Marketing Plans

Grocery stores and brokers have been purchasing “in-season” produce for years. As the season progresses, a glut of product drives down prices, allowing stores to capitalize on lower inventory costs. One solution to these falling prices was for farmers to try to get local produce into more stores. But, the problem with local into retail is mainly about distribution. Distributors usually work with brokers, not directly with producers.

With the direct marketing season in full swing, it’s a good time to step back and examine some of the tools and marketing technics that can have a substantial impact on your success as a direct marketer. Whether the outlet is a farmers’ market, your on-farm stand, or working with your CSA or wholesale accounts.

Whether you’re selling raw or value-added farm products, breeding stock, agritourism experiences, or business services, the start of a new year is a good time to develop your digital marketing “action tools”. There’s lots of buzz words or phrases surrounding direct marketing activities, but let’s focus on just four suggestions to improve your marketing results in 2016. Remember that these suggestions still need to be viewed through the filter of your own farm business.

As the marketing and cropping season gets into full swing, there are always questions about product pricing, marketing costs, and decision on what to produce. In the pricing module I use to teach the “Food for Profit” classes, we approach pricing by looking at both fixed and variable costs. These are terms most business folks are very familiar with but don’t often set down and really pencil out for their operation.

I never met anyone who told me that they got into farming because they enjoyed trying to predict what the Basic Formula Price (BFP) for milk would be six months down the road, or because they got great personal satisfaction from tracking the futures market. Farmers want to farm. They don’t prefer to be marketers. For most farmers, marketing has long been a way to get rid of the commodity they have grown, regardless of the price; the farmer is a “price taker”.

With July temperatures approaching triple digits, it’s hard to start thinking about holiday marketing plans. For many that would be the Christmas season but, for direct farm marketers, the “holidays” encompass the Labor Day weekend, a six-week period in the Fall that crests every weekend in October, Thanksgiving meals and decorations, and of course Christmas.

Quality products and top-notch customer service are the cornerstones of a profitable marketing plan. A wider array of point-of-sales payment options is now becoming an important component of good customer service with many customers. These options include credit cards, debit cards, and NFC (near field communication: ApplePay, Google Wallet, etc.). Near field communication is the technology that allows smart phones and devises to establish communications with each other when they’re close together.

Your marketing plan is your road map to implementing your business ideas and measuring your success along the way. But a plan is useless without implementation and then evaluation of the results. Year-end is a good time to determine where you are with this year’s business marketing plan while your sales numbers, weather conditions, and the successes and challenges of this production year are still fresh in your mind. It also helps you gather important tax filing information to use in year-end purchasing decisions. When developing your marketing plan, it can be helpful to follow the “SMART” goals format.

As we move through the realities the Covid-19 protocols, many are experiencing first hand its effect on their business’s viability. Whether you are dealing with a constricted or delayed Farmers Market, an unprecedented spike in your online and delivery orders, or sympathizing with your restaurant buyers whose sales have been restricted to pick-up and curbside options only. It is an unpredictable time and with so much information flying around, it’s hard to pause and consider what your business might look like when these restriction ends. There are no clear answers at this time, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t actions you can take to affect the outcomes. We just know things will won’t be going back to the way they were before Covid-19.

Although they’ve been around for a long time, gift baskets are still a “hot” holiday gift idea. Gift boxes are a near-perfect offering for direct marketers. They can be customized for the receiver, convenient for the giver, can be offered at different pricing options and, can feature your special products. If they include a gift certificate, they may even draw the receiver into your brick-and-mortar or online store.