When it comes to marketing, there is no such thing as a silver bullet
You’ve got the vision. There’s a line out to the street at your farm stand, your phone is ringing off the hook, and the cash is flowing in. You just need your product to go viral, right?
Wrong.
Going viral is not a marketing strategy. It’s impossible to predict, and if you’re not prepared to take advantage of the wave, it’ll leave you behind and you’ll be left blinking in shock while customer attention shifts to the next shiny object.
The only way to do marketing is by a slow, steady slog. Week in, week out. The first years are going to be painfully slow. And yes, unless you have a multi-million-dollar marketing budget, it will take years. The rule of thumb is that it takes seven interactions for someone to go from being indifferent to interested in your company. An interaction is what you use to grab attention — opening a newsletter, a phone call, a click on an ad, a reaction to a social media post, a conversation with you at a farmers market.
Every so often you’ll get lucky and someone will be looking for exactly what you offer, but those people are rare enough that you can’t base your marketing strategy around them. Plan for seven contacts before someone is willing to take the first step and purchase something. After that first purchase, you’ll probably need another few before they buy again — and another few for a third purchase. Eventually you’ll have them in a habit of buying from you, but it may take dozens of contacts before you get to that point.
In addition to my work as a farmer and at Good Agriculture, I manage a farmers market. (Yes, I do too much. I can sleep when I die.) When I took over the market in 2020 it had 15 vendors, 1,000 people on a newsletter, and roughly 200 people shopping each week. I had zero budget. To get our marketing efforts rolling, I started doing four things.
First, I started posting pictures to social media from every vendor at the market, and I created a narrative for each post, walking the customers through their shopping trip. I also created events on Facebook and various community boards so that the market would show up in the spaces people were already spending time in.
Second, I began creating activities that encouraged people to return weekly —challenges to purchase from every vendor, loyalty cards, shoutouts on social media for folks who come every week for a month, etc.
Third, I started inviting artists and non-food vendors to participate on a semi-regular basis. The presence of those artisans every couple of months introduced our market to new people.
And fourth, I extended the season. Every week we weren’t open was a week our customers had the opportunity to go somewhere else, so we stayed open.
After three years of this, we had grown from 15 weekly vendors to 23 and were seeing about 350 attendees on an average week. At that point, the market owners agreed to put money toward advertising, so I began spending $20/week on ads on Facebook and Instagram. We’ve now been doing that for 20 months, and we’re at 30 weekly vendors and 500+ people shopping in an average week.
Marketing is a slow burn. At the end of the day, people don’t care what you have to offer the first time you reach out to them.
Many farmers assume that if you build it, your customers will come. It’s an appealing fantasy — you spend 12+ hours a day on your farm; surely, you think, everyone just needs to get a glimpse of how amazing your farm is and how good your food tastes, and then you’ll have lines out the front gate. Unless you happen to be Jeremy Clarkson and can lean on your fame (and probably some extras courtesy of the Amazon show contract), that’s not going to happen. Much more likely are the results seen by Love Is Love Cooperative Farm for their recent consumer plant sale.
In the two months leading up to the plant sale on the farm, the farm posted to their social media accounts daily — sometimes multiple times a day. They advertised the event in every community calendar and event platform within a 100-mile radius. They drafted a press release and sent it out to over 100 news outlets. The plant sale was promoted in the weekly CSA emails and monthly newsletter. They ran ads on social media targeting specific types of people who seemed most likely to show up for the sale and the events they had planned for that day. The goal was to see a 20 percent increase in the number of plant sales and the people who came out to the farm for the sale.
The end result was a slight increase in plant sales and a slight decrease in the number of people who came out.
This is disappointing on its face, but it’s also to be expected. Two months of effort isn’t enough to make a significant difference without something going viral or some major piece of news coverage. And let’s be honest — a plant sale just doesn’t lend itself to virality or front-page coverage in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At the farmers market, we’ve doubled after almost five years of consistent effort.
Marketing is a slow burn.
Kirsten Simmons is the co-founder and Chief Farming Officer for Good Agriculture (goodagriculture.com), a company dedicated to helping farmers find funding, manage finances, reach new customers and get certified. She also farms at Ecosystem Farm in Atlanta (ecosystemfarm.com).
