Two neighboring farmers would meet along the property line of their farms each day to have lunch together.
One of the farmers would open his lunch box each day and exclaim “cheese sandwich all I ever get is a cheese sandwich.”
Finally one day his friend suggested “Why don’t you tell your wife to pack you something else?”
To which the farmer replied “Tell my wife? I pack my own lunch.”
I talk to farmers on a daily basis who aren’t making the income they want from their small farm. They tell me how hard it is to get customers or how tough the farmers markets have become with the huge growth of both markets and farmers all trying to get the same customers.
Some of the things I commonly hear is something like:
Money is tight folks aren’t spending as much.
People shop at several markets and aren’t always at the one I sell at
How do you find customers?
How do you advertise?
You have HOW MANY regular customers!?
You farm full time?
While it would take a book to properly answer all these questions, I can tell you one problem I consistently see with small farmers.
They don’t make marketing the #1 priority of their farm business.
When it comes to farmers markets most rely on the market to drive traffic to their venue.
Big mistake.
There are many things that can be done to bring customers not only to the market but directly to your table. Don’t rely on someone else to do your marketing for you. I’m afraid many farmers have simply adopted the commodity farmers model of “I’ll concentrate on growing and producing the farm products and someone else can do the marketing.”
The problem with that particular model is:
It ends up costing you more i.e. somebody wants a cut for helping you market your goods.
You don’t have no control over your business income.
It’s hard to establish a solid relationship with customers.
You are not in the drivers seat when it comes to producing income when you need it.
Don’t be simply riding the trend of many people buying local or from a small farm.
What’s your plan to capture and keep as much of the business as you can while the trend lasts?
If don’t have this type of plan in place you will lose business to those who do.
As the trend grows it will be harder to differentiate your products from the guy down the road or at the other market. Prices will began to fall as more farmers come to the table.
Even if the trend continues for a long time the serious marketers will come to the surface and capture the majority of customers.
As one gentleman put it “the time to get better is when things are good.” Don’t wait until your market share is falling to get a system in place to market your farm products or worse yet think you have all kinds of time to build up your customer base.
No you can’t just farm and get rich…you have to have a strong marketing system.
A recession is a transference of wealth from the meek to the bold - Dan Kennedy
I love Dan’s definition of a recession. While it seems to hard to nail down the Fed says $878 billion dollars will circulate through the United States economy in 2012.
The question we have to asked ourselves is “how much of that will I capture for my business
Here’s some tips:
Check up on your attitude - W. Clement Stone said in the midst of the depression “I did know the opportunities were unlimited. For sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman—not the attitude of the prospect.”
It’s very common to have customers remark on fuel cost going up or food prices increasing or a million other topics that only accentuate the negative. Resist getting into these conversations.
Work on being a place that is positive and upbeat. Customers buy more from those types of business.
Tap Into Consumer Mentality. Match It – Customers have money. They are just more reluctant to let go of it in a down economy. Their mentality has changed. They are holding on to their money and less likely to spend it frivolously. That doesn’t mean they won’t spend it or they only want cheap food. Actually quite the contrary. Many people are looking for a way to make themselves feel better in less expensive ways.
Talk to your customers about less expensive ways to have fun, feel good, etc. An example would be offering “special breakfast package” or a farm visit they can bring the kids to see your new baby goats etc.
Coach Your Employees or Helpers about How to Talk to Customers – Part of their job is to sell and influence buying decisions not talk about their life is or how rotten the state of the economy with customers.
Customers don’t contact you or come to your farm to hear bad news. They can turn on the radio or read the newspaper if they want that. They come to you to find something they want and have a positive buying experience.
Farmers take heed: There’s enough bad news in the air, without adding fuel to the fire. When customers come to do business with you, they want to feel good. They want to feel good about buying.
Action Tip: Spend the next few weeks thinking about positive ways to present your products as well as checking up on everyone’s attitude at your farm.
The better you know your farm customers, the more clearly you can communicate with them…in their terms and on their level.
A stronger understanding of your customers will lead you to better anticipate what other products they may be interested in buying from you. The clearer you see your customer’s individual characteristics, the easier it is to find other people like them. This makes your marketing efforts more precise and less random, which saves you time and money.
Knowing your customers so well that you can sell to them over and over is the central theme of customer-focused marketing.
And, because you know them so well, you can find other customers just like them because you know what you’re looking for.
Anytime you communicate, whether it’s to a customer or prospect, you have to think about how it will be perceived and how it will be received. For instance, if you get a piece of SPAM mail in your email box, it could be the best deal of the century but chances are it’s going to the trash folder. AND, you might take the time to filter out messages from this sender in the future so you don’t even see them in your email box.
The message may have been great, but the method in which it was sent stunk!
You have to consider how effective and how efficient your marketing is. How many of your ideal prospects can you reach for the lowest possible cost to get the sale?
The only valid measure of a marketing campaign is how much money did it make you? Not how cute it was, or how many people liked the idea on Facebook, or all the farmers that told you how great it was, but HOW MUCH DID PEOPLE BUY?
And how much profit did you make after you paid all your overhead?
Customer-Focused marketing is designed to do one thing…make you the most net profit from your marketing efforts.
With this approach you can actually make more money with fewer customers.
In my last post, I listed data that you should be capturing from your customer base. I’ll assume you have a database of some sort on your computer to enter this information into so you can begin to segment your customer base.
Let’s look at a simple example from my farm. Every year we sell Hams at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
I record into my database all the people who purchase and what they purchased e.g. butt portion, whole ham, also when they purchased.
At each holiday I have a list of customers that I can feel fairly certain they will want know about our holiday hams.
So I open up my database and sort these people out, and craft a letter or email to them so I can offer them a ham for the holidays.
Why not just send it out to all my customers? Because some of my customers don’t buy pork of any kind and never will. By sending a communication to them I risk offending them or at the least emphasizing the fact that it’s a mass mailing.
You don’t want communication to go out that isn’t personal.
Just imagine getting a letter trying to sell you a holiday ham and you don’t eat pork. You know right away your farmer doesn’t know you very well or the marketing mechanism is disconnected from the farmer’s knowledge.
Now imagine getting a letter that looks like this because you bought a ham at Easter:
Dear Joe,
Our holiday hams are going to be ready on October 3rd. Since you bought a whole ham last Easter, I wanted to let you know those same great hams are available for this holiday too!
This is targeted, personal, and gets a much better response than a mailing to all your customers.
How else could this knowledge recorded in our database help us?
What else might the customers who bought a ham purchase?
Maybe a holiday turkey?
So you could send out a letter like this:
Dear Joe,
Our holiday hams are going to be ready on October 3rd. Since you bought a whole ham last Easter, I wanted to let you know those same great hams are available for this holiday too! We also have a few turkeys left. These turkeys are 14-20 lbs and receive rave reviews from our customers….
Take your current customer base and analyze who they are, what their buying habits include, and figure out how to segment them into different groups and then individualize your offers to them.
As you continue to do this, a clear picture of who is likely to purchase from you emerges. Then you can narrow your focus to only the best prospects to go after.
This saves time and money. It also enables you to make more with less customers.
What does a buyer of farm products look like? I don’t mean their physical appearance. I mean how do you know who is a good candidate for your farm products? What traits do they posses? What characteristics indicate they may purchase from you?
It is a mistake to think everyone you meet is a good candidate. If you are paying for advertising or doing some type of marketing campaign, you need to have an idea of what your potential customer looks like.
This why it is critical to collect data from your current customers. The more you know about them the better you will become at recognizing potential customers.
The idea of target or niche marketing is to focus your efforts on selling products or services to a specific group in the marketplace.
If the only thing you know about your customers are they live around you, and they are male or female, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to target your market.
You should be capturing as much information about your customers as possible.
How?
Well start by asking questions!
I’m not talking about barraging them with a million questions every time you see them but a standard set of questions can help you put together a “best customer profile.” Then you could weave those questions into your conversation with your customers. You probably already know a lot about them…but is it stored so you can analyze it?
Let’s imagine you line up all your current customers.
You notice that the large majority of them are female. You also notice that your customers who purchase the largest amounts all wear sandals.
Then you realize that not only do they all wear sandals but they also have blond hair.
Using this imaginary example, you could reason that you have a good chance of getting new customers if you can find blonde haired women who wear sandals!
“…targeted marketing is the art and science of identifying, describing, locating, and contacting one or more groups of prime prospects for whatever you are selling.
In today’s marketplace, if you don’t know who, what, and where your true prospects are, or if you fail to go after them as individuals, you will lose ground to competitors who do.”Stan Rapp & Tom Collins – MaxiMarketing
So you need to know what your customers look like in order to find more for the least amount of effort and cost.
Criteria you should be tracking:
Beyond the obvious ones like name, address, contact information etc.
1. Age
2. Family Size
3. Social/Economic Status
4. Gender
5. What they purchase
6. Frequency of purchase
7. When they purchase – Holiday etc.
8. Amount of purchase
9. What they will not purchase – Vegetarian etc.
10. How they pay – Check, credit card, cash, payments
11. Do they shop at farmers markets
12. Anything else you can think of that will help you identify new customers and create offers to your current customers.
Reaching large numbers of people is not the key to building your business. It’s reaching an audience with a high concentration of people who have shown some behavior that indicates they are reasonably likely to purchase your farm products.
Next time we’ll talk about where to store this information and some ways to use it.
Getting testimonials from your current customers is one of the most powerful ways to build credibility and create trust/belief with potential customers.
I’ll start out with a confession. I watch late night infomercials. Actually they don’t even have to be late night with all the channels on TV now.
It’s not because I’m looking to buy something, it’s more about learning. The main thing you’ll see if you watch a good one is they use a ton of testimonials.
Want to know why?
Because they work!
Hearing other people tell about how they bought the product and what it did for them is an excellent way to elevate a viewer’s belief in the product. Even though deep down you may think they were paid to say the positive things they say, you can’t help but wonder at the same time if it would benefit you in the same way!
An infomercial is designed to constantly move you toward the close at the end. That’s when they have done everything in their power to raise your belief about the benefits of their product…hopefully enough so, that you’ll pick up the phone and buy their deluxe, triple guaranteed, gadget.
But let’s focus on the testimonial segment. Which by the way, they play all through the infomercial to elevate your belief. They carefully select, or craft, the testimonials to re-enforce all the benefits that the host is telling you that you’ll receive if you buy one.
So how can we use this to market our farm products?
You must collect testimonials every chance you get. That means you need a system to collect them and use them to make sales. I use several tactics to collect them from my customers.
Here’s one: Ask them!
I use a simple form that I mail them after they have had a chance to try my products. It’s important not to wait too long after a purchase. You want to get them while their “hot” and you want to make sure they are happy. If you send out the form and they have a problem, you can find out about it before they complain to all their friends.
This puts you in the position to correct it. Then they tell their friends they had a problem and you followed up and fixed it! In today’s world, that sets you apart from 90% of the businesses they deal with.
When was the last time you received a call from the grocery store asking if you liked everything? Or any business for that matter?
If you’re selling a quality product ninety-nine times out of a hundred they will tell you how great it was!
You can do this by phone also, but I like to have it in writing. You can also use email or both. Maybe try email and if they don’t respond to email then mail out the form. I’m finding people are responding better to mail these days because so few people use it anymore. People are constantly pulled here and there on the internet and you run the risk of your email getting buried or deleted or caught in their spam filter or whatever.
The form, which I’ll include a link for you to see here, needs to be designed to pull the testimonial from them. It also spells out how you will use their comments. This is key to getting customers to cooperate with you. If you are using snail mail be certain to include a self addressed stamped envelope – it drastically raises your response rate.
Here’s one I got a while back from a new customer using this form.
“I’ve used the bacon and the ground beef and both were OUTSTANDING! Now I’m REALLY excited about filling up the freezer! …I can tell you, with no stretch of the imagination, that grass fed meat agrees with my digestive system far better than with “grocery store” meat….Mmmmmm, sure am looking forward to those chickens!
Then she later emailed this…
Update – The chickens are a tremendous hit in our family…I enjoyed meeting you a couple of weeks ago, and I really appreciate your bringing the chickens to Pickerington.
Just want to mention, too, that as long as I’ve got a job, you’ve got my business” – Lynette Y. Streetsboro, Ohio
Now just imagine for a moment you’re talking to a prospective customer and you say “Here’s what some other folks are saying about our products“
You then pull out a stack of these type testimonials for them to look through.
You just used someone else to sell your product to them. That’s powerful!
Include testimonials in your brochures, website, informational package, anywhere you are presenting your products. This one tactic alone will bring in more business than most other forms of advertising and it costs practically nothing.
Video is another way to do this. Check out the video below. It’s from a tasting we did at a local business. (more on that later).
If you really want to know if your farm marketing efforts are on target and relevant to your potential customers, here’s a test that’s not only effective buy also a bit humbling.
If you’re preparing a brochure for instance, ask yourself if someone could read it and based on your statements about your product or service, or just the general premise of the brochure, could answer “So what?”
Let’s look at an example…your brochure says “We own the oldest farm in the state tracing back to 1780.” Now imagine someone reading that and saying “So what? I bet your family is proud to own it, what does that mean to me?”
Or maybe you say, “We raise only heritage breed Tamworth pigs that thrive on pasture.” Your potential customer says, “So What? I don’t have a clue what a heritage breed is and don’t pigs eat slop?”
You might be enormously impressed with your heritage breed pigs, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is perceived to be important from your customer’s point of view.
They aren’t interested in buying a heritage breed pig. They want the tasty bacon that comes from the heritage breed pig. Actually they don’t even want the bacon – they want the taste, the smell , the experience of eating the bacon.
That’s where the old saying “don’t sell the bacon sell the sizzle” comes from. Ah wait a minute maybe that’s “sell them the sizzle not the steak.” Either way you get the point.
Even if they did seem to want your pork because it’s heritage breed they could be looking to boost their image by helping preserve an old breed of pig.
In that case they are still not in the market for heritage breed pork, they’re in the market for image…sell them what THEY want.
You should spend a ton of time coming up with killer headlines. You should spend as much or more time creating good headlines than ad copy.
Maybe even work on them for days. Get others to give you their thoughts on them. Write several and ask them which one they like the best and why. You may create many headlines and toss most of them. That’s Okay, the entire return on an ad campaign depends on the ability to attract customers who want to buy the farm products you offer.
No matter how great the ad copy, it’s wasted if no one reads the ad because the headline is weak. That’s how important a good headline is!
The exact same ad will give tremendously different results all because you change the headline.
Which means you absolutely must key your ads so you can track them. If you’re only running an ad in one newspaper or classified, you know where the business came from. But what if you’re running a multiple venue advertising campaign?
What about on the web? Do you use different email addresses or some other marker to identify where the inquiry came from? You should, otherwise how do you know what works and what doesn’t? If you are spending your hard earned money you need to narrow down what headlines work as well as what venues work.
I always ask people how they heard of us. It helps me see what works or who has referred them. Make sure at the least you thank customers who refer others. Better yet have a referral program in place in writing and make sure your customers know it.
Just remember that people will not read your ad to see if it interests them. They will decide at a glance – by your headline or graphic. Only address the people you seek.
The difference in advertising on the web or any type of media is you aren’t there in person to speak. If you are present it’s hard to ignore you! Not so with an ad, it’s quite easy to ignore the message.
We presume that only the people who are interested in our farm products will read our ad. The purpose of a headline is to attract people who might buy our farm products.
If you are about to speak to someone in a crowd you would say something like; “Hey Mr. Jones” or “Excuse me sir.” That’s what you’re trying to do with a headline.
But remember, with a headline, you are only trying to attract those people who might buy your farm products. So you need to create a headline that speaks to them.
I’m not a huge fan of teaser headlines. For instance a headline such as “people are lying to you, and it’s costing you a fortune.” This headline might cause people to look further to figure out what you’re talking about but more than likely most of them will have no interest in farm products. And how would you tie your product to that headline?
Not to mention think of how many people who are interested in farm products but will never investigate the teaser headline at all!
Headlines on ads are like headlines in the news. No one every reads or listens to all the news. They pick and choose by the headlines. We don’t like the headline to be misleading or we feel like we were lied to…not a good way to start a relationship with a potential buyer.
Most people are scanning through newspapers or search engines or where ever you are advertising. They’re not going to read anything that doesn’t interest them.
Remember people are in a hurry. Most of them have plenty to read. They aren’t going to spend more than a second reading your ad if it doesn’t grab them with the headline and keep them with the copy.
People will not be bored reading for long. They choose what they read. Your farm product may be of interest to them but your headline has to shout above the crowd of all the other print they are reading or scanning.
People want to save money, look better, feel better etc. So your headline has to speak to them. Speak about their wants needs and desires.
The best ad in the world will be ineffective if the headline doesn’t pull them in.
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Two neighboring farmers would meet along the property line of their farms each day to have lunch together.
