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Marketing in the Offseason
113 Plays2 years ago
Join us as we share tips and tricks to keep your business thriving all year round. In this episode, we're going to talk about how to retain your customers during the slow season and keep them engaged with your brand. We'll also share some examples of successful off-season marketing campaigns from other seasonal businesses. If you want to learn more, check out this website for some great webinars on off-season retention: https://www.uky.edu/ccd/fallwebinars/Offseason_Retention. Stay tuned and let's get started!
Offseason Marketing and Customer Retention
Wholesale, Institutional, and Multi-farmer Marketing
Center For Crop Diversification Value Added Resources
Publication: What to Think About Before You Plant
Kentucky Farm to School Network
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Hort Culture'
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hey, hey, hey. How's everybody doing today? Today? Today. I don't. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today. Today.
Humorous Anecdote: The Donut Incident
00:00:38
Speaker
Discombobulated it's been a weird week, and I know it's been a weird week because for the second day in a row I have grease stains on my pants from the donut That sounds like a good day. I'm just sad that you dropped enough donut to leave a grease stain well It was my driving donut and driving donut just walking
00:01:03
Speaker
We're going straight into fall foods on this. Yeah. If you, if you know me, I eat my, you know, next day pizza is walking pizza and I never sit down with it. And so, but I have a driving donut. I have a driving donut in the morning, the past two mornings. So I've had to sit it down on my lap. So like, I can like put all my stuff in, in its spot. And then I pick it up and I have a grease stain all day on my pants from this fricking donut. And, um, like a circle.
00:01:30
Speaker
Yeah, like a bull's eye. We talked about the last episode and you were taking care of your tools. It is what it is. What I like to do is if you get a garbage bag, you can put a head hole and arm holes in it.
00:01:49
Speaker
and that's what i put on before i do any last shield i like it i like that well you know i was on my way to work i'm supposed to be a professional but now i have donuts grease stains all over me can you take you seriously i have a master's degree that's a it's a it's builds it's like a rapport builder i am one of the people it's a conversation starter
00:02:13
Speaker
They should elect me. Donuts.
Challenges of Marketing Season-Extended Crops
00:02:17
Speaker
Anyways, what are we talking today? What are we talking about today? Yeah. Well, so we've talked a little bit about season extension, you know, as this concept that everybody, not everybody, many people have a fervor for this idea of being able to grow things into the off season or the traditional off season outside of the seasonal window for horticulture, outdoor crops in Kentucky and other places.
00:02:42
Speaker
One of the vexing problems sometimes with those season extended crops is if you're growing them to sell, how do you sell them? How do you market them? Or even if you don't grow things in the off season, surely we just take time off of everything, including production and marketing and thinking about the business, go into a hibernation- Farmers don't work in the winter, right?
00:03:08
Speaker
Yeah. Check back went after the first frost or the last frost date, right? Vacation time.
Off-Season Marketing Strategies
00:03:15
Speaker
And so we thought we'd just talk about this, like this concept of off season marketing and some of the things that you might do or consider or think about both in terms of if you wanted to expand your season a little bit and expand your selling window a little bit, but also even if you're not, what can you be doing to prepare that in the off season?
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, I have a couple of different things sketched out here of what we can maybe talk through, but do you all have any initial thoughts on why even to think about this in the first place? What's the point of talking about this? What do you have in mind when you hear off-season marketing? The thing I always find interesting is during the off-season, you want to keep people... My father always said, we had a truck route for vegetables, but he said, you got to keep
00:04:02
Speaker
people thinking about you and i always thought about that in the off season when he said that you said you know you wanna maintain relationships and you know that was years ago before the onset of social media so on so forth but he was just talking about making those relationships so that people wouldn't forget about you and go do something else with those resources with their time or.
00:04:22
Speaker
or whatever. But that's what I think about when I think about off-season marketing, I guess, is I don't know if I'm even to the point of thinking about expansion, but I'm just thinking about keeping what I have as far as a customer base. And I don't know. There's lots of different ways to do that, I'm sure. But yeah, that's what I think about, Brett, first, when I think about the off-season is depending on the nature of your horticulture business.
00:04:47
Speaker
is first of all, who's your customers and how do you keep at the top of their mind?
Maintaining Customer Relationships Off-Season
00:04:52
Speaker
That's what I think about. Yeah, I think of that too, as well as like shelf stable kind of products, you know, kind of push out into that time period where it's an exciting time in Kentucky, there's a lot more of those and we have several outlets in the my personal county now that's like complete small grocery stores with shelf stable products and I think that's awesome. Yeah, that's a great point.
00:05:14
Speaker
I guess by that I should say like, you know, sauces and whatnot. Yeah. Yeah. Can you say all that's out of season that I've been in some kind of value added product or, you know, something like that. Sure. What else? What about you Alexis?
00:05:30
Speaker
On top of all of the things already said, I think I think about building my audience as well. Maintaining what I have, but also building what I have so that when I do have a product, a tangible product they can buy, but also, you know, selling those CSA shares, things like that, like that income. So I think maintaining and building, you know, my market and whether that's, you know, through relationships or education or, you know,
00:05:57
Speaker
You want to keep people thinking about you, but, uh, my, my big goal personally is, is, is building as well. You know, I think I'm doing a pretty good job maintaining. How do I take the next step into build my audience? So when I've got product, they know about it. Yeah. I think, I think that's, I mean, all of this kind of touches on the central things that I had sketched out here.
Simplifying Marketing Tasks
00:06:19
Speaker
And I think, you know, sometimes people tend to think of marketing as a complicated.
00:06:24
Speaker
thing or this thing with like all these secrets. And I think in general, like a lot of other stuff in life, marketing is mostly a bunch of small, simple things that when combined become complex. But a lot of the individual components of the things that we're doing are not that complicated in many cases. And so, excuse me, I think, you know, one of the things you're talking about so far a little bit is the
00:06:51
Speaker
thinking about like how much time you have available at different times of year. And if so, if we're, if we're starting with businesses that are not going to be trying to sell during directly actively sell during the off season, I think of it to put some different words to what you all said, it's a time for strategy.
Branding and Marketing Strategy
00:07:08
Speaker
And it's a time for planning what that marketing might look like. And so
00:07:14
Speaker
Be curious to hear what you all think. Are you evaluating then too, you guys? Are you evaluating your current efforts that you've already kind of went through? I think that the strategy is informed in part by evaluation and reflection back. And Alexis is talking about kind of targeting new markets or new customers, new clientele.
00:07:33
Speaker
I think it's also an opportunity to work on your branding within the strategy, which is to say maybe you think a little bit more about developing some materials either for your new cards that go on your new bouquet or the new sticker that's going to go on your blueberry container that you are selling the next year. It could also be a lot of folks
00:07:59
Speaker
you will use like templates for their social media stuff where they kind of develop a template that has the brand, the whatever, sorry, the logo, the branding, et cetera, and you can drop a picture into it, drop a message into it, and then use that for, you know, or attach a message to it, and then use that for your social media. This is an opportunity, a time of year where you're not scrambling. It's almost like people who really get really into meal planning.
00:08:27
Speaker
you know, where it's like, I can batch out these meals during this focused period of time, and then I have this thing during the week, I can just grab it and go. I think that any, you could think about that in terms of your marketing approach too. Are there things, there are certain aspects of marketing that you're just going to have to do in real time, right? You can't pre-comment on someone's comment on your Instagram post, right?
00:08:52
Speaker
Wow, thank you for this information, which may or may may be positive or negative. I appreciate it. No, you're going to have to do that in real time. But I think that there are it's a good time also to think about maybe organizing your
00:09:04
Speaker
your pictures that you've taken over the course of the year, putting some labels in. I can't tell you how many times being able to search pictures and search for content that you've created. It's really helpful and I always am glad that I did it. Most of mine are just silly things of vacations or my dog mostly.
00:09:25
Speaker
All the pictures are just labeled bear. Bear on vacation. That's a little bit of that strategy and planning component of marketing.
00:09:37
Speaker
Yeah,
Creating Content Pillars for Marketing
00:09:38
Speaker
anything you all kind of in that general? I heard something that resonated with me that I think goes along with what you said is kind of coming up with your top three, maybe three to five, those pillars you want people to know.
00:10:02
Speaker
that you've got this product, it's a sale, and then you've got maybe information on the growing practices or whatever that is. And then maybe that third one is something more personal, so personal to your family or however
00:10:17
Speaker
However, you want to connect to people and having those ideas where if you're trying to think of a social media post or an email message or whatever kind of marketing you're doing, does it fall within one of those pillars? And it can be helpful when trying to figure out what you're going to post and you're like, okay, well, I've talked about, because I think a lot of people feel very salesy in the winter. Like they're very, you know, a car, they feel like a slimy car salesman or something. And so it can feel weird.
00:10:46
Speaker
but if you can kind of mix it up well these are the things that I want to be able to share to people this is what my market you know yeah you're not going to call your wholesaler and be like let me tell you all about how I grow my geraniums like they don't they don't care they want to know how much your geraniums cost right but depending on your market and this is maybe more for the retail side kind of coming up with those pillars that you want to
00:11:07
Speaker
Talk to people about and maybe you organize your pictures that way or you know You you come up with some posts those grab-and-go things that fit within those pillars And I think that that had been that thought process was really helpful for me Of
Structured Marketing Approach and Audience Understanding
00:11:22
Speaker
kind of organizing. I like to compartmentalize things. I'm like a tree I like to compartmentalize and that was really that made my brain clicked for my brain So maybe that will be helpful to someone Yeah, I think in general if you kind of give yourself if you form a little bit of a structure for yourself
00:11:38
Speaker
Sometimes the difficult part of life is knowing what not to pay attention to or what not to give your energy to. And so, you know, thinking if you're thinking about social media posts, for instance, you might frame it as there's kind of a look behind the scenes of the farm. There's just a nice product picture.
00:12:01
Speaker
there's an education post, and there's a sales post, and that's four posts you're gonna do in the course of a week, for instance, and that's your structure. It doesn't have to be the same, but every week you're looking to do one of each of those. I think one of the more heady, intimidating, woo woo, I don't know what.
00:12:24
Speaker
That's how people experience, teams seem to experience it with branding is thinking really about your values and the values that your customers have and the things that they value in your product. And again, it's a really big question or it can feel kind of, yeah, a little touchy feely, but I think one of the things I talk about in local products at least is differentiation is
00:12:50
Speaker
is your bread
Product Differentiation and Customer Values
00:12:51
Speaker
and butter. That is why people would buy your product. Why is it special and why is it special to them? And taking some time to think about that and you may be able, this is another aspect of something you might consider doing in the off season is a little bit of market consumer research trying to pull. Maybe you tell people if they fill out the survey, they get 10% off their first whatever purchase from you or you give them some sort of incentive to
00:13:20
Speaker
to fill out and give you some honest feedback. And if you give them something, you might be able to ask a little bit more information to doing that, you know, during this time of year can be, it can be a time where you have more space, mental space to be able to try and do it. I like that idea a lot. Trying to get some feet, getting feedback from people right now and staying kind of on their, their radar during that time. Ray, you had mentioned, you know, on the staying on the radar,
00:13:47
Speaker
I think you had mentioned the stain in people's minds or any thoughts you have on that kind of mechanisms for doing that? When I think about that now, I guess I don't think about this topic a great deal and I should think about marketing first and foremost, but one of the things I wonder about a great deal is, is it easier now with all of the channels that we have? We have traditional channels like
00:14:14
Speaker
You know newspaper articles or ads and all the way up through the latest greatest fifteen twelve to fifteen second you know social media videos for kind of product placement sort of things. I guess that's the one thing is knowing and you know Lexus started to touch on this is I guess knowing your.
00:14:33
Speaker
Potential customer and how are they consuming or being formed about local products? I mean, is that easier now that there seems to be just such a wealth of marketing venues and avenues? What are you guys hearing? That's one of the things I think a lot about and I know that overwhelms people and I like the way that you're structuring that Brett.
00:14:53
Speaker
When you talk about you have to have a thinking structure in place first, or like Alexis put it, the way she puts it is compartmentalizes kind of the way she thinks about things. And I think having that hierarchy in place for marketing is pretty important because if you have a wholesale buyer, obviously you're going to not market to them in the same way that you are trying to market to a crowd that may be urban and between the ages of 20 and 40.
00:15:22
Speaker
I mean, is that's what I think about in marketing and try to wrap my head around first is the potential. Who is your potential customers? And then how do they consume or know about things? Simple as that. And then I try to target those mechanisms that they use to inform themselves with a good old fashioned kind of marketing research. I mean, how do people get to that point of knowing, you know, which channels are effective and I, and I, and I love feedback. I love evaluation.
00:15:51
Speaker
You know if i try things out i want some kind of feedback and that's the thing about social media is there's usually some kind of feedback mechanism that's pretty immediate it seems like. That's kinda how i think about these topics with marketing and wrapping my head around things and it all starts it all keeps going right back to one thing and that's who your potential customer is and working out from there.
00:16:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think do I also have any any thoughts on that? Well, something that really resonated with what you said about thinking about using the offseason to sort of organize and develop a strategy that you sort of deploy throughout the season.
00:16:32
Speaker
That really is the first time the concept of marketing has appealed to me, because I think of it as something that unrolls and unfolds during the season. And frankly, during the season, when I'm doing farm work, my idea of marketing is like, this stuff sells itself. I shouldn't have to explain anything to anybody ever. Like, I'm too busy. Right. Like, this is awesome. Either you want it or you don't. Think about it. It might be for the right to not buy this. Right.
00:17:00
Speaker
Whereas to take that time in the winter to really sit down and engage with these questions of what do my clients want? What do my subscribers want? How might I organize a series of recipes to put together and roll out with, say, subscriber shares and things like that? It takes the pressure off of switching those gears between production and sales.
00:17:29
Speaker
And yeah, that would really, that appeals to me. It stands out.
00:17:35
Speaker
I think horticulture in Kentucky where we are seasonal, depending on the operation that you're in, unless you're in just a completely controlled environment, such as a greenhouse and you have year round production that's pretty consistent. I think that adds an interesting spin on things here in Kentucky is our seasonality. That's not the same in all places. I mean, does that affect things, Brett? The seasonality, potential seasonality of some of the products that we're trying to get out into the world?
00:18:02
Speaker
Definitely, definitely. And I also want to say one more thing about the maybe some of the marketing outlook before maybe we can jump over there to the seasonality and season extension and the different ways of achieving that.
Social Media Strategies vs. Large Corporations
00:18:14
Speaker
But I think, you know, I have a talk about like social media analytics and web analytics. And in general, some of my talks about social media, I'll put up a picture and it's it's like this
00:18:29
Speaker
digital war room, basically like a bunch of computers, lots of people, you know.
00:18:36
Speaker
Dozens of people and they have all that, you know analytics and I say I I hate to break it to you, but like coca-cola This is what their social media team looks like Right and then I cut to if you're lucky and I show a picture of a baby like holding a phone if you're lucky This is what your social media looks like Part-time baby, right part-time baby who can work the iPhone better than me but the point being that I think
00:19:02
Speaker
sometimes we tend to think of social media marketing and digital marketing as a small farm and Coca-Cola being on an even playing field or using the tools in the same way. And I think honestly, they're using the same tools in radically different ways. Totally. And what I mean by that is Coca-Cola, the person who's marketing that
00:19:27
Speaker
is very likely selling you, the person who's working to sell you that product very likely will never ever meet you, maybe even be in the same state with you at any point in their life. Whereas the people who I think who do small farm marketing
00:19:44
Speaker
well through social media are ultimately using it as an extension of their interpersonal relationships. They're using it as a tool for bridging some of those gaps. And so that could be showing their face on it, but it could also just be thinking about how can I confirm experiences that people have had with my product and with my business
00:20:06
Speaker
through my social media and vice versa. Is there a brand authenticity across those two different types of experiences? And in many cases, because the people who are doing it are so amazing and authentic, that wouldn't occur to them to lie on their social media or lie in real life, to have a disconnect there. And so all that I'm saying with that is,
00:20:30
Speaker
Something I think about a lot, especially in the off season, are some of those relationship building opportunities that aren't just
00:20:39
Speaker
Make sure you still have some social media posts going out, which you should make sure that you're still reminding people that you're going to be back and when you're going to be back and thanking them for the season that you've had, which you should, you should be doing those things. But I think also just taking opportunities if there are either events or other types of locations or.
00:21:01
Speaker
whatever, just taking opportunities to try and make some other connections. That could be with additional buyers. It could be if there's a local, like local fair event type things where you could get out or maybe your business provides a sponsorship to something in the off season, something like that, to just kind of keep that human level profile elevated in the minds of people. I think that's another, just another thing to think about.
00:21:28
Speaker
We're not, in the small farms world, we don't have the luxury of twisting the dials and knobs on the social media machine to make people buy what we want them to buy. It's much more of a relationship driven business in most cases, regardless. And some of those relationships could be emailing, sending out an email to the people who are on your email list saying thank you or offering them some sort of incentive to buy from you again.
00:21:57
Speaker
It could be also it could be if you're interested in selling to other types of businesses things like restaurants or things like. You know other retailers or in the case of like flowers if you were trying to.
00:22:13
Speaker
have a certain business, you know, buy flowers to put on the tables in their restaurant or put, you know, have a display at their, if you offer like office suite, you know, arrangements or something, I don't know, something like that. Those types of going out and exploring, again, just thinking, I have the time now to think about this.
00:22:32
Speaker
to develop maybe a product or a service that I can offer, and then being able to go out and talk and interact when you're not frazzled by the realities of a grown man, as Josh was talking about. This reminds me, and I think you said this, and it reminds me of some of the best advice I've ever gotten. It was given to me from an extension personnel, but I have adapted it and said, well, this makes sense for business as well as
00:22:58
Speaker
People come to your classes, people buy things when we're talking about small, not even just small, but the more local aspect of communities because of you and their relationship to you.
00:23:14
Speaker
who, you know, their connection to you because they can get tomatoes at the store. They can get tomatoes from anyone at the farmer's market. So why are they buying them from you? Yeah, maybe they taste better. You can spit a lot of facts while local flowers are better and sustainability and blah, blah, blah. But when it comes down to it, there are more of you or more businesses
00:23:35
Speaker
Similar enough to you but why why you why should they buy from you and so making that connection on a more personal level and like you said like I know a lot of people are uncomfortable with you know putting their face on social media just it's just not something but having a face to connect to that product even if it's occasionally
00:23:53
Speaker
or even like a picture of your dog sometimes can be enough. I love those categories Brett mentioned. It takes some of the cognitive load off when it's fast and fierce in the summer. You have categories of things that you want to convey that are very specific. I think that's great. Like the dog picture may convey a certain behind the scenes personal aspect of the farm versus field production aspect. What relationship can you form with those people even if you never meet them
00:24:21
Speaker
or maybe never even messaged them, but they feel like they have a relationship with you. And I feel like, you know, we probably all have someone like Brett talks about all his bonsai people that he watches. Like in the way he talks about them is as if he kind of almost had a relationship with them. They're my best friends. And so he's more likely to buy something from those people. Yeah. I'm wearing my hoodies right now.
00:24:43
Speaker
Exactly. So how do you become that? And it's by being, most importantly, your most authentic self. You don't need to buy your followers and fake your personality or anything, but just be yourself and share your hardships, share all of those things with people and kind of set yourself up to
00:25:04
Speaker
be a little bit more open. And if I can do it, you can do it. Yeah. As has ever been a problem. And I can think of a couple situations where that kind of relate to the comment I'm about to make. But have you and I know, Josh, you and Brett work on more of a state level, whereas Alexis and I are county based. But have you guys ever worked with someone that's been like really, really good at marketing to the point to where they may have over marketed? I mean,
00:25:30
Speaker
And because I guess what I'm getting as you have an operation social media can be very powerful if you know how to work that and marketing channels if you're good at marketing and you have just X amount of production capacity have you guys ever anybody that's been so good at marketing that they ran into production issues not being enough.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yes, it's a great problem. Yeah, I would say in general for every one person that is like that there are 20 who are great into production and are not they don't think that much about marketing or don't care much for marketing.
00:26:10
Speaker
I would say more like a hundred. Yeah. So the vast amount of people are more, it seems like that I work with a more producer oriented versus marketing oriented. Definitely. But like in the case, one of the case very specifically, there was people, the people who were very, very good at marketing. And when it came time to deliver the product, the product was of a massively inferior quality. And the people felt that they, consumers felt that they had been sold a bill of goods.
00:26:40
Speaker
about what was going to be delivered, and it wasn't, and it was not good. Not a good thing to happen. I'll say, generally speaking, when I meet with new producers who are interested in doing some sort of thing, some sort of business, farm business, if they come from a background where they operated a retail store or they thought about, they can't come from marketing or they even can't, even something from like more of an analytics or
00:27:09
Speaker
accounting or that kind of background, I tend to give them a little bit better odds of succeeding as a business.
00:27:19
Speaker
versus people, if they're trying to figure out the production side and they already have some of the bookkeeping and marketing, et cetera, aside versus people who start as, you know, dyed in the wool plant, people who are trying to make it into a business because I think that those skills are a lot less fun to learn on the fly in many cases and less enjoyable. And so yeah, that's been my experience that a lot of the, there are counter examples to both of these, but like,
00:27:49
Speaker
in general, if someone has a really decent head for or mind for an experience for
Overproduction and Pricing Challenges
00:27:55
Speaker
marketing and business, and they're learning the plant side, it to me, it's usually that they're going to have an easier go of it because they're going to they're not going to go down the pathways that lose the money for very long, like someone plant person.
00:28:10
Speaker
Gonna be more objective about things yeah yeah and i've seen some on the flip of that i've seen you know when i'm sure we all have because it's more common producers that let's say i worked with the producer once that i don't know had an acre of.
00:28:22
Speaker
Had never had produce tomatoes on a pretty good scale but had never done that on a plastic culture system where you're irrigated and you're running fertilizer through and maximizing, you're absolutely maximizing your production. Well, they maximize their production and they just had thousands of pounds that went to waste and that was hard to look at.
00:28:41
Speaker
They had a tremendous amount of product. And this person was a very smart person. They said, you know, we're torn. Do we sell these at such a rock bottom price that basically we're losing money just to kind of move them and make some of the money back and set the bar so low that in the future people are going to complain when we raise the prices to a sustainable level. I mean, they were making great considerations, but they knew that they had messed up. They had overproduced and they did not put the time into marketing. And it was hard for me to watch that.
00:29:11
Speaker
They had more production than they had accounted for. And I'm sure that's a more common situation, uh, that probably all of us have seen, but it's bad either way without the balance between the two. It's, it's bad either way. So the chicken or the egg, they have to grow. Yeah. Yeah. Got to go together. It's very difficult. Well, Ray, you were asking a little bit about, you know, seasonality and the way that that plays into it. And I remember back when I first started, um, this job, I proposed.
00:29:41
Speaker
to, I think that it was back when Southern SOG was a thing, the Southern Sustainable Ag Working Group. I proposed a pre-conference session to them and I kind of got some strange looks, but they were maybe encouraged by my enthusiasm. And what I proposed was to do a session on season extension and value added as strategies for extending your market.
00:30:11
Speaker
And up to that point, many people seem to have not made, this was a couple of years ago, seem to have not made the connection between those
Value-Added Products and Season Extension
00:30:18
Speaker
two. And I see those as two of the main ways that if you're interested in indirectly selling and marketing into the off season, those are the two ways that you're going to probably approach doing that. And so, for instance, with the
00:30:33
Speaker
The season extension, you can do that either through growing stuff in high tunnels or low tunnels, all the technologies we talked about before. Another angle on it, it would be thinking about potentially marketing some of the storage type products. Now, you do have to account for the costs associated with doing that, but there are opportunities for doing that as far as this is just on the product side. I'll talk about the markets here in a second.
00:30:57
Speaker
And then with value added, you've got all the gamut of the ways that people have done food preservation for thousands of years, drying and fermenting being probably the oldest, but also things like freezing and canning and all the various permutations and combinations of all of those. Now you do have some regulations and things you need to be aware of in terms of where you are and whether you can sell this stuff.
00:31:22
Speaker
But I mean, that food preservation is a huge part of human history, and we've lost a lot of that through the strange relations of global air travel and everything.
00:31:37
Speaker
the idea where it's just a strange thing that there are some people who live in northern climates who eat fresh vegetables year round is a bizarre thing that would be unimaginable to some even just 50 years ago. Ray, what was that like when you experienced that as someone born in the 1800s? We just dug through the permafrost.
00:32:00
Speaker
The first time you had a winter watermelon, was that just mind boggling to you? It was. It was. Seasonality became not a thing anymore. Globalization. The shelf stability is pretty huge for the broader food system. Yeah. I don't really know the statistics on it, but I'm willing to bet a lot of calories consumed are shelf-stable products. Yeah. Yeah. And I have found a little bit of strangeness in the fetishizing of
00:32:30
Speaker
fresh fruits and vegetables year-round by, you know, public health people and like, smart people. And, you know, a frozen vegetable is good. I don't know. It's okay to, it's okay to eat frozen vegetables, a canned vegetable. Good. I mean, I guess you could make some argument about the salt content, but like they have low sodium or whatever. But like, that is a, that has been a little bit of a strange, I'm getting on my
00:32:58
Speaker
Dropbox and out of the marketing here, but it has been a little bit of a strange thing of like.
00:33:06
Speaker
it's this kind of all or nothing mentality or something about eating fruits and vegetables. Like if you ate 10 servings of frozen vegetables per day during the winter, I mean, you'd be doing good. You'd be glowing, you know? And the idea of, anyway, but so that season extension component of having, you know, some of the crops that you can grow more year round and the value added stuff is, to me, like the primary
00:33:36
Speaker
prongs of the strategy as far as on the product side of marketing in the off season. But then the question becomes, where are you going to sell it? And this is something that sometimes I think people take for granted the fact that these things like farmer's markets or things like regular season marketing
00:33:58
Speaker
exist, that act of market making, of creating a market in the first place where people- Who's marketing the market? Exactly. Oh, Lord. Other people in other areas have to create their own market, and so they don't necessarily take that for granted, and they also maybe are more open. But I think that
00:34:20
Speaker
If a person is out there and they've mainly marketed through a market that existed, like a thing like a farmer's market, for instance, they might be shocked by how much work it takes to create visibility, create a sense of a brain and trust, awareness, etc. Whereas someone who's created their own market or mostly created their own.
00:34:42
Speaker
understands that, I think. But there are people who do fall off-season CSAs. You can do farm store on farm stand, pick up kind of market opportunities on the farm. You can do things like an online store and other kinds of methods like that. A couple of the other ones that are outside of that direct marketing side is
00:35:06
Speaker
marketing to schools, you know, the farm to school, this is one of the tricky, since our school year is in part, has been determined by our agricultural seasons, they are kind of the opposite of each other. And so off season does offer, offer an opportunity, potentially market to schools, but there's some other challenges associated with that. And then the last one we mentioned earlier, but like establishing those relationships, if you're interested in moving in a wholesale direction or a, you know, some sort of intermediated direction.
00:35:35
Speaker
the off season can be a good time for establishing some of those relationships ahead of a coming season. And that's part of the reason why we see some of the trade shows and other activities during that time of year. So that's kind of just the overview for me of thinking about products and markets as these big themes within that. What else do you all want to, any of that spark anything?
00:35:57
Speaker
I want to address just because I've seen it across all the platforms that I am on and like just other other growers and small business people.
00:36:08
Speaker
that are going, there was kind of this like, everyone was doing email marketing, right? Like when we started, everybody was doing email. We used to read emails. Yeah. And then it moved, right? Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all of these, you know, got big. And so there was this push to go and use these and you can even sell right through those platforms.
00:36:31
Speaker
But now, what I have noticed is a lot of people are going back to email marketing and keeping their social media for more of the education, more of the updates. This is what's going on.
00:36:46
Speaker
They're still saying, hey, we have these products available, but they're not selling in the way they used to. They're using email marketing for that. Brad, I wanted your thought process on that because from what I'm hearing, if you are putting something up for sale, like if you're saying, we've got $20 bouquets or whatever,
00:37:08
Speaker
up that the algorithm is picking that up and not putting that out to people as much is what I'm hearing. I haven't looked at the research on that, but it feels correct.
00:37:21
Speaker
from what I've said. And so a lot of those people are just saying, Hey, we'll be at farmer's market. But then in an email, they're saying these are all the things we're going to have. These are the price points or, you know, where they sell their CSA through email and they, you know, try and get people onto the email list from social media. What's your, have you heard anything? What's your take?
00:37:40
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know specifically about the algorithmic effects. I do know that there seems to be a constant tinkering and then a constant need to adjust to that. I definitely agree though. Starting back a little before COVID and since then we have generally seen email marketing is one of the most, it has one of the higher conversion rates in terms of
00:38:07
Speaker
actual calls to action because it's almost like when you, I don't know, the social media is more for
Return to Email Marketing
00:38:17
Speaker
entertainment. It's this thing that's passing by and we're glazing over it, whereas the email marketing is a little bit more of that interpersonal interaction. It also allows
00:38:27
Speaker
It allows the customer to opt into or out of a more in-depth relationship with the business and they can curate it. They haven't changed the algorithm on my inbox, even in emails. People who want to be involved can be. I think that's definitely.
00:38:49
Speaker
It's an extension of your brand and relationship and reputation in the first place. And so if people are having a good experience with your product and your product is bringing them joy or it's making their life better and you're not abusing that relationship, then they're happy to receive an email from you or they're excited by that. It's like getting a letter from a friend.
00:39:11
Speaker
I would want my emails to come across that way. They can't wait to see what I've been up to or picture the dog or whatever. When they see something come from me, it's like I'm sending an email to a friend. I know that sounds silly, but that's how I've trained my brain to think about it.
00:39:30
Speaker
because that's what I like to receive when I receive an email from, you know, I get some from, there's a business called Fleurette and they're out in Washington state. I've never met her. I don't, I've never spoken to her anything, but I love when I get her emails because they're, I get pretty pictures. I get to see all the cool stuff they're doing at the farm and it feels like a friend has sent me an email and then she's like, oh, by the way, our seed sale is happening. And I'm like, let me just click, click, click, you know? So,
00:39:59
Speaker
It worked. There's so much that goes into that. I mean, there's like subtle things like knowing the formatting, the proper formatting, you know, the email itself and rich text and HTML and all of that stuff. You know, that's people that do it really well are very deliberate and they're very informed about like even something as simple and as so-called old fashioned as email. There's there's an art to that too, of making those things engaging and
00:40:26
Speaker
and good to look at within the body of an email, not an attachment, not a PDF newsletter of a farm, but actually in the body of the email and all of that is, you know, lots of skill sets come to play there. Yeah. Something Brett had mentioned, I mean, about the, you know,
00:40:42
Speaker
They each have their place, right? Like the social media use of marketing. Social media is this feed, right? And it has this kind of ephemeral quality to it. If you're there when it goes by, you get that information. But that's very distinct from an email, which the email might come in and I will notice it and think I need to read that later more deeply. And that isn't really an option with stuff that's happening through kind of the social media feed.
00:41:09
Speaker
It's pushed down on the feed and you never see it again so I'd be like. It's not an archive thing that I can even really search through if I missed it that day like it might as well not even exist anymore. You guys mentioned like the conversion rate I wonder how people convert like episodic contacts that may just be coincidental or just kind of anonymous.
00:41:29
Speaker
How do you capture and convert those to some kind of database or constant contact format where you can communicate with them more regularly? I've always been interested in that. How do I capture people's contacts where I can get a hold of them again? The shotgun approach to marketing where you just kind of throw the spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks, that's one format.
00:41:50
Speaker
that is good in certain regards, but it's totally another thing, another thing to try to convert those contacts into somebody that you're communicating with regularly. I've always been really interested in how people do that effectively. Yeah. And I don't know how do they. The complexity can spin up pretty quick. Yeah. It becomes the time where like, you know, you have a person who is your marketing person in your business if you, you know, or you have a marketing person who leads a marketing team in your business and
00:42:19
Speaker
Their job is to coordinate those things and so you have to, I think there is a being real with yourself about in the same way that you as us, one person operating a business, you're not going to put out 10 acres of tomatoes if you don't have any help. You have to be kind of targeted with what you're going to be doing with your marketing as well and I think,
00:42:41
Speaker
Just to touch on something we've said a couple of times and Ray, you just brought it up with all the skill sets involved and all of the different things that are required.
Marketing as Art and Science
00:42:51
Speaker
Um, I think that to me, that fits also with the idea that sometimes we marketing when it comes across to the consumer feels really sleek and timely and cool and all those things, the function of art and science and everything else in between it is, I mean, at its heart, it is a really, a set of really, I don't know, say boring, but kind of boring, you know,
00:43:19
Speaker
calculated. It has structure, yeah. It's in some ways no different than how many seeds you need to put in to have a certain number of flaps. There is this very mechanistic planning, boring process. Just describe the matrix, Brett, for those that are old enough to know that movie. Just describe the matrix. It's so good that you don't see the machinations behind all of those things coming together.
00:43:43
Speaker
Yeah, and yeah, it's like if you ever get the chance to look behind the scenes at like a theatrical production or it's like it's a mess or a kitchen, but, you know, in a restaurant. It's a mess. It's crazy back there, but the whole thing out of the house.
00:44:02
Speaker
And I say that not to, I don't know, get us off topic or in some way demean the process. I hear a lot of people, of course, we hear people who say they don't have a green thumb, but as far as people who are in this small farming world, there will be people who say, well, I'm just not good at marketing or marketing is just not really my thing.
00:44:24
Speaker
And there is something to not enjoying it or like not enjoying the processes associated with it but sometimes I think people tend to think of it as a personality type as opposed to a set of processes and skills and and there are natural people who are naturally better at it than others or who pick up on it quicker than others or kind of understand
00:44:43
Speaker
But so much of it is there's a thing in woodworking that everything's easy once you know how. Oh my gosh, this is like the craziest thing. I don't even imagine how I would do that. And then they show you like a simple process and like, oh, that's how you do it. And it's still cool. And it's for people who don't know, it still holds mystery and it still holds value. But I think a lot of the marketing stuff,
00:45:07
Speaker
That's how we try to talk about it, is as a series of relatively simple steps.
00:45:15
Speaker
Can I make a request? Yeah. As a grower? It hit me because Ray said, how do I collect those emails for email marketing? How do I get people onto my email list if email marketing is so important? There's the traditional aspect of you collect them at farmer's market or you collect them in places where you're having those one-on-one conversations with people, but not everybody markets that way. One thing that I've seen and
00:45:43
Speaker
I'm trying to figure out is like a way to give people something and in order for them to get it they have to put their email in. And so like it's a PDF. It's not like something you know it's just like for you know in my case scenario it might be
00:45:57
Speaker
how to take care of your flowers best for longest-paced life. And so then it's like this nice thing that you've probably made in the winter and you've gone online, put pretty pictures in, typed it all out, or it might be a recipe that you are trialing over the winter. And in order for people to get the recipe for the squash that you have sold them, they have to give you their email address. But I can't figure out
00:46:20
Speaker
how to set it up, like where they automatically get an email with the said PDF or recipe. So I'm still like that in my brain. I'm just like, I guess you have to have a certain type of setup and you have to pay for certain things. And it's just, it has already overwhelmed me. So it's going to be my December thing.
00:46:41
Speaker
It's sort of like the e-book principle. Like if you sign up for our newsletter, we'll send you this free e-book. Yeah, exactly. And just like how the mechanics actually work for that. I know what I want it to do, I just, I'm not sure. And I know this is gay personal. I think the biggest hurdle is obtaining the motivation to know that you will figure out a way to do that because people do that. I think the fact that you have that motivation is that's the most important thing.
00:47:08
Speaker
And it's something to do, you know, that's your, we talked about nesting last
Rebranding Off-Season and Planning
00:47:12
Speaker
time, right? So that's like a lot of marketing stuff is like my, some of my nesting things. And I'm like, well, I'll design it. I'll figure, figure that out during the winter when I can put a little more brain to that side of it.
00:47:26
Speaker
great off season project. We talked about that last episode as well, but off season, is there ever a true off season when you're thinking about, when you need to be thinking about marketing, producing is one thing, selling is another. Yeah. It's like, I hate calling it an off season. I just want to call it like the indoor season because you're still most people, even if they're not doing season extension, as far as a growing season extension, they are.
00:47:52
Speaker
thinking about next season, right? So it's just like, they may be thinking about marketing without calling it that, but they may be thinking about how they're going to lay their beds out or how they're going to do better weed control. So it's like, I just want to call it the indoor season. Oops, sorry. Just kidding. I'm throwing my things around people. Indoor season with your hands. Yeah. I like indoor season, cold season, not growing season.
00:48:14
Speaker
Well, yeah, but it is a growing season for a lot of us. So indoor season seems more of it. We're growing indoors, so. Yeah. You put some thought into that. That works. Indoor season it is. I like it. Tm, tm, tm. Instead of the Netflix season or the tube season, we're the indoor season. Yeah, that's what plant people call it. We're the indoor season. Netflix and chili season. Ooh, I like chili.
00:48:41
Speaker
Well, Brad, any other like words of wisdom for people who maybe are feeling a bit overwhelmed. It's the end of the season. So we're number one, we're all tired. But I think also, you know, when January rolls around and we're kind of starting to get the itch again.
00:48:58
Speaker
Things that you might suggest like start here and see how that goes. And I know you guys have great resources on this. Fantastic resources. If you could just talk a second and kind of give those a plug you guys about the all the resources you've developed and all the live resources you can, you know, work with. Yeah.
00:49:17
Speaker
Yeah, so we have a pretty extensive library of videos now from the Center for Crop Diversification at the our YouTube channel, which is just the at CCD UK why we have a couple publications. We have one called what to think about before you plant that is it's generally about thinking through marketing some steps for identifying markets because in an ideal scenario we want we would love to have everything sold either in the abstract sense or
00:49:47
Speaker
concretely before it even goes in the ground. That's the ideal scenario as opposed to, I got a truck bed full of yellow squash, where should I take it? Come on and get it. Yeah, exactly. Into the city, downtown. Yeah, and so we also have a thing called the Horticulture Biz Quiz, which is an interactive tool that we use for people who are just kind of evaluating
00:50:11
Speaker
what they have available in terms of land labor and capital, and then giving some suggestions for thinking about crops that you might consider. And that'll also have some bearing on your market channels and approach to marketing as well. I think as far as this time of year, we do have some budgets that we use, enterprise budgets. And I think if you have never worked with a budget before for planning ahead of a season,
00:50:38
Speaker
It doesn't have to be a scary thing. It may not be terribly exciting to some. It may be very exciting to others. But the budgets are really like a starting point. And I think of them as a way to try to make sure that I have at least accounted for what all of my costs categories or types of costs will be. It may not be that I have them dialed in perfectly. I know exactly how much I'm going to spend on everything. Or maybe I do work toward that.
00:51:06
Speaker
Working off some of those budgets as a way to project, okay, this is what I think I'm going to probably spend, and this is how much I'm really targeting to sell. Making some of those goals, I think, for the season can be really helpful. It can also give you just some more context for whether or not the season is going the way that you thought it would. It's not like if you don't meet your goal, you fail or something like that.
00:51:33
Speaker
It allows you also, as Alexis was talking about earlier, to have a little bit more thoughtful consideration maybe at the end of next season about where and how you want to expand your market and expand your customer base. And I think in general, the more that you can flexibly prepare ahead of the season, production and marketing wise, that's kind of what Josh had talked about.
00:52:03
Speaker
you're going to thank yourself later that you have kind of had a plan or you had pulled some things together and think, man, I wish I had done even more of this, or this was completely useless. I'm not going to do that next year. I'm going to do this instead. Because once that, once things start warming up and the weeds start growing and the crops start growing, it's a runaway train for a while, kind of white knuckling it through the season. So doing a little prep ahead of time in the same way that if you, you know,
00:52:28
Speaker
pack your lunch the night before and that crazy hectic morning the next day, it's much easier to get out the door without a stressful experience. It's kind of a similar mind. I do think it's important to actually rest though and not
00:52:44
Speaker
Stay steady on the grind 24 seven yourself sick or ill or miserable and full of spite. You will know you will you in the long term won't be able to do this anymore. And so you will lose the race against the version of yourself that
00:53:00
Speaker
took the time to rest and maybe didn't grind so hard and Alexis's. Yeah, Alexis says you're wrong. Alexis is gritting her teeth. I learned a new technique to deal with when the crazy goat comes and doesn't stop. Actually, don't grind my teeth surprisingly. My eye twitches. That's how I know. I remember that. No, I learned a new technique I'm going to share with you guys really quickly.
00:53:25
Speaker
When you're, and I, by the way, I am not a doctor, but this has worked for me is cover one eye, like just whatever like you're doing, just cover one eye for like 20 seconds. And sometimes it might not work and you need to try the other eye. And I think that goes back to what part of your brain is causing the like anxiety. So you got to figure out which side for like roughly 20 seconds. And.
00:53:55
Speaker
Oh my gosh. It really works. You don't have to close your eyes. You just cover one eye. I've done it three times a day if that tells you how great my day's been. You're having a fantastic day. Did you do it while you're at walking pizza? I did it while I was driving. You put the pizza over her eye. You put the pizza over her eye. Jumping into things, driving over curbs.
00:54:14
Speaker
My monocular vision is not serving me well today. Someone said it and I was like, well, that's simple and it's not going to hurt me and I don't have to buy anything. So, you know, they said, they said they do it at night when their brain won't shut off and they just keep thinking and stressing. And that's when they use it. And I am the person who's so exhausted that I'm immediately asleep. I mean, like seconds, it takes me. So my anxiety is during the day. It starts when I wake up.
00:54:43
Speaker
indoor season anxiety is during my indoor season, but yeah, I saw that. So if, so if you're out and it's just out in the field, just, you know, cover one eye maybe, and I swear it helps, but maybe that's just wishful thinking and either way I'll take it. So that's great. Sorry. I hydrated. If it works, it works. Yeah. I guess you should rest. I don't know. I like to, I think I'm really excited to set my budgets for next year. Sure.
00:55:06
Speaker
So for me, that's exciting. Yeah. Well, I think it's about people rest in different ways. Not all resting is laying down and eyes closed and there are some people do it in different ways. Some of us can only afford to cover one eye. That's right. That's right. And I think that it's more about being in touch
00:55:29
Speaker
This is very touchy feely, but I just finished a book called The Body Keeps the Score, which is about. Oh, yeah. And it's about being in touch with and in connection with your body and what's happening within it. And the more that you can do that, that's what made me think about that with your eye. The eye thing is there's a certain like
00:55:51
Speaker
reconnection to some aspect of your body there, which in this, you know, there, yeah, it's a pretty, pretty crazy book. Shut that down, Alexis. Shut it down. That's great. Reconnect to the body. And so I think that that's it is that, you know, be honest that, you know, I'm just exhausted. I'm like worn down to the bone. I need to do something. Go visit someone. Do something to reenergize your thoughts. Who knows what, but like do the thing that you need to do and be honest with yourself. Have a seance. Yeah, seance, Beyonce seance.
00:56:20
Speaker
Beyonce sounds yeah well that's I mean that's all there you know marketing is a lot there's a lot of different angles you can take on it but maybe if you all like marketing you can leave us a review and let us know what part of marketing you would like to
00:56:36
Speaker
like to hear about but I think it's a timely thing so maybe we can pick or if you all have any thoughts about what specifically you'd like to have in. I mean Brett's a wealth of knowledge and he also knows an awesome amount of people who know all different sides of marketing so if you want to learn about a CSA or you want to learn about how to set up an email marketing account or I mean
00:57:00
Speaker
really anything, feel free to drop us an email at hortculturepodcastatl.uky.edu, or you can send us a direct message at hortculturepod on Instagram and let us know. And I'm not ending this. It was a beautiful segue for me to be able to say we'd love to do more marketing. And if there's something specific that you all would like to hear about,
00:57:25
Speaker
We'd be more than happy to discuss it or bring in an expert to discuss it or if you want to know more about budgets or something like that. Everybody's is a little different, but there are some things that we could cover. But yeah, anything else from the boys?
00:57:41
Speaker
I don't think so. Not here. Awesome. Well, we thank you all for joining us today. We hope you had a great time and that you will join us next week. Again, please leave us a review if you have a second to just be like, sounds cool. That's good with us. You can even just put a period. There's no exclamation point needed unless you're into that kind of thing.
00:58:05
Speaker
That would be great. It helps other people find us and we've been really enjoying this. So we appreciate all of you who listen on a regular basis and have found us. So thank you so much for that. And we hope that as we grow this podcast, you will grow with us and we hope that you join us next time. Have a great one.