for you today is to find the role you already play in your customer's world. And once you know what that is, build your marketing around it. Just play in that sandbox. Experiment with that, test that this summer and see if it simplifies your marketing. See if it drives more people into your brand. See if it increases your revenue. Own your category. All right, my friends, that's all I have today. Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 366 if you like today's episode, please go leave me a rating or a review. Would you help other people find out about this show? It would be so amazing. There's so many great episodes, so many great resources to help farmers get better at sales and make more money and become more profitable. And I just want to find a way to reach more people with this. So help me talk about my podcast. Share it with your your farmer friends, maybe grab the link, copy it, share it with people who are leaders in your region who are collecting farmers together and training them so that more people can find out about this show. And if you want to get onto my email list, remember I have some free stuff to send your way to make your marketing better. It's like a crash course in marketing. Just go sign up for free mydigitalfarmer.com SP Subscribe. It's really good. Thank you for joining me today. It is a pleasure to hang out with you every week. It's one of my favorite things that I do. I look forward to recording this episode and I will catch you next week for another show. Make sure you're tuning in. Don't forget to spread the word and remember, I believe in you. Have a great week. Bye Bye. Sam.
Host: Corinna Bench (Shared Legacy Farms, MyDigitalFarmer.com)
Date: June 17, 2026
Corinna Bench explores the powerful marketing lessons behind Aldi's slogan, “Shop Aldi First,” and translates its core strategies into actionable takeaways for farm businesses. Drawing on personal anecdotes, customer psychology, real-life marketing experience, and thought-provoking listener exercises, Corinna explains how embracing and leveraging your farm's true place in the market—rather than trying to be everything for everyone—can lead to more confident, effective, and profitable marketing.
“You don’t need to be known for everything. You just need to be known for something.” (17:50)
“If you can get your customers to come to you first, you have a greater likelihood of cross selling and catching their attention with other items that they'll just add into their cart.” (21:39)
“Their message is, ‘Of course you're going to other stores. We want you to go to other stores…just come here first.’” (25:20)
“Customers are constantly telling us how they use us, when they use us, why they're using our products…if we were to follow them around…we would learn so, so much. And most businesses are ignoring these clues.” (29:40)
“Not because it’s creative, but because it’s true. And true is way more powerful than being clever.” (34:18)
(Starts ~37:02)
Corinna provides practical prompts for farms to clarify their market position:
Quote:
“Figuring out what you want to be the first stop for is a powerful exercise. Then you want to be moving your marketing and your messaging…to push new people to the thing you’re known for first and trust that they'll come back and they'll slowly grow and buy other things.” (44:52)
Corinna’s Aldi Anecdote:
“I remember her literally saying, ‘Oh, I always shop Aldi first and then I go to other places.’ And I remember, like, nodding my head being like, me too, me too. …And so suddenly, that sign totally made sense. It was brilliant.” (10:40)
On Customer Research:
“I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't do that work until maybe my eighth or ninth season of business. That's when I finally took the time to get on the phone and meet up with 20 of my best customers…Everyone, I learned so much from these phone calls.” (31:13)
Marketing Gold:
“If that's what lots of people are saying, then you need to repeat that back. Right? Those are marketing gold mines.” (35:15)
Homework Challenge:
“My challenge, my homework for you today is to find the role you already play in your customer's world. And once you know what that is, build your marketing around it.” (55:48)
Corinna wraps up with a call to action for farmers:
“The lesson is that [Aldi] understood exactly how customers were already using their store—and then they stopped fighting that reality. …Own your category.” (57:35)
For more detailed frameworks, listener exercises, and resources, visit mydigitalfarmer.com/366.