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Many farmers think the answer to better marketing is simply posting more content. And I have to admit, I used to fall into that camp, but now I disagree. Today we're talking about how to prioritize your farm marketing when time is tight. And I know that it is right now, and why some marketing activities are worth far more than others. Let's figure out what you should be focusing on. 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 368 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 My Digital Farmer, which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back everyone, all my regular listeners from the My Digital Farmer Nation. Super glad you're here and if you are new to the show, I hope you become a fan. I hope you enjoy it. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and check out my archives. There's so many great topics over the last five, six years, but I always tell people to start at episode one through ten. I designed them long ago to be an on ramp into the marketing lingo. So if you don't really know a lot about marketing, that's a really good place to start. And then you can kind of jump around and you'll better understand the things I'm talking about in later episodes. If you want to get onto my email list, that's another great way to learn the ropes of marketing. Because when you do, I'm going to send you an email every week that slowly drips out content in just the right framework. Every email builds on the next one and it's going to teach you the basic ropes of marketing so that you learn the lingo, you learn what you should be focusing on first. And I'll also be telling you about the podcast and what's on deck the following week so you can subscribe to get on that list by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends @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 positive. 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 from 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 localline all one word and then enter that coupon code MDF2026 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, I'm back. I'm excited about today. This is going to be a good episode. Life is good, my friends. Life is good. I just want to remind you of that. If you're going through a season right now where you feel overwhelmed and you are just go, go, go. I want you to just stop for a moment, take a deep breath, zoom out and see how everything is being provided for. There is enough. There is enough to go around. And I just pray for you guys every single day that you would be encouraged, that you would be full of hope, that you would be blessed and that you would see the promise, the abundance, the things that are still to come. I think about a lot of you farmers who are still in the early stages of building your business and what a slog it is in the first few years. And sometimes you wonder if it's going anywhere, if you're ever going to, to be in a better place, be making enough money, have more time, all the things. And today I want to just encourage you and remind you that it Will not always be this way. And that life is always in motion. Creation is always in motion. There's always new material, new resources that will suddenly surprise you and come onto your radar. I've seen this again and again. And things you can't even imagine will just appear and will break the logjam and help shift you into the next gear. And sometimes it just takes a while. And it's kind of like crossing this huge chasm from one cliffside to the other. And the only way across to get to that other side, that place you want to be, that version of you that you want to be is to just go over the bridge. And man, you know, sometimes you don't know how long the bridge is, and the bridge just is as long as it is. So you just gotta keep going. And one day you realize that you can see the other side of the cliff and you've made the shift and you are that next level. You are that you have become the person that is able to take the business to the next stage. And the only way to get there is just to go through the things. So I remember that phase. I remember that it's hard. I remember thinking will always be this way. And I just want to remind you that it won't always be that way. And that there will come a point if you are feeling overwhelmed. There will come a point when it just isn't as acute and it feels. And that's kind of like an oasis moment, and it begins to feel differently. So that was just a little bonus coaching moment. I felt compelled to share that with you today. I'm in a really good space right now in our business. I'm enjoying the fruits of our labor. We spent a lot of time in those early eight to 10 years building the system, making all the mistakes, wasting a lot of time, and being inefficient. And now we're more seasoned. And sure, we have stressful times, like we just started our csa. Those first few weeks are always a little hairy. They just are. But the longer you do this, the more you realize that you can. You've been here before, you did it before, you'll do it again. And in many cases, you optimize it. It's a little bit easier and a little bit better the next time. It just progresses. So hang in there. Hang in there. Today I wanted to talk about the topic of prioritizing your farm marketing time, because one of the questions that I hear a lot from farmers when they send me surveys, when they fill out surveys, and I ask them what do you want to know about? How can I support you? Or when I, when I ask my farmers in our one to one calls in farm marketing school, you know, I often hear questions like, Corinna, what, what should I be focusing on? Like, what marketing channels should I spend my time on? Or this is another really common way that it shows up. If I only have a few hours a week, what's the minimum marketing I need to do? Have you ever thought that question? Yeah, I know you're, you're nodding your head. I did too. And I'll be honest, every time I hear that question, I feel a little tension as a marketing coach, because part of me wants to answer it, but part of me wants to push back because we would never ask what's the minimum amount of irrigation I need to do? Or what's the minimum amount of weeding, or the minimum amount of feed I need to give my animals? Or the minimum amount of harvesting I need to do? Right. We just wouldn't ask those things. And for me, marketing isn't optional. Marketing. Marketing is production. It is one of the most important things that you should be spending your time on. Because if nobody knows that you exist or that you have an offer, it doesn't matter how beautiful your tomatoes are. Now, I understand where this question comes from. So hear me, okay? I understand. I know you're stretched thin. You're growing all the things. You're managing a staff, you're fixing equipment. You're trying to manage a tight, tight budget. You're delivering orders. Some of you are in the van or in the, the farm truck a lot. You're running payroll, all the things. And so when you ask this question, I think what you're really asking me is where should I invest my limited marketing time so that it creates the biggest impact? And, and that's a much better question. And that is actually what I want to try and answer today. And I'm going to do it in a slightly different way. It's not going to be like a checklist of here are the three things. I thought about doing it that way, but then I realized I can't. I can't because you guys are all very different. You have different operations, different marketing channels. You're in different places in the life of your business. Some of you have just started, some of you have been around for five years. Some of you have been around for 15 years. So I'm going to try to get at that question through a different lens. And before we talk about marketing channels and you know where you should be spending your time. I need to review something that I teach quite a bit in farm marketing school because this is the lens through which every marketing decision should be made. I think there's probably other lenses, but this is a really important one. Like, this is a default lens to go to if you're trying to figure out how to make marketing decisions and spending time in marketing. And that is the three metrics that matter the most. There are only three primary ways to grow your revenue, and that is to increase the number of total paying customers, increase the average order value, the amount they spend, typically in one transaction with you, or number three, to increase the order frequency, to increase the number of times that a customer will come back and buy from you in a given year. That's it. Okay, maybe you could argue raising the price. So we'll throw that one in too. There does come a point though, when the price has sort of reached an up its optimized point. Right? So every marketing activity should move one of those three numbers. I'm going to say that again. Every marketing activity that you spend time on should be moving one of those three numbers. Now here's the crazy part. If you increase each of those metrics by 30%, you will double your revenue. So let's pretend you have 300 customers who spend $40 every time they order and they buy four times in a season. That's $48,000 if you do the math. Now, if you increase each of those three metrics by 30%, now you have 390 customers spending an average order value of $52 and, and they buy 5.2 times in the season. Now you have made over $105,000 and you didn't double any one thing. You improved three levers modestly. So that multiplication effect is enormous. And that's why I get really excited about teaching farm metrics and knowing your metrics. Because once you understand the levers you can pull, then you get a lot more clear about where you should be spending your marketing dollars, your marketing time. So here's kind of the reframe most farmers are asking, well, what marketing channel should I spend my time on? Should I be on Facebook? Should I be on Instagram? Should I be doing TikTok or YouTube or email? And those are important questions to ask. But I don't think it's the most important supreme question. I think the better question is, what, how would I say this? What business problem am I trying to solve? So am I trying to get more customers to pull that lever? Am I Trying to get my customers to buy more often, Pull that lever. Or am I trying to get them to just spend more every time to grow the AOV average order value? Pull that lever. Because once you know which metric you want to move, the marketing activities that do those things will appear. They become much more obvious. And that's why I wanted to start out reminding you of this framework of the three levers that grow your revenue. Because this is going to help you determine how to spend your time if you only have a little bit of it. Okay, so there are four places that your marketing time can go. Well, this is Corinna's. Corinna's idea. There's probably someone else who would say five places and I'm, I'm choosing four. Okay. I think, I think of marketing work is falling into four categories. Category number one, the first place that your marketing time can go is communication. And I think this is what most people think marketing is. That's like their default setting. I know it is for me, it still is for me. And I have to constantly remind myself to think about number two and three that we're going to talk about in a minute. But yeah, I mostly think about emails and social media and sending text messages and updating my website. Yeah, just writing new content, creating new content and communicating it. This is the work that keeps you visible. Right. And it feels like work. It's something that you can point to and say, look, I did something that looks like marketing. And if you only have 30 minutes a week, honestly, I would put most of that work here in this bucket. Send one email to your list if that's all you can do. Send an email to your list. Checking in with them, telling them what's going on on the farm, letting them know what your offer of the week is. Okay, bare minimum, maybe post once or twice on social media or add a post in your Google business profile once a week to help with your SEO as a local business. The goal there is just to stay visible. Okay, so that's kind of step one or the first place that your marketing time can go. The second place your marketing time can go is strategic thinking. And I think this is where many farms under invest, especially in the early phase of our, of our business. Because we don't, we don't realize that this is important. This isn't content creation. This is thinking about the why behind your content, behind the communication questions like what promotion should I run next week or next month? And why? How do I create a reason for customers to buy this week? What challenge could we launch this month so that a person thinks about my farm every day for seven days? Right. Get creative. What new fun partnership could I create that would drive new eyeballs to get onto my farm list? Or what's something I could beta test for a short period of time just to be curious, to play in the sandbox, to create some energy? Or maybe it energizes me and it's fun. Right? Those are some of the questions that you might use as prompts during your course. Unquote marketing time that would get into this category of strategic thinking. One great marketing idea can outperform 50 social media posts. And so I'm thinking about some of the promotions and themes that I've run in my own business that brought a lot of energy that were fun to create. A few years ago, we did something called the Chopped Challenge for our CSA members. And this was where we did a spin off of the Chopped television show. And every week for four weeks in the last part of our csa, I had a contest on a certain theme. There was like a vegetable, maybe a spaghetti squash challenge. And people would compete to make something with spaghetti squash, take a picture of it, submit it to the community. And I chose the winner of each of those challenges. And whoever won a challenge then was entered into the Chopped Challenge. And this was a final huge event that the whole community was invited to at a restaurant where this panel of four contestants were duking it out in front of a panel of chef judges and food editors to make three different creations over the course of an hour and a half using the formula on the Chop Challenge TV show. And it was electric. It was so fun. The people got really competitive about it and it just created all kinds of, like, feelings of belonging to in our community. The event itself was a huge hit. It was. It was awesome. So that's an example of where I was thinking about what's something we could do that would really create buzz and energy and feel good vibes and help people feel like they belong and then also drive sales to our store. Right. We did an online store credit membership beta test this past winter. We're trialing a new way of trying to get people to purchase from us who aren't going to join our CSA or who are graduating from our CSA because they're aging out. And so I thought, all right, I'm willing to test this concept, but I'm only going to do it on a small scale and we'll just see how it works. And that was cool. It was neat to do a beta Test and that felt easier and lighter and no pressure. And I ended up selling 50, although I only needed to sell 20. So I can tell there's a lot of energy for it, right? All of these things and I could go on. We have chicken and pork share. We had a Snap it Forward initiative when the SNAP benefits failed. And we did this whole really cool thing to help food insecure people get access to our food, create so much vibe for our brand and helped people. That was awesome. And these were all strategy wins. The idea came first and there was a reason behind then making the content. And the communication came afterwards. Right. So do you understand the distinction? What I mean is that the thing that made those successful wasn't the marketing channel, it was the concept. So, for example, if you're just thinking through the first lens of communication first and content first, you're asking like, I need to post on Facebook today. I think, what should I post? Right? And that's the question we're asking versus a strategy first thinker. Who's asking, I need to increase my order frequency this September. What's a promotion that will make people buy every week instead of every other week? And then once you invent the promotion, the posts will practically write themselves. So that's why I say the idea comes first and then the communication comes afterwards. And I think a lot of farmers mistakenly spend 90% of their marketing time creating content in bucket one, and then only 10% thinking about offers and promotions and customer behaviors and bundles and challenges and subscriptions and referrals and all the other pieces of the customer value journey. And I'd argue that the ratio should be much closer to like 50, 50 or 60, 40, because one really good idea can fuel months of content and create all kinds of energy. A social media post isn't a. Isn't a marketing strategy. An email is not a marketing strategy. They're just communication channels. The strategy is the thing that you're communicating, the why behind it. 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 for 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 pretty 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 at mydigitalfarmer.com forward/fms. And now back to the show. Okay, so so far we've talked about two places where you can spend your marketing time. Number one is communication or creating content. Number two is spending time strategically thinking about how you're going to do your marketing, why you're doing your marketing. The third place that your marketing time can go is optimization. And I think this is actually where the revenue is hiding. Optimization is asking, how do we make the existing systems that we've built perform better? So this is where we're asking questions like, what have been our proven bestsellers? What products should be bundled? What products naturally cross sell? What could I upsell? Do we have abandoned cart emails turned on? What products should I be featuring first as my gateway product? What should my second offer be once they've purchased for the first time, and sometimes even what's my third offer? To turn them into a regular. Right. This is where the average order value lever lives. So a farmer could spend an hour creating content if they only had 60 minutes a week. Or they could spend an hour creating a bundle that increases every order for the next six months. And sometimes that second option has far more leverage. But optimizing a system, here's the problem. Optimizing a system or an offer or a process you have on the farm, it often doesn't happen unless you are paying attention and you're measuring stuff. Which brings me to number four. The fourth place that your marketing time can go is measurement. And you know, this is the category that a lot of farmers don't enjoy, frankly, aren't doing. Haven't set up a system of what metrics to even track, but it might be the most important one. And I want to encourage those of you who are listening at least once a month, but I would argue every week, I want you to sit down and look at those three key numbers that we talked about at the beginning. The total number of paying customers, your average order value, your order frequency. Be looking at those. Your eyes should be on them like a hawk. And then ask yourself which one is the weakest, which one is optimized to the max? Because sometimes some of those numbers get to the point where you just can't get someone. You can't get the order average order value to go up. Like it's just a really, really strong number, and that's where it's going to stay. So which one is optimized to the max? But which one is holding you back? Which one feels the easiest to lift? Where do you have energy to start first? Which one deserves your attention next? Because once you know the answer to some of those questions, your marketing priorities will become more obvious. You'll begin to feel energy for what you should be working on with that limited time. All right, let's try to make this really practical. I wanted to end the episode with, with giving you a couple of, like, some marching orders. If you only have 30 minutes per week, what should you be doing? If you only have 60 minutes per week, what could you be doing? So let me try to make this a little more tangible for you. If you truly only have 30 minutes to devote to marketing, I want you to first of all commit to using those 30 minutes. Well, turn off your phone, turn off other distractions. Show up and bring your marketing game and give it your best. Okay? And here's what I would do. 15 minutes. I would send one email, tell people what's happening on the farm, maybe enclose a picture, tell them what. What's available. If you have an offer, make an offer. Tell them where you'll be if you're going to be at the market next. That's it. As, as a, as a base. And I would recommend that you make this as easy as possible the first few times. You know, I want you to practice doing it in your own voice, but don't be afraid to use ChatGPT to help you eventually create these quickly. And I have an amazing project inside of our marketing school that's called train your ChatGPT assistant. And it will walk you step by step through how to create a folder in ChatGPT where you basically dump all your knowledge about your business, who your avatar is, what you grow, what you sell, like all the background history, samples of your writing style, samples of your social media so that it can learn your voice, what your signature offers are like. It just, it walks you through the stuff you need to do to train ChatGPT and then how to use that assistant to then create this content for you in a very quick way. Okay, so basic 15 minutes. And I know that sounds impossible. You're like, what? I can't write an email in 15 minutes. You're right. Probably the first time it'll take you 30. But eventually you're going to get to the point, especially if you have AI helping you do some of the basic stuff in that email and then you like personalize it, you'll be able to get that done in 15 minutes. Okay, 10 minutes. I would write one, at least one, I maybe say one to two social media, social media posts from that email and schedule them. I would also argue that one of those two social media posts should be some kind of content that drives people to join your email list. Okay, and then with that last five minutes, this one was hard for me. I almost didn't include this. But I want you to use that last five minutes to step into the waters of metrics. I want you to review a metric to actually look at some data. And some of you are going to resist me on this because you're like, ah, this feels hard. I don't even know how to find it. Go be awkward the first time and struggle to locate it. But just check that off the list so that you can tell me. I, I found a metric. It took me 10 minutes, but I figured it out. It's one of the reasons I love local line because you can just go to the reports section and select the dates, check mark a few boxes and boom. It's telling you, here's the number of customers, here's the aob. It's all there. But ask yourself, how many customers who were active this past quarter, this past week, this past month? What was my aov? What was my order frequency? Look at those metrics. Because that little five minutes is going to train you in the habit of making marketing decisions from data. Okay, so that's it. Send an email 1 to 2 social posts, review a metric. Done. Now, if you have 60 minutes a week, let's say you have a full hour. I do not want you to spend that entire hour creating more content. In fact, this is where I think a lot of farmers get it wrong. They assume that if 30 minutes of marketing is good, then 60 minutes should mean twice as many Facebook posts. Nope. The next 30 minutes should be spent improving your system, working on the marketing system. So spend the first 30 minutes communicating, send the email, make the social post, tell people what's happening. But then take that second 30 minutes and become a strategist. Practice strategy. Be a business owner, be a marketer. So pull up your numbers and ask yourself, which of my three metrics need attention right now? Do I need more customers? Is that the lever that I feel like I could pull, that I have energy to pull, that I see potential and opportunity to pull? Do I need customers to spend more each time? Does that feel like the easier lift? And how could I do that? Do I need customers to just come back and buy more often? And how could I induce that behavior? And that's going to help determine what you work on next. So let's just say your average order value is lower than you want it to be and you discover that during this extra 30 minutes. So maybe your marketing time should go towards building a bundle or identifying what were my best sellers last week or last year at this time. Or creating a cross sell at the time that a person purchases. You bring something else along side and say if you liked this, you'd also like this. Or maybe you set up an upsell at the checkout process. Or you train your team. When someone buys this product, try to get them to get that version of the product that's slightly more expensive because it's bundled up. Or you could create a minimum order amount. I know we did that in local line where I just said oh, minimum order is now $20. And that increased our AOV big time or ad free shipping if they hit a certain higher AOV target. These are all just examples of some of the stuff you could be brainstorming if your AOV is low and you want to get it higher. And that's kind of the strategy work that you're doing in this extra 30 minutes. Okay, one little small change could increase every future order and that's taking this 30 minutes of time and leveraging it. Maybe your order frequency is the problem though. Customers are buying once and then you don't hear from them for a really long time. And in that case, you want to be asking why? Why is that happening? Do I not have enough items in my product suite? Maybe I have to create more products. Maybe I have to make the products that I'm currently selling in large bundles in large amounts. Maybe I need to make them a little smaller so they run out sooner, so they'll have to come back and buy again. I don't know. That could be a solution. So your marketing time might be spent brainstorming a challenge or a seasonal promotion or a new subscription offer a new product you want to launch or a new bundle or some kind of campaign that will give people a reason to come back again next week. Okay, again, that's leverage. Or maybe you need more customers and that's the one that you feel like you could pull that lever and really make a difference. You could spend your extra marketing time on identifying a partner who serves the same audience, a collaborator. We talked about this a few weeks ago. Coming up with that Dream25 list and using some of that time to reach out, write an email, call someone, and say, I'd like to get to know you. Maybe we can work together. Maybe you use that time to improve or create a new lead magnet and test it. Or maybe you've noticed that there's a certain social media post that has, you know, that you post organically and it's done really well, and you're thinking, what if I turn that into a paid ad because it's kind of proven itself on the organic landscape. So you use that time to make a paid ad and just test it, or you have a referral campaign that you build up, or you make some kind of a printable card on Canva that you. That you can get printed, and it gets tucked into everyone's first order at your flower farm stand and they share it with a friend and that you're testing that, right? Yeah, just. We're thinking through strategy to try and move one of the levers with that extra time, and we're building something. Do you see the difference here? So most farmers think marketing means I've got to create more content, more emails, more posts. But some of the highest value marketing work never gets posted online. It's thinking, it's analyzing, it's looking at data, it's beta testing, it's. It's improving, optimizing, and frankly, building a machine. So if I gave two farmers an extra hour this week, one farmer might spend that hour making four more social media posts. The other homer might spend that hour figuring out how to increase their Average order value by $5. And I gotta tell you, my money is on the second farmer because those extra social media content pieces, that disappears after a few days. But a good upsell or offer or promotion can keep working for months. But a well thought out gateway offer, or a abandoned cart email sequence that you've taken the time to build, or a great lead generator system that grows your email list on autopilot, like those are things that build the assets of your business for the long term. Now I want to make sure that you don't misunderstand what I'm saying because you might be listening to this and thinking, great. Corinne is telling me I need to spend more time on hard marketing things. And actually, no, what I'm describing is a season of investment. A season where you're taking some extra marketing time to build the machine. There's a huge difference between creating a system and operating a system. The first time you build an abandoned cart sequence, it might take a few hours and feel heavy and not easy because you've never done it before and you have to learn the formula and the framework. Or the first time you make a lead magnet, a new subscribe form for your website or a pop up, it might take you a few hours. You might have to work on that over the weekend because you're not comfortable with the tech and you're not sure what to say and you, you gotta learn kind of the formula for it. Or the first time you design a customer referral strategy, it's gonna take some serious thought. You might not get it right the first time and then you gotta tweak it. But once it's built, then it works for you again and again. It becomes an evergreen asset in your marketing. Think about like irrigation on your farm. Installing irrigation is a project, but turning it on is a process. Those are two very different things. Marketing works the same way. Building the system, putting all those pipes together takes effort the first time, but then running the system is easier. You just flip the switch and let it do its thing. In fact, one of my goals as a marketer is to make my marketing time feel boring, for lack of a better word. Like not super challenging, just where I have to just do it. And I know that sounds strange. By boring, I mean predictable. Predictable means that it's been systematized and systemized. Systematized means that I don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time I run that promotion or every week that I send an email. I know what email I'm sending, I know the format. I Know how I sent it last year? What I said I can go find it and copy it. Or I know what promotion I'm running and how I'm running it, because I did it last year and it worked great. Or I know how new leads enter my funnel typically. So I have figured out a way to get more people through that door because it works really well. Or I know what happens when someone abandons a cart, and. And so I have a way to get them back in. I know what happens after someone places their first order, typically. Right. The machine is built. Does everyone follow the machine perfectly? No, but a lot of people do. And so now I'm just operating it and tweaking it and optimizing it. So, no, I don't think the goal is to spend more and more hours on marketing forever so that you can say, oh, I'm a great marketer because, look, I spend so many hours on it. No, I think the goal is to spend a season building assets and systems so that eventually you can get excellent results, consistent results from a relatively small amount of weekly effort. That's what we're all after here. Not more work, just more leverage. And it takes a little bit of time to learn that. You gotta play in the sandbox. You're gonna make a few mistakes. You are gonna waste some time in the process of learning it. But it is possible to get to that point. The farms that grow are not the ones that are making a lot of communication and content over and over and over again. I fell into that trap many years ago, I have to say. I think that flurry of activity helped because it created this illusion of a lot of energy, but it was a recipe for burnout. Like, I couldn't keep up with that pace. And now I'm a huge fan of figuring out what are the things that I should be doing that are actually pulling the levers, moving the needle. I don't have to be doing a lot of activity for the sake of looking like I'm busy and looking like I'm successful. What if I can get to the same result with less work? So I'm not doing a lot of content creation and video posting. I'm trying to be a better decision maker. I'm trying to look at what have I already created that I can reuse and rinse and repeat it. I'm looking at my numbers and asking strategic questions and trying to say, this is the metric I want to move. This is the metric I think I could move. And I'm investing my time accordingly. So the next time that you are tempted to ask, hey Corinna, what marketing channel should I spend time on? I want you to try asking a different question. What metric am I trying to improve? Because once you answer that question, your marketing activities that you quote unquote should be working on become a whole lot easier to spot. All right, well, that's all I got today. I hope that was a little bit helpful. Gave you a grid to look at as you're trying to figure out where should I be spending my time? Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 368 if you liked this episode, please go leave me a rating or a review on Apple podcasts or tell another farmer about this show. You can send the link through a text or on social media. I'm trying to get as many people as possible to know about this resource that's online to help people learn the ropes of marketing. There's so much good material here, so help me spread the word. I really appreciate you being an ambassador. If you want to get onto my email list and go a little deeper with me and learn the ropes of marketing, I have a lot of good free stuff to send your way. Just sign up@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and check me out on Instagram ydigitalfarmer I show up inside of Instagram Stories with some coaching tips throughout the week. Thank you for joining me today everyone. I know it's busy, I know it's crazy, but marketing is important and it's possible to build the system. Taking the time to invest to build the system so that all you have to do is push the flywheel a little bit from time to time. Does it take time to build that system? It does, but eventually you can get to a place where you're just doing the thing because you know it works and I want to help you get there. So for right now, if you're in the middle of craziness and you don't have a system built, that's okay. Just take that suggestion that I gave you. Do do the absolute like 30 minute plan, send that email, do that basic post and then commit to in the off season, I'm going to do the work of starting to build the system so that next year I can just rinse and repeat and have a completely different experience with what marketing looks like and see results that make a difference. Well, thank you for joining me today everyone. Have an amazing week and remember, I believe in you. Bye bye. Sam.