My Digital Farmer Podcast

Farm website updates. Ugh. If you're like most farmers, you cringe at the thought of working on your website. It feels overwhelming, time consuming and ultra confusing. What do you say? How do you set it up technically?  How do you even get started?! In today's episode, I interview an actual website designer who works specifically with farmers to design or rebuild farm websites. She has seen it al...

I'm willing to bet that if you're in business, you have some big dreams and goals you want to hit. How do you make sure you reach them? Over the last 3 years especially, I've made some pretty incredible things happen. One day this past year, I was reflecting on the art of "manifesting big things." I decided to catalog a list of things that I would consider "big goals" I had manifested. And then I...

January 10, 2024 Today we do one of my favorite things: we interview a farmer and audit their sales funnel. In today's episode, you'll hear from Adam Henson of Shady Brook Farm. Adam joined my Accelerator program this fall to build out his email nurture sequence and sales sequence for his meat sales. As you listen, I want you to hear how simple his sales funnel is. Sometimes we think that we have...

How do you make more money in your farm business? Answer: make more offers. In our early years as a CSA farm, we struggled to increase revenue because we only had the one thing to sell: our 18-week CSA membership. That's it! Once you paid for that, you weren't asked to buy anything again until the next year, when we asked to renew the membership. Looking back, that was a mistake. In order to maxim...

Have you ever wondered what are the primary agents that cause people to buy your product? Turns out there are "laws" in marketing that drive the sales to our products. Do you know what they are? I'm betting that many of these principles are familiar to you. You're probably using some of them without realizing it. But there might be a couple that are new to you. What's REALLY cool is when you can u...

It's the end of the year, and that means it's time for the end of year evaluation and goal setting retreat! This is a rebroadcast of Episode 191 -- because it's THAT good, and I want you to repeat the process again! I used to avoid this process — partly because I didn't have a good process that worked for me. That all changed when I found these evaluation questions. And in today's podcast, I'm goi...

How do you sell a rare breed pig in a community who's never heard of it? This was a problem faced by today's podcast guest. Joanna Shepherd from Cobblestone Farm had moved from the UK on a mission to save the Berkshire pig breed! The problem: not many people in Saskatchewan, Canada knew what they were, or why they deserved her luxury-level price point. How do you market a product no one has heard...

What do you want your farm customers to DO? This is the all-important question as a farm marketer. You are always taking your customer (or prospect) somewhere. We should be ready at all times with a "call to action" in whatever communication channel we use. So what is your go-to CTA? Most farmers (and business owners) default to "buy my stuff." But in the world of marketing, there are a lot of oth...

How do you make your farm products highly desirable?  To answer this question, this week I share another saga in my continuing quest to find a massage therapist.  I share how my prospective LMT played "hard to get" when I tried to book her; and what that did inside my brain to make me want it even more.  We'll explore the value of things like "sold out" signs, wait lists, and low inventory. How ca...

What if you could go ONE place to learn all the farm marketing basics, and DIY your way through them? What if you could spend this off-season, working through ONE marketing project at a time - build it in 30 days, and move on to the next one? What if you could finally get some of those "big" marketing tasks OFF your plate and into your sales machine, because someone has explained it in a way that...

How do you raise your prices and get your customers to buy at that price point? (And feel good about it?) In today's episode, I'm diving into a crucial aspect of farm marketing: the art of price anchoring. Have you ever gone to Amazon to buy something with a certain idea in your mind of what something will cost?... and then you see what Amazon thinks it should cost?... For example, I recently  nee...

Do you wish more of your current CSA members would renew their share early? I just wrapped up my end-of-season "early renewal" promotion campaign to my current CSA members, and it's October 23. I asked 400 members to give me their commitments for next summer. My results?... 310 of 385 spots were pre-sold in 7 days before November 1st! That's 7 months before we start our season. And most of them ca...

When you talk about your farm products, are you making a nice, bullet-point list of features that come with your product? Things like: certified organic by USDA grass-fed, regeneratively-raised locally-sourced raw and unfiltered That's great, but that may not be enough. The problem with just focusing on features in our marketing is that we (as the salesperson) have assumed that the customer has a...

Imagine waking up on Christmas morning and running to tree to pass out gifts, only to discover that none of the packages have labels on them. You have no idea which package is for whom. Some packages go to the wrong person. People get upset. NO BUENO. Ahhh.... the power of LABELS. When it comes to communicating with your customers and leads, it is VITAL that you have some kind of identifier, label...

How often do you hold up a mirror? If you're good at marketing, you're doing it ALL THE TIME. We mirror in two ways: In our behavior and face to face interactions with customers/prospects. In our messaging. In today's episode, I'm revealing "sales secrets" that the great sales reps often leverage to quickly connect with their prospects and close more deals. It's something known as: "sales mirrorin...

Do people "Google" something that leads to your business? If so, what are they typing into that search bar? And is Google recommending your business to them? If not, you may have an "SEO Problem." In today's episode, I invite a special guest and SEO expert, Julia Bocchese, onto the show to share some best practices for how we can improve our SEO performance and drive more organic traffic to our bu...

How many times does your call to action show up on your website home page? (or anywhere on your website?!...) Today I'm going to challenge you to go count. And if you've only got 1-2 on your home page, I want you to DOUBLE it (at least). In today's episode, I talk through why repetition of this CTA button is so important for conversions. I also share some best practices for how to design (and writ...

Who are your "best" clients in your farm business? Do you know? And how do you define "best" when it comes to your customers? Maybe it means "biggest-spending" or "biggest referral source." Or maybe your best clients are customers who add energy to your brand in some other way. We all have a small subset of super valuable clients. In business, it's vital that you A.) know who these clients are, an...

Traffic is  a count of the number of visitors to a website, web page, or your point of sale. Increase the number of people who get exposed to your message, and you will inevitably increase your traffic (and your sales). If I know that 20% of people who see my message end up clicking to my website or online store, then the way to get more eyes on my offer is to increase the number of people I'm fun...

What farm marketing metrics are you tracking in your business? When I first took the reins of sales/marketing in my business, I didn't know I SHOULD be tracking metrics, much less which ones! Peter Drucker (wise, business man) once said: "You can't improve what you don't measure." SO TRUE. Please trust me: if you haven't starting measuring data, you're leaving money on the table. The data is there...

How much does it matter that a customer "like" you -- before they buy your product? Turns out, it helps a ton. In today's episode, I let you peek into one of my private Book Studies I'm doing with my Accelerator Group Coaching cohort this summer on the best-selling book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini, PhD. In this study, we discuss two key psychological "trigger point...

A few weeks ago, I broke a personal weekly record with my online pre-sales for this time of year. My store sales revenue jumped by 35% in my Local Line store. I accidentally did something different that week, and I think that's the reason it happened... In today's episode, I share the story and why I think it worked. If you have an online store that you're driving customers to each week -- this ti...

Sometimes you just need to have a few key elements in place in your marketing system to get the sales going. In today's episode, I interview a guest who spends most of her time on two things -- social media and an email marketing process (called a "nurture email automated sequence"). These two elements are enough to drive new clients into her world and get them to feel ready to buy her bulk beef....

If you want to be in business for a long time, then you MUST become a master at making "offers." An offer is not your product. An offer is how you position and pitch your product in such a way that makes a person want to buy it. There are LOTS of different ways you can pitch your product, and in this episode, I'm sharing 10 of the most popular ones you see around many industries (that also work fo...

August 2, 2023 by Corinna For many farms, COVID-19 forced many of us to re-imagine how we could sell our products to our customers, and inadvertently created an opportunity to sell more product with less work. Today's guest is Sarah Bakker from Field Sparrow Farms, and she shares how moving to an online pre-sale process made everything easier. We'll learn how she drives the marketing engine in her...