Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Building Farm Partnerships in your Community’s Local Loop
334 Plays11 days ago
In this week’s episode, Kevin and Cory of Barn2Door’s Success Team discuss how Farms have built successful partnerships with other local businesses in their community. By identifying ideal partners and uncovering their Buyers' local loop, Farms have created convenient ways to expand their product reach.
For more Farm resources, visit: Barn2Door.com/Resources
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Independent Farmer Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer podcast, the go-to podcast for do-it-yourself farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman, and selling direct to local consumer and wholesale
About Barn to Door's Role and Offerings
00:00:20
Speaker
buyers.
00:00:20
Speaker
This podcast is hosted by Barn to Door, the number one business tool for independent farmers to manage their business, promote their brand, and sell online and in person. Let's dive in to today's Independent Farmer podcast.
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm Kevin, the head of our success team at Barnador, and I'm your host for today's episode. As many of our listeners may be aware, Barnador offers an all-in-one business solution for independent farmers who are cutting out the middleman, taking control of their business, selling under their brand, and making sure their customers can purchase from their farm both online and in person.
Community Partnerships and Their Benefits
00:01:08
Speaker
In today's conversation, we're going to get into utilizing partnerships in your community and the local loop to expand your farm's reach. Today, I'm happy to welcome back Corey, who's one of our account managers here at Barnador and helps farmers implement best practices when building their brand and direct-to-consumer operations.
00:01:27
Speaker
I'm excited to talk to Corey about forming partnerships with other local businesses, uncovering your community's local loop, and expanding your farm's reach to increase of sales. Welcome, Corey.
00:01:39
Speaker
Thanks, Kevin. Good to be back on the podcast. This is one of my favorite things to do at Barnador. Yeah, I've listened to some of your previous episodes. They are very good. You're a natural for this, that's for sure.
00:01:50
Speaker
And who better to have on this particular episode than someone who's probably had these types of conversations with farms more than just about anybody here. So Corey, can you give us maybe just a little background on how you help support farmers or trying to expand their reach within their community?
00:02:04
Speaker
Yeah. So when I meet with farmers as a farm account manager, I'm covering a lot of different things from the basics of helping farms, you know, help with their store, MailChimp.
00:02:16
Speaker
But a big portion of my meetings is having marketing conversations and having conversations on how to grow your customer list. how to effectively reach customers and drive those customers to your online store. So expanding out and tapping into their local market and partnering with businesses has been something that I've constantly been brainstorming ways, listening to other farmers' success stories of how they've been able to achieve that.
00:02:45
Speaker
So it's one of my favorite topics to discuss. And yeah, I'm excited dive a little more into it. Awesome. Now let's maybe just start then with
Strategies for Collaborating with Local Businesses
00:02:54
Speaker
a brief overview. Like what does it look like for a farm to partner with other local businesses?
00:02:59
Speaker
So it can look couple of different ways. From a very basic way, it can look like you're selling another business's products in your store or another business is selling your products in their store.
00:03:14
Speaker
Now you take kind of the next step. And we'll get into this a little bit more using the example of like a independent grocery, but maybe you're using a local business as a drop-off point, a convenient spot where some of your customers already frequent and you're utilizing that business as a drop-off point. They have refrigerators or cold storage.
00:03:37
Speaker
And in exchange, you're driving foot traffic into that business. It can look as simply as maybe in a church a coffee shop, you have your flyer on their bulletin board, or maybe that business is including a link to your store in their newsletter. So there's a number of different ways these kinds of partnerships can look and formulate.
00:03:59
Speaker
Yeah, I've even seen some farms partner with other local businesses to do giveaways to expand their reach. And, you know, they'll launch a giveaway, combine each other's products, use that to capture emails.
00:04:12
Speaker
share it on each other's socials and really boost each other's presence using their own current followings to essentially dip into each other's customer bases. Yeah, I mean, ultimately there's and an immense amount of ways in which they can partner with other businesses.
00:04:25
Speaker
And one additional topic we'll get into further that kind of goes hand in hand with partnerships is the concept of the local loop. So anyone that's not familiar with this term, could you maybe just give a brief explanation of what the local loop is?
00:04:38
Speaker
The local loop is going to be where yourself and your customers frequently visit the places of business, the locations. So this can be churches, grocery stores, schools, gyms, the places that are most frequently visited by yourself and your community or your potential customer base.
00:04:59
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And to expand on that a little further, generally, you know, you look at a suburban mom who's the ideal customer for a lot of our top farms. you know, every week she's kind of making the same trip, traveling throughout the community to and from school, dropping her kids.
00:05:16
Speaker
There might be a local gym in there on a weeknight, maybe a local church on the weekend, a coffee shop on a Saturday, or brewery on a Friday. And so those places that she is consistently going on a week to week or month to month basis would be a part of her local loop.
00:05:31
Speaker
So we all have slightly different local loops, obviously, but understanding your ideal customers. local loops and where they're already going can give you a leg up on the ability to get in front of them and secure more customers.
00:05:44
Speaker
Yeah, securing two birds with one stone situations. If someone's already going to, you know, church for a Wednesday night Bible study, that's a great, great way to knock out, you know, they're not making an extra trip to go pick up their order, places they're already visiting.
00:06:01
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. If you can meet them where they are, you're making their lives easier and and convenience is king when it comes to online e-commerce. The more convenient it is for people to get your products, and the more likely they are to want to purchase them. So Corey, let's dive a little bit deeper into some different ways we could partner with local businesses and really just like how to start as well.
00:06:21
Speaker
So like if I'm brand new, I've never partnered with anyone, like
Starting Community Partnerships: Tips and Strategies
00:06:25
Speaker
what would you recommend? How should I start this process? To start, before you do anything, I would first think about your approach.
00:06:33
Speaker
And as you're thinking about your approach, one thing I've started to talk to farms about doing is just take out a pen and paper, or maybe you're on your laptop, and start just jotting down names, people you know, whether that's friends, family, parents of your kids, coaches of your kids, sports teams, people you've worked with in the past,
00:06:55
Speaker
And start to just note down different people and like how you can network or speak with those people about your store and your online store. And then you can also start to jot down businesses that you're already familiar with.
00:07:11
Speaker
Maybe you will know the coffee shop owner in town. Maybe your friend or your kid's baseball coach knows the coffee shop owner in town or your friend's mom goes to the local yoga studio in town.
00:07:23
Speaker
So that's a very preliminary start. And then on top of that, I would start to think about your message that you're going to present these potential businesses with.
00:07:34
Speaker
Like, what am I going to portray as what a partnership would look like, what the benefits would be for that business when I speak with them? So you're just not going into it, you know, cold when you first start to approach these businesses with that.
00:07:50
Speaker
So you want to be ready to go and have a game plan. Now, i
Successful Case Studies of Community Partnerships
00:07:55
Speaker
was speaking with a farm very recently, and I think they're an amazing example of what it takes and what it looks like to form a partnership with a business. This farm had a local grocery, just a small local grocery that was focused on curating local products, had more of a health nutrition vibe to it. And she thought that would be an amazing partner, but didn't know this store owner
00:08:21
Speaker
So what she did, she first, she drove and went to that store. The owner manager wasn't there. So she dropped off her flyer. Now her flyer had her QR code to her signup form. It had her website yeah URL on it, had some key bullet points on what she does and what her overall values are like grass fed or sustainably raised or just locally raised, whatever's most important to you and you want to portray.
00:08:49
Speaker
Those are good things to list as well. Now, she then followed up that after driving home, she followed up a few days later with a phone call and talked to the owner. Did you see that flyer?
00:09:01
Speaker
Owner answered, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, she eventually talked to that owner again and said, hey, I think it'd be great for us to meet. Let me just get in front of you and talk to you about what I do and what this could look like.
00:09:14
Speaker
The owner was apprehensive, again, not really knowing her, but once she was actually able to drive and schedule that in-person meeting, hey, here's what it's going to look like. I could just do you know pop-ups, have my bundle boxes. I already have this existing customer base that are placing orders all the time on my online store.
00:09:32
Speaker
They're going to be placing orders. It's going to be more customers coming to your storefront on a Saturday afternoon. it'd be great for me because I'm going to have access to more customers. So that was a lot of effort on her behalf.
00:09:43
Speaker
And she took ah all different approaches from emailing and calling to going in person, dropping off a flyer to following up and actually scheduling a physical in-person meeting.
00:09:54
Speaker
So that's what it takes a lot of the times, but the hard work definitely paid off in that scenario. Yeah. Amazing. What a great story. And I love the way you started that too, is just like for people to sit down and just analyze their own current network. Because a lot of times so we don't realize how strong that network is and how many people we know and how many connections and opportunities may exist right there when we just sit down and simply write out who we know and who they may know and then start asking people for help.
00:10:23
Speaker
One other thing that is probably worth talking about here too, when we're looking at starting is once we've kind of Exhausted those means would be utilizing the brand basics worksheet at Barnador, where we will work with farmers to help them identify their ideal customer and then places those ideal customers frequent. Could you maybe give a little insight into what that process looks like as well, Corey?
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, the brand basic worksheet's an incredible resource as well. and kind of serves as almost a guideline to some of the list building that I was referencing earlier. They will actually send out that brand basics worksheet before a lot of our academies like grassroots marketing or social media academy. And it's just, it's a thinking exercise as much as anything else.
00:11:04
Speaker
It'll help you kind of go through your local loop, like it'll ask you to identify the places you frequently visit, churches, schools. It'll ask you to identify who you think your ideal customer demographic is.
00:11:16
Speaker
Is it, you know, young adults? Is it married folks? Is it a ah couple with three, four young kids? Is it, you know, like you referenced earlier, suburban Sally, your active gym goer?
00:11:29
Speaker
So it's making you think about all these things that for a lot of farms I've met with who are new to selling in general or selling online, a lot of times they haven't really like put a ton of thought into who is my core demographic?
00:11:43
Speaker
Who's going to be my ideal customer? And that brand basics worksheet does a really good job of helping you dig deeper into some of those things. Yeah. Like you said, the simple act of sitting down and identifying who that ideal customer is, their demographic information, where they're frequenting can really help you utilize your marketing efforts more wisely. So you're not trying to market to everyone and not trying to make everyone your customer, but a very select group of people, which can allow you to be much more specific with your messaging, as well as where you're going to find those people.
00:12:14
Speaker
You mentioned on the brief overview, some different ways we can partner with local businesses. We just maybe go over a few other ways in which some farms can partner with local businesses. Yeah, absolutely. So we touched on earlier, some brief overviews of ways that you can partner with other businesses.
00:12:31
Speaker
Now, some of the most successful ways I've seen are from a very basic standpoint of <unk> changing social media shout outs. Like maybe you are partnering with the local coffee shop in town and you've started to build a little bit of a Facebook or Instagram instagram following, you know, you're promoting their store and maybe they're promoting you're sending them over your barn-to-door store link and they're posting that for you on Facebook.
00:12:58
Speaker
And you can get into things, you know, a little bit deeper. Like I had mentioned, the local grocery, which is a great example because sometimes they might have refrigerator space. So if you are protein farm doing beef, pork, chicken, and you need cold storage, partnering with like a local grocery to be able to drop off your bundle boxes for your customers to pick up,
00:13:20
Speaker
And again, you're kind of messaging that to the owner as, hey, in exchange for this cold storage, like we kind of share ideal customers. Customers are buying from me because they want local sustainable foods.
00:13:34
Speaker
Those are kind of the same people who are visiting your store. So while they're coming to pick up bundles, I'm driving that traffic into your store. Yeah, that's fantastic, Corey. I know many of our most successful farms, their mindset is never turned out an opportunity to meet with someone or get your name out there. So, um you know, if it's local news organization that wants to do a story on you or, you know, you have an opportunity or seek out opportunities to even go speak at schools or do school field trips, work with your local church and do giveaways or even speak at the local church. We've had very savvy farmers as well.
00:14:07
Speaker
look at building co-op and workspaces. We have a farm actually that drops their CSA off here where we work. We have a 19th floor and a downtown office with a number of other businesses that share this workspace and they advertise their CSA here and drop it off every week and every two weeks for people to pick up.
00:14:23
Speaker
And ultimately, but the more opportunities farms take to get their name out there, the more opportunities they give themselves to build a ah strong customer base. So Corey, let's move on a little bit and talk more about when farms are forming partnerships, where should they begin?
00:14:37
Speaker
So, and I should have mentioned this earlier, Kevin, because one of my favorite exercises to do when I meet with farms is when we're actually looking at what businesses we're identifying is to just pull up Google maps, right?
00:14:50
Speaker
This is after we've already started brainstorming, using the brand basics worksheet and creating our own list. But when I'm in with farms, so I will just pull up maps, whatever, where's the town, where's the city, where's the neighborhood that you were looking to target? Where do you think your ideal customers are going to be coming from?
00:15:07
Speaker
And so one exercise I'll do is I'll pull up Google maps and I'm just going to type in gyms. When you do that on Google maps, red dots are going to populate on the screen that are going to show you each gym in that area.
00:15:20
Speaker
And you can hover over it. You're going to see what the gym You're going to be able to see the website link now. I will, and this goes for other businesses as well, because I'm going to add a few key things that are going to help us here.
00:15:34
Speaker
We're going to immediately eliminate any chains, right? Same goes for coffee shops or grocery stores, 24 Hour Fitness, Anytime Fitness. We're going to eliminate those. We're specifically doing this on Google Maps to identify those gyms where we can actually talk to a decision maker.
00:15:51
Speaker
That's going to help us. So you can do the same thing for whatever businesses you're looking for, but starting there, mapping out Google maps, and then you're just going to the website.
00:16:03
Speaker
There's going to be contact information, pull phone numbers, pull emails. That's your first place to start. Make sure you have something ready to go that has a link to your store, what you're looking to do, what you're looking to offer.
00:16:15
Speaker
But before driving out to meet people or picking up the phone, I would just start behind your computer and pulling up Google Maps. Yeah, I love that. And I think coming back to what you said on the front end, because it's worth repeating here is that going back to the local loop and looking at your own connections, but your own local loop, right?
00:16:32
Speaker
Start there first. It's a great, simple starting point. Businesses that you go to, restaurants that you visit, a school that maybe, be if you have any kids that go to a school, if you attend a church, places within your own local loop that you're already frequenting are also very good places to start.
00:16:49
Speaker
Corey, what are some typical partnerships that see your farms forming? So I just touched on like the Google Maps and I use the example of gyms. But
Exploring Unique Partnering Opportunities
00:16:59
Speaker
I use that example for a reason because that's been an extremely successful partnership for a lot of farms I've worked with.
00:17:05
Speaker
I initially started mentioning that because I'm a gym goer myself. I also am someone who cares a lot about the food that I eat. I'm very nutritionally focused.
00:17:16
Speaker
And so going to local farms, like as soon as you get anybody who is nutritionally focused or fitness focused, they're going to eventually listen to something or read something that's going to tell them how amazing it is to buy from a local producer.
00:17:29
Speaker
Right? So when they do that, those people are looking for farms. The big issue right now is they don't have the awareness. Like if I asked any of my friends where they would go to buy from a local farmer, they're going to say, I guess the farmer's market.
00:17:43
Speaker
Yes, that same question, the person's going to say, well, you know, I go to the farmer's market maybe once a month or once a year even, which I think is actually the statistic in which ah average Americans freak with the market.
00:17:57
Speaker
So gyms is an incredible partnership. Those people are going to be nutritionally focused. They're going to be quality focused. They're not going to be price focused on the food they're purchasing. Now, I've had it go from as simple as the gym owner allows you to hang up your flyer with your QR code to they're going to include your store link, your Barnador store link on their newsletter to their own internal customer base.
00:18:22
Speaker
All the way to I have a gym that drops off a cooler of beef sticks as a quick snack for gym goers. I have farms that do bundle boxes and protein subscription drop-offs at gyms.
00:18:36
Speaker
So there's a wide range. I mean, you're going to take a little, but you know, you continue to develop that relationship. And generally gym owners are pretty excited to speak with farms because there's a reason they're that entrepreneur and they started a gym. They're probably pretty aligned with what you're going to be doing.
00:18:54
Speaker
So gyms is a huge one. We already discussed local groceries, utilizing schools, like just going within your own family. A lot of times we've spoken with farms who will go to, you know, their kids' schools and do guest speaking events. It's a great way to get in front of parents or, you know, in exchange, hey, we actually do on-farm visits. You can bring your kids out to the farm, but that's an awesome ah opportunity as well. Just also not even building the customer base, but starting to build an actual relationship and a brand loyalty, you know, if parents,
00:19:33
Speaker
are super excited about a farmer speaking to their kids and now knowing there's a place where they can take their kids out to see, you know, animals and spend a day outdoors.
00:19:44
Speaker
And then the last thing I'll highlight, just because I've heard it so often as well as churches, obviously churches have bulletin boards in their lobbies, but we've even had farms who after Sunday services will have their truck with coolers and do pop-ups outside of the church as the congregation's flooding out the doors.
00:20:04
Speaker
So that's an ideal scenario as well. And there's many, many more examples I could get into, but those are some of the key big ones. Great examples, Corey. I'll share a couple I've seen. I've seen local breweries be a great pickup for some farms.
00:20:19
Speaker
Unique thing about a local brewery is the people that are going there value local products. They're generally going to be paying two to three times more for the same for of a domestic beer versus the local brewery.
00:20:32
Speaker
So they really want a high quality local product. And generally you have people that are going there consistently on weekends. Salons have some potential. You talk about, again, another ideal customer overlap, Suburban Sally, a lot of people go in local beauty shops or salons. And then one thing maybe worth just mentioning here, Corey, one thing you and I were discussing the other day was potential for like firehouses. Do you want to maybe share a little bit about what we were thinking about with that?
00:20:55
Speaker
Oh yeah, firehouses. And another one of our account managers, Ryan k Grace, has brought this up as well. But thinking about incredible partnerships, when you think about firehouses, almost every single town, city has a firehouse.
00:21:11
Speaker
A lot of times those firehouses are going to have their huge garage doors open and you're going to be able to see the firemen hanging out inside. And those firemen spend a lot of time together, cooking, grilling,
00:21:24
Speaker
doing different activities. They're also generally very involved in the community and very highly regarded by the rest of the surrounding community. So that could be a super approachable business to, you know, just go over to, Hey, I know you guys love to grill.
00:21:41
Speaker
I've got my incredible beef and pork box. If you guys placed an order in my online store, I can come drop it off. Maybe we could have some other customers come to the firehouse to pick up or you guys start spreading the word for me as well.
00:21:56
Speaker
So firehouses is a unique one, but I do really love it. When I first heard it and the more I thought about i was like, yeah, that would be an awesome partnership. Yeah, absolutely. Great. Thank you for sharing all those examples, Corey. Let's talk a little bit more about just like uncovering the local loop in your community. Like
Networking and Understanding the Local Loop
00:22:13
Speaker
If we're, again, starting out and looking to find our local loop in our community, where should we, how can we uncover that further?
00:22:19
Speaker
I mean, I think it's for a lot of farms, Kevin, and this is, you know, I have this conversation with farmers where you're on a farm, right? A lot of times your farm is generally pretty removed from the actual town or city.
00:22:35
Speaker
You're very rural. Maybe it's 15 minutes, maybe it's an hour away. to where the bulk of your customers actually live and the local loop that you're looking to identify.
00:22:47
Speaker
So I think the first step in starting to uncover more about your local loop is getting off the farm a little bit, right? It's gonna be leaving the farm and driving into town and starting to scout out local businesses, talking to folks, shaking hands, because we can talk about all these different marketing strategies, QR codes, flyers, driving people to your online store.
00:23:11
Speaker
The best way still to bring awareness to the fact that you have an online store is word of mouth and it's meeting with people and you're never going to be able to portray the message in a way that you want it to better than you will be able to in person and actually talking to folks. So I think that's the biggest thing in uncovering your local loop is starting to Get off the farm and talking to folks about where would be a convenient pickup location if you were able to establish one. Yeah, talking to people and asking questions. There's so much that can be learned from asking questions and such a simple practice to implement. Some other things we've seen some farms do that have been helpful, surveying people, right? Sending out a survey on social media or email and then just getting a grasp on customer routines can be really helpful as well.
00:24:01
Speaker
understanding what their routines are. And again, sometimes that comes through just talking and asking questions. So Corey, when we look at partnerships and the local loop, there's some overlap there when it comes to farmers marketing efforts. Could you maybe expand on some of the overlap you've seen between those two?
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah. And so one thing I want to highlight that immediately popped into my head, Kevin, you had mentioned breweries just a minute ago. So a lot of our farms might already have wholesale relationships with clientele like breweries or restaurants that they're already making frequent visits to.
00:24:34
Speaker
Well, it's always worth speaking with some of those owners in your point of contact. Do you have the wholesale relationship with and see if there's an opportunity for that business to be a pickup location for the rest of your customer base?
00:24:46
Speaker
So I think that's a great overlap. Again, You're already frequenting, maybe delivering that wholesale order each week, and potentially you have a great relationship with them.
00:24:57
Speaker
And your customers are already, you know, a lot of them already like to frequent that brewery. So might be potential for them to pick up their bundle box on their way home. Now, looking at some other ways this kind of overlaps, one thing I actually mentioned to you in the office today, Kevin, maybe you're a farmer with young kids.
00:25:16
Speaker
Maybe you have friends who have kids. I was speaking with a farmer the other day who was going to baseball tournaments, Little League baseball tournaments almost every single weekend. And everybody knows, like Little League baseball, you have your little concession stands there.
00:25:31
Speaker
Well, he sought an opportunity to bring coolers with his beef sticks. And what better way where you know a high concentration of customers gonna be in one area, you're gonna have a lot of parents watching kids baseball, getting hungry, and do you have, you know, better healthier better option than what's generally available at those little league baseball games as someone who spent a lot of time playing sports and knows what's offered for parents and kids playing sports so that's an awesome opportunity to just meet people introduce them to your products get a sampling out there yeah can't tell you how many packs of bubble gum and packs of skittles i had growing up playing baseball would have been much welcome to have some local farm food for sure exactly
00:26:19
Speaker
Corey, any other parting words of wisdom you want to share before we wrap up? One thing I'll just mention, because it's not as much related to, we've talked a lot about the the different local businesses and your local loop that you can partner with and start to identify.
00:26:35
Speaker
But sometimes that might look in the sense of like an actual club or an organization. So I just wanted to mention that to close too, because I've had farmers who have built partnerships because they're part of their local Rotary Club or the local chambers of commerce, right?
00:26:51
Speaker
where that's a great place to meet local business owners. So even going to a town hall meeting or getting involved in one of those organizations, that can be a great way, again, to get you off the farm and start building some of those relationships and networking.
00:27:09
Speaker
I love that. That's great. Well, Corey, thank you so much. I want to extend thanks to you for joining us on this week's podcast episode.
Podcast Wrap-up and Resources
00:27:15
Speaker
You can check out more of Barn to Door on our Instagram at Barn to Door.
00:27:19
Speaker
here at Barnador, we are humbled to support thousands of independent farmers across the country. We're delighted to offer services and tools to help farmers access more customers, increase their sales, and save time for their business.
00:27:33
Speaker
If you're an independent farmer who's just getting started or transitioning to selling direct, or if you've been at it a while and want to simplify your business management, please visit www.barnador.com slash learn dash more.
00:27:47
Speaker
Thank you for tuning in today. We look forward to joining you next time on the Independent Farmer Podcast.
00:28:03
Speaker
Thank you for joining us on the Independent Farmer Podcast. At Barn to Door, we are passionate about empowering independent farmers to build a thriving business. To all the farmers out there, thank you for all you do to grow amazing food, care for the soil, and serve your local communities.
00:28:18
Speaker
You are the backbone of our country. For free farm resources or to listen to prior podcasts, go to barntodore.com backslash resources. We hope you join us again and subscribe to the Independent Farmer Podcast wherever you stream your podcasts. Until next time.