Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Have you ever watched a relay race? Every runner has one specific job, run their leg of the race and pass the baton to the next runner. No coach would ever ask one athlete to run all four legs. Yet that's exactly what many of us are doing with our marketing. And in today's episode, I want to introduce you to the seven essential offers I think every farm business needs and why each one has a different job to do. 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 competent at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Hello, welcome to episode 373 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com which is all about trying to help other farmers get more confident in their marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable business. Welcome to the show and for all of my regular listeners, thanks for coming back and tuning in yet again. If you're new to the podcast, make sure you subscribe to the show and go check out my first 10 episodes. I always tell people to start there if you're new to the marketing lingo. Otherwise you can just scroll through the archives. There's a ton of really good stuff. I've got like 370ish podcast episodes. That's just crazy. It keeps climbing, but the first 10 were designed to be an onboarding into the marketing space. Another way you can learn kind of the ropes is to get onto my email list. Because when you do, I'm going to send you all kinds of great resources. Little by little, over the course of several months, you'll get an email from from me that shares a fundamental principle, does a little teaching, maybe points to a really good podcast in my archives or gives you a free training or a free resource. It's really good. So you can subscribe by going to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe and that's free. Hope that's helpful for you. Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Local Line. 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 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 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 and it's efficient and it's built for growth. And now back to the show. All right, well, welcome back, farmer friends. Today we're Talking about the 7 essential offers that I think a farm business should have in their portfolio. And I say this with a little bit of caution because I know not all of us are exactly the same. We're not all set up the same way. But this concept of having different styles of offers was new to me many years ago. I didn't even know what an offer was actually, and I certainly didn't know that there could or should be different ones at play. In my business. I've used the metaphor often on the show of a relay race. If any of you have kids that run track, or if you ever ran track, you've seen the classic relay race where the runners are running around doing their part of the race carrying their baton, and when they're done with their leg, they have the. The great pass off where they hand the baton to the next runner and the runner who's next does the next lap, and no one runner is expected to do all parts of the race. They'd probably pass out. They wouldn't be able to do it. And so you often choose your different runners. If you're a Coach based on which leg of the race they're probably going to do best. And business is a lot like that as well. That we have different runners, different parts of the race, and we have different offers that are like these relay racers. They are in charge of passing the baton onto the next runner. And I kind of want to use that image today to show you what is possible for your business. Maybe some of you only have one or two runners in your relay. You only got two batons being passed. And I want to just show you what's possible in terms of offers for other things you could be having that might help serve your customers better and serve your bottom line and lead to more profit. So I want you to do something for me. I want you to think about one of your favorite brands. It doesn't have to be a huge one. I, I immediately thought of Flight Test. I've talked about them before, but this is a brand that is the epitome of this episode because they, they have every single one of these offers. But I want you to think about all of the different ways that you have done business with that company since you first found out about them. Okay, so with Flight Test, this is a. A company that we found out about when we were homeschooling our kids during the pandemic. And my son Jed stumbled upon it. They're these guys that just love to fly RC airplanes. And they had a YouTube channel where they were flying anything they could think of. They were trying to figure out if they could get it to fly. So they had like a flying toilet. That was a really popular YouTube video. And my kids loved watching this. Well, they had a business. They started selling foam board airplane kits that were pretty cheap. And that was their kind of starting offer. And you could download the plans for these kits for free if you wanted to take the time to actually trace them out, which my son did the first time he traced out, cut out the patterns and then traced them again onto some foam board from the dollar store, cut those out. It took forever, but he did do that. And then after he did that, he realized, I don't want to do that again. I'm just going to buy the kit where it's already cut out for you. So we soon fell into that sales funnel where that was the next offer. And we bought that playing kit. And then we of course had to buy a controller or a receiver in order to be able to fly it and had to learn how to use that. And then we had to watch the video for how to even use These two things to make them work. We eventually bought more kits. We kept going back and making more and more things. We had to buy the servos and the engines and the different pieces to turn it into an RC plane. And eventually they had a big event called Flight Fest once a year which thousands of people would go to to fly their RC airplanes. We went, we experienced that. It was like going to Disneyland for RC airplane people. We eventually broke into their drone line. I mean, we just, we just kept going. They just had offer after offer after offer. Okay, so I want you to think about your brand, your favorite brand, and how did they slowly pull you in? What were some of the things that they did? Okay, now for the really great brands that understand this concept of having multiple kinds of offers, that doesn't happen by accident. They don't just create a bunch of random products and hope that they sell. They they intentionally build a portfolio of offers, or I sometimes call this your ladder of products. And every one of the offers has a job. It has a job in the customer value journey. It's designed to move your customer one step deeper into the relationship, into the brand. So when I coach farmers, I sometimes will ask this question, so tell me about your offer. What's your offer? And a very common response. And you know, this is how I kind of first respond too, because I'm not thinking we're going to go super deep on this, but a common response is, oh, our CSA or our online store or I sell a meat share or we have a farmer's market. And in each of those cases, it's tempting to just think of them as a singular offer. Like one. It's one thing that I sell, one thing that I kind of known for. And I want to just point out that when we think about it that way, when we're really simplistic and we're not aware of the potential here, we're essentially asking one offer to do everything in our business, to be that one runner in the whole race. So we're expecting our flower CSA to generate leads, create first time buyers, build weekly shopping habits, turn into superfans, increase our average lifetime value, increase our average order value, generate referrals, all of it, okay? And great businesses, those big brands that we all see on online or the big box stores, but also our favorite small business great businesses, right? Like Flight Test, they don't rely on just one offer on one runner in the race. They have a portfolio. When you really analyze and look at how they've structured their business, it's really cool. To see it. And so I think it's easier to spot in other businesses. Like, that's why I asked you to think about your favorite brand. You can see the team of runners, especially as I talk about it again today, each running their part in the relay. And every offer in that portfolio has a specific job, which I'm going to hopefully show you. And I just want to challenge you today as we go through this. I really believe that every farm business should have an offer portfolio. Maybe you're not going to have all seven, but I want to show you there's probably actually more, now that I think about it, but there's kind of the basic seven that you see in the marketing space. And I hope that I'll show you what is possible that'll open your eyes to see, oh, I didn't even realize I could make an offer like that. And that this might actually grease the wheels for you and remove some friction and cause your customers to start turning more into those superfan buyers because you have a better path for them. You have more batons that you can pass in that raise. So today's goal is for you to hopefully be thoughtful about designing a collection of offers that are going to work together in your business to pull the key growth levers that raise your revenue. I talk about this a lot. It's about increasing the number of customers. It's about increasing the average order value when they buy. It's about increasing the order frequency, the number of times they come back and buy. Those are your three primary ways that you grow your revenue and your business. And so our offers are all trying to do that. And we're not asking every single one of these offers to do all three of those jobs. Usually they're only doing one, but they all need to be firing. Okay, so some offers are designed to attract new people and new customers. Some are existing to make that first sale a no brainer. Some offers are designed to build buying habits. Some are designed to increase the size of every order. And so by the end of today's episode, I think you're going to start looking at your farm's product suite through a different set of glasses. At least that's what I'm hoping. So instead of just asking, well, how do I get more customers or how do I sell more CSA shares or whatever it is that you sell, you'll begin asking, huh, which offer am I missing in the portfolio? Okay, so let's stop asking one offer to run every leg in the race. Instead, we're going to try to Build a portfolio where every offer has a purpose. Okay, how do I want to do this? So before we start talking about those seven essential offers, I want to make sure that we're all picturing the same thing. When I use the phrase offer portfolio, I simply mean the complete collection of ways that your farm invites people to do business with you, okay? It's everything. It's your online store, it's your farm market stand, it's your flower subscription, it's your csa, it's your shit, your eggs, it's your you pick, it's your workshops, your farm dinners. If you do those, your holiday boxes, your gift cards, even your free download that gets someone onto your email list. That's an offer, okay? And together, they are going to make up your offer portfolio. And a healthy offer portfolio isn't just like a random pile of products that you've assembled over the years. It is intentionally designed. It's got purpose. Every offer solves a problem. And every offer is moving the customer one step further along. Which brings me to my second metaphor, which I've talked about before, and that's the product ladder. So I want you to imagine a ladder. Not a very long one, just seven rungs, okay? And at the bottom of the ladder is someone who has never heard of your farm before. And at the top is your biggest fan, the customer who buys everything and who tells all their friends about you. Who would drive an hour just to buy from you. And that customer at the top of the ladder did not become your biggest fan overnight. That's really rare. If they did, and that's happening all the time, then you are amazing. And you need to, like, you need to tell everyone your secrets. Nobody wakes up and says, I've never heard of this farm before. Here's $900. Relationships don't usually work that way. People climb, okay? They climb one yes at a time, one rung at a time. So maybe the first yes is downloading your A to Z vegetable storage guide, okay? And then a few weeks later, they decide to order from your online store. And now they're buying eggs every week. And eventually, they decide to join your csa, and they add a fruit share, too. And they're still buying from the online store maybe six, seven times in the season. And they sign up for that farm dinner, right? So each one of those little yeses builds trust, and it makes the next rung easier to climb. So you're. You're never asking a customer to leap and jump over multiple rungs at once. You're always inviting them to climb one at a time. Now here's where I think a lot of us make things harder for ourselves. And we just don't know. We just don't know about this whole concept of different offers. I think a lot of farms, their ladder has missing rungs. So imagine trying to climb a ladder where someone has removed every other step. Could you still do it? Maybe my kids could, but it would be awkward, right? Some people would turn around and walk away and never come back to your business. Others simply couldn't make the jump. And that's what happens in businesses that just haven't built out their ladder yet, that haven't built out that offer portfolio. Sometimes we're asking brand new people to buy into a CSA before they've ever even tried a carrot or a head of lettuce. They don't even know if our produce tastes good. And that's a really big leap. Sometimes we have a great csa. This was us early on in our years, but then we had nothing that encouraged members to buy from us again for the rest of the year. It was just the CSA and that was it. So they could only ever spend. I think at the time it was $360. $360 for an 18 week season. That's crazy because our, our price is like almost double that now. But Anyway, that was 18 years ago. Right? But we made that mistake of only having one product and we had nothing else to offer them. Missing. Wrong. Sometimes people buy from us once, but we never give them a reason, an easy reason to come back. We don't have like a second offer. We don't have a cool special that drives their interest and says, oh, I want to come back and get that. That's a missing rung. Sometimes we have super loyal customers who've been with us a long time, but there's nothing special for our biggest fans ever. We treat them exactly the same as everyone else. Missing rung. So the point isn't that every customer climbs every rung, because they won't. Some people will jump ahead, some will skip a step, some will only ever buy your sweet corn once a year. And that's okay. The latter isn't about forcing a journey. It's just about making sure there's always a next easy. Yes. What's the next logical step for this customer? That's the question we're always asking. And that's what I hope we're going to show you here in this episode. Like, there's a series of offers that businesses typically have that move people along. I Just want to make sure you know about them. Categories of offer types. Okay. All right, so let's start at the bottom of the ladder and let's talk about the first rung, the first type of offer. And it's the lead magnet. This is the very first offer and it isn't something that people can buy. In fact, a lot of people forget that the lead magnet is an offer. But it is, isn't it? Because you, there's a transaction happening, you are giving them something of value in return for their email address, their contact information. It's something they receive from you. It's the first thing they get, actually. And if it's a positive experience and it's valuable and it answers a question, piques their curiosity, it earns permission to continue the conversation. And what is the business lever that it pulls? Well, it gives you leads and everybody starts out as a lead before they turn into a customer. So here is I, I think what a lot of farmers often think is, well, if my vegetables are good enough, people are just going to, they're just going to buy maybe, but they don't know you yet. And a lead magnet gives someone a low risk way to raise their hand and say, I'd like to know a little bit more about you. So at Share Legacy Farms, we've tried lots of different lead magnets and they kind of switch depending on the season and depending on what offer I'm trying to move them to. Because each lead magnet has alignment with the offer that's on the other side. Right. So I'm thinking about the different batons in that relay race. And so I want there to be alignment between the eventual runner that's going to take this baton from this lead magnet. So I have lead magnets that are really designed to attract CSA members, like my CSA tips and tricks guide. But I also have some like the A to Z vegetable storage guide, which is a little more generic and that could attract someone who's just going to buy from my online store. It could also attract someone eventually who buys my CSA vegetable box, but that's a little more broad. I have my produce availability list. That's my biggest one. People who want to just know what's going to be available in the online store that is not really for a CSA customer. We have an instant pot class with recipes to learn how to use the instant pot. And then I have videos on YouTube that I point them to when they subscribe so they get over their fear of the instant pot. That's actually a really popular one for Us too. So these aren't just nice offers, PDF guides, videos, they're actually offers. Their job isn't to make money. Their job in the relay race is to build trust and to grow our email list and for people to say, wow, this was really good. I wonder what else they could teach me. Okay, so I want you to ask yourself, has someone discovered your farm today? What free resource would make them gladly give you their email address? So really spend some time thinking about a lead magnet offer. There's an entire project inside of our marketing school all about helping you identify your lead magnet, helping you write it, get it done, connect it to the Internet and working, and then where to publicize it so that you can start growing your list. Okay, all right. That's the first offer. The second offer that you should have in your portfolio is the gateway offer. I've talked a lot about this in the last few months, so I'm not going to go into super detail. Go look for some podcast episodes in the archives about gateways. Now that someone gets on your email list, what is the easiest way for them to turn into a paying customer? That's your gateway offer. Its job is not, and I repeat, it is not to make a ton of money. This is really hard for farmers to like, not under, to, to misunderstand. Like, it's, it's not about trying to get people to drop a ton of change. The gateway offers, sometimes you're barely breaking even. You just want them to spend money because something happens in the brain when they actually put down the cold hard cash or swipe their car for the first time. Okay, so you want to create the first purchase. This is the first conversion. A first purchase can feel a little bit scary, especially if it's at a higher price point. So we want to remove the risk. People are asking, is this farm reliable? Will the food even be good? Is it good quality? Is it going to go bad really fast? They don't know. And so giving them something that's a lower dollar amount is a, is a great strategy because then they can have a great experience and now they're willing to come back and their second time they buy. If you have a second offer, which I hope you will, that's coming up soon, they'll buy more. Okay, so your, your gateway offer is, is trying to be something that offers very little risk. You're removing the risk. So at Share Legacy Farms, we recently have pivoted and, and now I have an online store I used to consider my four week CSA sampler, my gateway offer. But now I'm realizing that's still kind of a hard ask. Now it's just come to our online store, buy your custom order. You have to spend at least, at least $15, buy what you want. And then they get into this rhythm of buying from us. A few times in the season, they have to come to the pickup location where the CSA is happening and get in the same line to pick up their store order. So they're seeing the CSA shares getting passed out. They become aware that that is a thing. I talk about it in my weekly emails from time to time. So they become aware slowly. And then some of those people will eventually graduate. I'll invite them into that offer and some of them will be ready. Okay, but the gateway offer is just come spend 15, 18 bucks on my lettuce, on my carrots, right on my garlic. The things that I know are popular and I usually have a weekly special or a weekly offer in that weekly email for that kind of a customer to try to draw them in. Okay, so the question here that I want you to ask is what is the easiest, lowest risk way someone can experience my farm? What is the popular product that everybody wants? What's the best seller? What's a no brainer? And that's the thing you're pointing to as step number two. That is the second baton after someone gets on your list. You are pointing to the gateway offer all the time. Okay. That should be in the rotation wherever you are doing your marketing. All right, offer number three. At first I called it something really exciting. I called it the second offer. That sounds really boring, but that's essentially what it is, your second offer. Okay, so they've, they came through the gateway and now it's important for you to have another offer right behind that to encourage a second purchase to create a habit. So that's another way of talking about this is the habit builder offer. Okay? Long time businesses that last forever are not built on just a first purchase. They're built on repeated ones. We need to pull the frequency leverage. And so the habit builder is usually a product that people naturally buy again and again and again, which is easy in our space because people need to eat. So it could be eggs, it could be milk, it could be salad mix, the things that people just have to have. That could be the chicken breast, the ground beef. Okay. Even something like a store credit membership to me is encouraging a habit building process. Weekly specials, daily specials. If you're a business that has that kind of traffic, you could have a daily special. The goal is just to become part of someone's weekly grocery routine. So when someone starts saying, every Saturday I order from Shared Legacy Farms online store, like you've won and you're not competing for attention every week you become a habit. So coming up and crafting, what is my second offer going to be? After someone has said yes, what is a good second offer that I'm pretty confident they're going to take? Either it's a new product or it's that habit product. The thing that you know they're going to need every week, really thinking through what that is. Okay, offer number four that you'll often see in great businesses is the signature offer. The signature offer, this is your flagship and for many farms that's like the csa. For someone else it might be a meat share, a flour subscription. This is the offer that you are known for. All roads lead to this offer. You're trying to get as many people as possible into this offer. It's usually a higher price point as well. And the business levers that it pulls are retention and lifetime customer value. Now the mistake that I think many of us make is trying to get strangers to start here. That's like proposing marriage on the first date. It's too big of a leap. Can it work? Yes, sometimes. But most people need a smaller yes. At our farm at Share Legacy Farms, the CSA is still the centerpiece of the business. It is the primary revenue driver. When we look at our revenue and our income, it's the CSA flagship that's pulling the load and all of the add on shares by far. Okay. But now because we have this online store, customers have several ways to get there. So we have many roads. But we're trying to get all of them to lead eventually to the csa. Do all of them take that road? No, some of them will just stay in the online store space forever and that's okay. But we have a yellow brick road taking them to the Emerald City. Okay. We, we have a clear path where we want them to go and we communicate that. All right, Offer number five is what I call the cart builder offer. And these are the little offers that make your average order value go up so they increase the cart size. It can be things like upsells. So instead of, you know, if someone's like, oh, I want this ground beef, you could be like, well, how about our premium ground beef, the one that's a little more expensive? Or how about getting our ground beef bundle? You see how that's like upselling is trying to get them to spend a Little bit more on the same product. Cross sells fall into this category as well, the cart builder, where they've decided to buy something. And now you point out another product that is complementary to this one that would be the natural companion. And they're like, oh, I never thought about that. You're right. I should get both of these or I should get all three. I was at a olive oil place this weekend with my friend Kendra in Vermilion, Ohio, and you could do olive oil tastings from these little vats. And they also had balsamic vinegar in there of all different kinds of flavors. And I actually went in there just to get a few things for prizes for our csa, but I walked out of there with a lot of stuff. And what I noticed is that they. They did a great job of telling you on the signs as you're tasting the different flavors of olive oil. They would say, this pairs great with the peach white balsamic vinegar over, you know, just on the other side there. And so you're like, oh, I never thought about getting them together. And so I ended up walking out with several suggested companions when I really only went in there to buy olive oil. Well, actually ended up buying more vinegar. I did olive oil because they did a great job of showing me how they should be put together. Okay, so what is the natural companion for coffee, for honey, for flowers, for fruit? When. When somebody's coming and buying. If you. If they're getting basil, is there a natural companion vegetable that you can. Or fruit that you can suggest to them? So we're helping our customers complete a meal and see the possibilities. Okay, so every time someone checks one more item into their cart, your average order value climbs. So we're naturally asking ourselves here, what belongs with what I'm already selling? What belongs with what I'm already selling? And then make sure you're pointing that out to your customers. I want you to train your teams on this. So if you send a crew of people out as your salespeople at the farmer's market, this might be something that you do every week where you suggest. Here are a few upsells. If somebody wants to buy this, then you suggest this. Or if somebody likes this product, you offer a cross sell. How about you add this to that? Because it's going to go great. Okay. So that's sometimes something you have to actually train your team to do. It will not occur to them to do that. Once you teach it, they'll get the hang of it and they'll start to see natural opportunities to Cross sell and upsell. But this is an important offer to get good at because this is what grows your cart value. And this is one of the primary ways that you increase your, your revenue. Okay, let's move on to offer number six. And this is the one that almost nobody has. I actually don't have one of these either, but I was challenged by a mentor of mine. This is called the premium offer. That's what I'm calling it. And this one is an offer that is for your super, super fans. And it often has a very, very, very high price. It could be a elite chef experience for four that is in, you know, the 500 to $600 price range. It could be a vacation trip to some really fancy foodie places that's in the thousand dollars zone, a private tour at a super high ticket price, a VIP membership. It's meant to be something that is a little bit outrageous and out of many people's price zone, and it attracts your high, high ticket customers. Usually only a handful of people purchase it, but because the price tag is so high, it's a really great ROI for you. I think one of the benefits of having something like this, even if hardly anyone buys it, is that it just changes how people perceive your brand. It creates, I don't know, it's almost like it creates aspiration. There's always something else that people could move towards. So don't assume that everyone wants the cheapest option. There are a handful of people that are looking for your absolute best, something really elite. And if you have the energy to create something that's very high ticket, you can just throw it out there and see if, see if someone takes it. I mean, I've thought about doing this, like planning a really cool, expensive trip that takes us to fun foodie places and just charging enough so that like my way is paid and Kurt's way is paid. And it's just a fun trip for us and just putting it out there and seeing if anyone buys. And who knows, it might work. But that's an example of a super high ticket premium offer. You often see this in the big brands. And so that's something to say. I just wanted to mention it here because it creates kind of an aspirational goal for some of your clients. Like I said, most people won't take it, but there will be a very small subsection that will be tempted for whom money is no object, and they will be inclined to take it. Okay, offer number seven. This is the referral offer. This is something that a lot of Folks don't know about either. Um, look, your happiest customers are already talking about you, but a lot of us aren't giving them an invitation to share. We're not giving them an offer that's irresistible, that makes it easy for them to spout on and on about us. And that's what a referral offer can do. The business lever here is just more referrals. And maybe it's a bring a friend week, or it's a share your box with a friend challenge, or it's give 20 bucks, get 20 bucks, it's a guest pass. Could be some kind of a farm event or party where your members can invite a friend or their neighbors. Could be a referral bonus if someone joins the CSA and mentions your name. I don't know. Those are just some common ones. But instead of just hoping that customers will talk about you, design an offer that makes referring more easy or that even just suggests that they should be doing this. Because I think people would be happy to do it. It's just that sometimes they don't realize they can. And so when we give them an offer and we point to it, occasionally, the power of suggestion will cause more people to actually do it. So I want you to ask yourself, how am I making it fun and rewarding for people to talk about my farm to someone else? 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 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, so now I want you to step back for just a minute. We've walked through the seven typical types of offers that you'll see in a portfolio for many businesses. And at first they might seem like seven separate ideas, but they're not. They're all connected. Every offer is pulling a different business lever. When sales are down. I think our instinct is usually to ask, how do I sell more stuff? But that's not always the best question to ask. A better question is, which leverage do I need to pull? Because not every business problem is necessarily a sales problem. I hope you see that. Sometimes it's a lead problem, sometimes it's a conversion problem. You just can't get people to buy for the first time. Sometimes people buy once and they never come back. That's the problem. Sometimes they're buying regularly, but you cannot get their order size to get a little bit higher. It stays really small. Right? These are all different problems and different problems require different offers. So your lead magnet is pulling the lead generation lever. Its job is to bring more people into your world. Your gateway offer is pulling the conversion lever. It turns curious people into actual paying customers. Your habit builder, those upsells, those cross sells are pulling the frequency lever. It's giving people a reason to buy from you again next week instead of six months from now. Your signature offer is pulling that retention lever. It's deepening, the commitment, is creating a long term relationship. Your cart builder is pulling the average order value lever, helping them spend a little bit more every time. And then that premium offer, if you decide to make something there, that's pulling the lifetime customer value lever, that's giving you a big chunk of income all at once for a very elite product. And then your referral offer is pulling the referral lever. It's turning those customers who love you into huge, enthusiastic ambassadors for you. And so what I want you to notice is that not one of those offers is trying to do everything. You see that every single one has a lane, has a purpose, has a job. And that's exactly why the offer portfolio works. Imagine if you tried to hire seven employees and every morning you handed all seven of them the exact same job. It would be chaos. Some important jobs would never get done. Other jobs would get done seven times. And no healthy business operates that way. Instead, we hire people with different responsibilities. One is doing the bookkeeping, one is doing the marketing, one is doing the harvest. One is doing the packing. Different people, different jobs. And they all work together. And your offers work the same way. They are members of that relay race team I talked about. They each have an assignment. Each one's contributing something unique to the health of your business. And when every offer knows its job and is doing its job, your business is growing more predictably and more consistently. So the next time your business starts to feel stuck, like it's not quite working right, I don't want you to immediately think I have to create another product or I have to just pitch another offer. I want you to try to diagnose the problem first. Ask yourself which of the levers needs attention. If your email list isn't growing, you don't need to create another bonus product. You probably just need to really focus on lead gen and on a different lead magnet. Or buying paying for lead ads or collaborating with someone to grow your list. If lots of people are visiting your website or your store and they're not placing an order, you don't need to make another product. You probably just need a better gateway offer. Or you need to be more clear which thing on your website is the gateway offer. Because right now it's a whole bunch of things and no one can tell where they're supposed to start. Are you seeing that if customers are disappearing after one purchase, you're probably just missing a habit builder. You don't have a process to invite them to come back again and buy a second time. They just fall through the cracks. Okay, so do you see how different those solutions are? The answer isn't always sell harder. It's build the missing. Wrong. That's what I want you to hear today. So I want to give you a little homework if you feel so inclined. Don't worry, you're not going to have to redesign your entire business. I actually hope you don't. It might be tempting to think, oh no, Corinne is going to ask me to build six new offers. Nope, don't worry, that's not the assignment here's. What I want you to do instead. I want you to grab a blank sheet of paper, and across the top, I want you to write my offer ladder or my offer portfolio. And I want you to make a list of every offer your farm currently has. Everything. Your csa, your online store, your farmer's market, your eggs, your flowers, your meat. Maybe it's specific cuts of meat that you want to pull out and labeled. Gift cards, holiday boxes, classes, farm dinners, Anything that someone can say yes to. Just get it all on paper. And I want you to draw a ladder beside that list. And at the very bottom, you're going to write complete stranger. At the very top, you're going to write raving fan. And I want you to ask yourself, how does someone actually climb this ladder in your business? What is going to be their first? Yes. What's the next logical step? And then what's the next one and the next one after that? Can someone currently move naturally from just discovering your farm to becoming one of your biggest superfans easily? Or are there some missing rungs? Are there giant leaps they're currently having to make? Okay, so here are a few questions I want you to ask. Which rung is missing? Where are you asking people to make too big of a jump? Do you see any patterns? Number two, which offer is trying to do too many jobs right now? Are you expecting your CSA to generate leads and create loyalty and increase referrals and build weekly shopping habits? Because that's. That's not how it works. Okay, and then question number three. This might. This might get at a different way. Which business lever needs the most attention right now? Do you just need more leads? Like, are you doing pretty good with sales, but you don't have a good lead generation machine? Do you need better conversion on that first offer? Do you need higher purchase frequency? Do you need larger average order size? Do you need more referrals? Do you need more retention of the things that they're buying? The signatures off the signature offers? Okay, Just identify the one lever that would make the biggest difference over the next six months as we move into the second half of the year. Okay, So I hope today's episode gave you a different way to think about your business. It's not just a list of products. This is a portfolio. Or I still love the metaphor of the relay race. This is a collection of runners, a collection of offers that each serves a unique purpose in the race. Okay? And you don't need to have more offers because more is better. You need to have the right offers. Doing the right jobs. So stop asking one offer or two offers to do everything in your business. Instead, I want you to really think about building a portfolio where you have multiple offers and they each have a purpose and where every yes is naturally leading to the next one. Where you're making it easy for those customers to climb the rungs. You don't have to convince them to jump over the missing rungs. Okay, I hope this was helpful. Thanks for hanging out with me today. If you liked today's episode, please leave me a rating or a review wherever you listen to your podcast. Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 373 if you want to get on my email list, remember I have some free stuff to send your way to make your marketing better. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and remember, there's Farm Marketing School if you want some help actually working this out. We have a monthly group coaching session where you can bring this stuff to the table and we hash it out together. There's a ton of projects inside of Farm Marketing School that are going to help you build the different offers, the different sections in the relay race so everything connects. That's what it's all about. Be happy to help you do that. If now is not the right time, I understand. But it's waiting for you. I'll be waiting for you in the in the fall, in the winter, and you can learn more about how to do that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS all right, thanks for joining me today, everyone. Have an amazing week and remember, I believe in you. Bye Bye. Sam.