Marketing Plans

Beware of “pouring money down the advertising hole!” Tailor your advertising and promotions to your current and prospective customers. Evaluate the results so you don’t keep spending money on ads or promotional campaigns that aren’t working.

Today with websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and email to promote their products and services, does a business owner still need to invest in a sign? Absolutely!

Fads are something people talk about, but trends are something people do. Look for market niches created by consumer trends. Popular trends include anything to do with health and nutrition, convenience, ethnic products, foods for the weight -conscious or elderly and food safety concerns.

I recently took a call from a vegetable producer who operates a roadside stand. He was selling very large tomatoes and was having trouble pricing them. His standard sales method was to fill a quart container with tomatoes and price them by the container. But he found these large tomatoes didn’t work well in his model. I suggested selling them by the piece or better yet, by the pound. He was reluctant to use a scale because it took time to weigh the veggies and then calculate the price. Also, he didn’t want to have to make exact change.

I recently read that there are 16M new websites launched every month. That means that there are almost 200M new sites launched annually! These all contribute in multiples to the unfathomable amount of information on the Web. To that point - a Google search of the terms “On-line Marketing Tools” yielded 94M results. When I refined the search to the terms “Online Marketing Tools for Direct Farm Marketers” there were still 36M results.

My apologies to William Shakespeare for mangling the opening phrase of a soliloquy spoken by Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play by the same name. But, as producers start drawing up their marketing plans for 2019, market vendors are questioning whether sales from farmers markets are still truly profitable. An agency marketing person declared to me recently, “Farmers Markets in Maryland are dead”.  At the risk of misappropriating another literary quote, Mark Twain said,“ The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”.

Marketing trends usually address a category of products that are gaining in popularity or address a niche group of consumer wants or needs. While marketing strategies address how to implement your marketing plan to your target customers. The marketing strategies of the behemoth Amazon and our use of our electric devices are changing how we need to think about both our customers wants and needs and how we present our marketing messages to them. Let’s exam these two “effects”.

In November, I had the opportunity to give a presentation through the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources’ (AGNR) new Agricultural Careers and Entrepreneurship (ACE) Virtual Center webinar series. The presentation was titled, Entrepreneurs-Born or Made?

Regardless of your direct marketing outlet (farmers’ market, on-farm stand, CSA, or Pick-Your-Own), great customer service is the undeniable business principle that cannot be neglected in order to have a sustainable and profitable business. Even though we’re increasingly connected by our electronic devices and messages, the human side of doing business still matters.

In his book The Practice of Management, Peter Drucker declares the only one valid definition of a business’ purpose is to create a customer… Because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions: marketing and innovation… Nowhere does Drucker say our business is about our product or our production, it’s about creating a customer. Our product must satisfy a want or need. So, who doesn’t need food? And with all the “buzz” about buying local products, why are we still struggling to grow our customer bases.