Marketing Plans

For two beautiful days in mid-September, I had the opportunity to join Penn State Extension’s Annual “Are You Crazy?” Retail Farm Market Bus Tour. This year, guided by Penn State Extension Educators, Brian Moyer and Carla Synder, the tour provided participants with an opportunity to visit premier retail farm marketing/agritourism enterprises to see new things, get ideas to use at home, learn from each other, and build a network of contacts.

The Maryland Rural Enterprise Development Center, is a virtual rural business development center of the University of Maryland Extension presenting the latest and most successful business development innovations and support for Maryland's agriculture and food systems enterprises. The mission of the University of Maryland Extension’s Maryland Rural Enterprise Development Center (MREDC) is to improve rural prosperity in Maryland.

Summertime and the season is busy. Planting, harvesting, marketing, coordinating employees, and dealing with customers leave little time in the day to prepare for the busy fall agritourism and direct marketing season. But, now is just the right time to plan ahead for the Fall “crunch” time.

Target Marketing involves breaking a market into segments and then concentrating your marketing efforts on one or a few key segments. Having a good grasp on your target market makes the promotion, pricing and distribution of your products and/or services easier and more cost-effective. It provides a focus to all of your marketing activities.

Whether you’re gearing up to sell at a farmers’ market, through your roadside stand, or by private treaty, you cannot thrive in business today without a pricing strategy. The price you set for your product must fall between two points: what the customer is willing to pay and your breakeven point (the point at which you start losing money).

Farmers are repeatedly advised to diversify into new enterprises in order to generate additional income. It’s not unusual for me to visit a farm that grows vegetables, fruit, has some livestock for direct marketing meats, chickens for eggs, offers agritourism events and farm tours, and is considering how to enter the craft beverage market. If diversification is really the business model for success, what does that mean for farmers?

Sell, sell, sell! That’s the end goal of your marketing efforts. But getting your product into the customer’s cart is seldom a direct line from locating the product to purchasing it. That’s where promotion enters the marketing equation. The objective of promotion is to move customers through the following phases: Unawareness> Awareness> Beliefs> Attitude> Purchasing Intentions> Purchase.

As I review more business plans and engage in entrepreneurial coaching sessions, I’m seeing more detailed marketing plans, engagement strategies, and attention to marketing materials. Those are all good business components. But, I almost never see a line item in their budgets for marketing costs. Plans and support materials are great, but how much will these things cost and where is the most effective use of your marketing funds? Not being intentional about developing the budget that will support your marketing plans is like purchasing a car and not determining if you have enough money to buy the gas to run it.

Unreasonable customers are always a pain, but they're especially prevalent and stressful during the holiday shopping rush. To help you cope with difficult shoppers this holiday season, consider these seven tips from customer-service experts.

The national average for ground beef is currently $5.39 lb. Prices are not looking to scale back until 2015. A good steak hasn’t cost this much in America since Ronald Reagan was president. A dwindling number of cattle and the growing export demand from countries such as China and Japan have caused the average retail cost of fresh beef to climb to $5.28 lb. in February, up almost a quarter from January and the highest price since 1987.