Three Main Marketing Concepts to Help Every Microgreen Farmer Establish a Decent Online Presence
Posted in Marketing on September 7, 2020
Marketing is a cool tool and it often plays a key role when a farmer is using it to sell out their weekly microgreens produce. Using digital marketing in farming is a huge topic and it could turn into a long conversation if we decide to do an extended analysis and compare a wide list with options. The goal in this post is covering the basics - main type of marketing and the kinds of different solutions that exist. Enjoy reading!
Concept #1: Owning vs Renting a Website
People are used to think that there's only one way to position themselves online and this is through their website and/or social media profiles.
In reality, there's the renting model as well where you rent a website that's already optimized to capture leads and turn them in your customers.
It's difficult to determine which one is better for you as every individual has a different skill set.
Here's what I we mean:
- People with previous experience in building websites might compose something in 48 hours that's good enough to represent their brand. Or they can outsource the design and just observe how it evolves ready to share their input occasionally.
- People with less experience might actually have a broader choice:
1). Learn building a website and build it on their own
2). Hire someone that will build it for them
3). Rent a well developed website that is already well optimized to capture leads and turn them into customers
With the first two options you're the website owner.
With the third option you can just own the domain name and get a done-for-you solution and plug it in on your own domain.
Our advice would be talking to someone that has experience with different options and can help you get an educated decision.
Concept #2: The role of social media
Social media usually have one main purpose and this is using it to build a presence and raise your brand awareness.
#1 Interested people will check your social media profiles to make sure you are a legit brand their can trust.
#2 They may visit your reviews section on Facebook and read your reviews on Google My Business.
#3 You can use it to collect information for people who visit your website and then build and run retargeting campaign using lookalike audiences.
Your organic postings should raise visitor's interest to learn more about your brand and your veggies. Being able to offer various type of content is key.
The V.R.I.N. concept will help you estimate your social media performance. The higher the average VRIN score, the better. The earlier you learn evaluating the quality of your content, the earlier you'll start building really solid foundations for your brand through social media.
Otherwise said, sometimes it almost doesn't make sense just having a dead social media profile with zero activity. You either use it on its purpose or it may even play a negative role when people interact with the profiles and make their own conclusions about your brand.
Concept #3: Paid vs Free Marketing to promote your farm.
Before we review advantages and disadvantages of paid and free marketing, let's quickly list the types of paid marketing options as there's a broader choice again to choose from.
Types of Paid Marketing for Farmers
Option 1. Outsourcing everything to a third party company.
There are hundreds of thousands of agencies, freelancers and marketing service companies that can be used for the same purpose.
Starting with a goal (i.e. number of orders per month) and defining your monthly budget will help each company or an individual to determine whether you are a good fit for their service.
You want to deal with those of them that have a proven record of happy clients and are result oriented.
In fact there are social media management companies as well that can replace you in creating and publishing content and same principles for filtering them apply when choosing a paid marketing company.
Back to the choices and the specifics. You might soon find out that not everything the way it's presented. That's why our advice would be getting in touch with someone you trust that can help you select the best option for you.
Being able to discover someone that specialize in marketing for farmers might be a great sign that the company or the individual really gets your problems and his services are already tailored towards farmers needs.
Of course there are smart marketers able to adapt their craft to any niche and you shouldn't try getting the perfect guy and delaying to launch your marketing forever.
Types of Free Marketing for Farmers
Free marketing is basically when you figure out and execute everything yourself or you delegate it to someone from your family.
In fact free is rare really free as you're spending time to craft it yourself and often your time will be limited.
Here are a couple of examples for free marketing:
- Using social media to create a positive image of your brand is considered as a free marketing.
- Running social media local campaigns through your social media profiles and a website is a free marketing
- Capturing your customers' emails and emailing them your weekly, bi-weekly or monthly offers is also something that you can do yourself or delegate it to someone from your family (if your farm is family run)
Paid Marketing vs Free Marketing
Sharing a couple of paragraphs for both option can now help us define better which one is better for us.
The truth is that possibly a combination of both could produce best results.
Great marketers need great images to work with and they will often count on your assistance to provide them the content.
Collaboration is key.
Most of the great services are able to determine your goals properly and then help you follow a plan.
However if you really know your marketing game and you just need to outsource the most time consuming tasks then you can hire people with specific skills to replace yourself and free up extra time for more strategic type of operations.
Microgreen farming remains mostly a local business and it's developed stage by stage:
- you start growing more veggies once you're used with growing the basic ones you started with.
- you start offering microgreens to a new neighborhood once you have reached the cap for your own neighborhood (depends on the model, but many small farms are fine staying in their own neighborhood)
The marketing could be also developed with a similar concept in mind:
- Initially you cover the basics - building a single social media profile with your business information, your story and images of your greens.
- Then you build a basic website
- Then you start promoting your offerings through social media and hashtags
Using Microgreenology as a marketing helper to support you in building your online presence
We're always keen on supporting microgreen farmers and it would be really cool to be able to contribute by consulting farmers for specific areas of their paid and free marketing campaigns.
The quickest way to get in touch and ask your questions or share your concerns is by PMing us on the Facebook page or on Instagram profile.
Feel free to ask us everything you can think of and we'll be more than happy to share our input.
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