By Diego Footer and Nina Galle
The following is an excerpt from the book, Ready Farmer One and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.
Unless you are selling a truly unique product, like an iPhone or a Tesla, you will likely have to advertise your product. No one is pre-ordering your lettuce months in advance. Your brand can help you stand out from the crowd, but that’s irrelevant unless you get enough eyeballs on your brand. Advertising is inevitable.
Advertising isn’t just about generating more sales now.
It can also:
- Increase brand awareness by getting your story and unique selling proposition (USP) into the market
- Attract new customers (who make purchases now and later)
- Remind current customers about new and existing products
- Keep your brand relevant in the eyes of the market
- Provide updates about your company, story, and products
Advertising clearly has benefits and produces results. In this chapter, we discuss the four marketing strategies we think are most beneficial for farms. We will also offer suggestions on other forms of marketing that might be worth exploring.
Strategy 1: Email Marketing
When it comes to modern advertising, there is no form as powerful as email marketing.
Ninety percent of Americans age 15 and older use email. If you want to reach a potential customer, email is your best bet.
Beyond pure reach, email has several other benefits.
First, you own your email list. This differs from social media platforms, where your followers are held on another business’s platform. If Facebook or Instagram shut down tomorrow, you’d lose access to all of your followers. With email, you don’t risk losing your audience—you’ve got their contact information.
Second, people check their email all the time. According to Statista, over 50 percent of people check their email at least a few times a day, with around 20 percent checking it in real-time as it arrives. If you send an email, the odds are your sender will see it.
Third, emails are action-oriented. Once someone gets your email, they must do one of three things: open, delete, or ignore. Your job is to pique their interest enough to get them to open it.
Fourth, email connections are personal. Email allows you to create a greater human-to-human connection than on social media because an email is viewed as a direct exchange between two people.
Fifth, you can convey information in an email that would be difficult to explain on social media. Social media has trained people to glance at a picture and scroll to the next one. Often the text portion of the post isn’t even read. If you want to convey information about your company or a product, your best chance of getting that information read is through email.
These benefits are reasons most brands, both large and small, dedicate a lot of time to email marketing. If you are not currently engaged in routine email marketing, you are leaving a lot of potential benefits on the table.
Learn how to get started with email marketing in Ready Farmer One: The Farmers Guide to Selling and Marketing by Nina Galle and Diego Footer, available at the Acres U.S.A. Bookstore.
About the Authors
Diego Footer
Diego Footer is best known for his farm podcasts such as Farm Small Farm Smart and Grassfed Life. Over the past ten years, Diego has traveled across the country to tell the stories of hundreds of farmers while inspiring thousands of people to start farming.
Diego is also the founder and owner of the farm tool companies Paperpot Co. and Modern Grower. In his spare time, he is a YouTuber, entrepreneur, engineer, finance nerd, product designer, and writer. While all those things, he is a dad first and lives with his family in San Diego. Get inspired or have a laugh by following him on Instagram @diegofooter.
Nina Galle
Nina Galle is a Dutch-Canadian writer and interviewer focused on helping farmers gain autonomy by owning their sales channels. As the Head of Content at Local Line, Nina built the farmer education program with dozens of videos, guidebooks, articles, and templates, all with the aim to empower farmers to get online and connect with their customers.
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