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A Farmer's Market(ing) Campaign to Grow Faster Online with Bennett Farms
383 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, Tom Bennett from Bennett Farms shares his tips on using Farmers Markets as a marketing tool to increase your Farm's online sales.
Show Notes:
https://www.bennettfarmsmichigan.com/
https://www.barn2door.com/resources
https://www.barn2door.com/connect
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Farm Success & Marketing
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the weekly listen for farm selling direct. We'll talk about the four levers for farm success, which are quality, brand, price, and convenience. We'll hear from outside industry experts and producers like you to delight your customers, save time and to increase your direct farm sales and business. We're glad you're here.
00:00:25
Speaker
Hey, everyone. Before we get started with the podcast, this is an audio version of a webinar with Tom Bennett and myself called a farmer's marketing campaign to grow faster online. If you prefer to watch this in video form, go over to barnadore.com slash watch. All right, let's get into it. Welcome, everyone. I'm delighted
Tom Bennett's Farming Journey
00:00:44
Speaker
here to have Tom Bennett with us from Bennett Farms in Michigan. Tom, do you want to maybe start by introducing yourself and the topic we're going to be talking about today?
00:00:53
Speaker
Yeah. Tom Bennett here. Um, uh, first generation farmer, we do pork and poultry on pasture. It's all non GMO antibiotic free up here in Michigan. And we do about 13 farmers markets a week. And we also utilize our online store. So looking forward to the conversation today and maybe give you guys some pointers on how to leverage your presence at the farmer's market into more customers online.
00:01:16
Speaker
Initially I didn't realize that was a big of a component of our online stores. It was until we started talking to some other farms that use Barnador and they're asking us how we're successful. And then it clicked for me. Wait a minute. It's probably these 20,000 farmer's market customers per year that I'm sending to our online store is why it's working so well for us. So we'll talk a little bit about that today and share some tips with you to hopefully grow your online sales.
00:01:42
Speaker
Awesome. And Tom, you're a first generation farmer. I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about the history of Bennett Farms and how you got started, how you got into farming and then, and maybe some of your background and some of the organizations you're a part of today.
00:01:55
Speaker
Yeah, the history of Bennett Farms, I didn't come from a farming family. My grandfather was a butcher and my dad cut meat for a while too. So we're on that side of it as a kid, but no farming experience as far as that goes aside from my neighbors having cows that we would go over and chase around the pasture when I was a kid. But when I was in the Marines, I joined in 2001 and that was going to be getting out around 2010 somewhere around 2007.
00:02:21
Speaker
I started to think about my future and what that would look like outside of the military service. And I thought it would be a great idea to have a direct to consumer farm wasn't real sure how that would look. At that time, there wasn't really a lot going on online with direct to consumer sales.
00:02:39
Speaker
So I started putting things in place prior to getting out of the military. Like I came home on leave a couple of years before I got out and bought the land. It was an old corn and soybean field basically off from a farmer that was retiring. So I bought the vacant land. And then when I had gotten out of the Marine Corps around 2010, we were able to, first you got to build the house and get an off-farm job and, you know, kind of get your life reestablished. Cause you're basically starting out at square one on every, so we did that slowly built it up. So by 2000.
00:03:09
Speaker
12, 13, we were just hobby farming more, just raising animals for ourselves and our own consumption. And then it just kept growing from there as people were like, hey, why don't you raise us a hog or can you raise me for us? And so it grew organically to a point to where it was feasible. If I put the time into it required to make it a full-time job. So it took a while. It wasn't like overnight.
00:03:34
Speaker
But we eventually got there and I became a full-time farmer in 2018. I quit my farm job to farm full-time.
00:03:41
Speaker
Great. Yeah. And I know you briefly mentioned, but the products you're producing, do you maybe want to talk about those and the practices that you're using? Yeah.
Farm Practices & Online Transition
00:03:49
Speaker
So it's all pasture raised. We don't have any barns to speak of on our farm. Everything's done outdoors. We do pork year-round. The poultry, we can only do that. And we've learned the hard way. Only run pasture poultry up in our region between Mother's Day and Halloween. You got a little bit more leeway on the back end because
00:04:09
Speaker
With the end times, those chickens at the end, they're full grown so they can handle a little bit more bad weather. But the chicks early on, whenever I try and put chicks out on pasture before Mother's Day, they inevitably get snowed on or there's a flood. It's just always bad. So we wait until after then. So on the poultry, it's seasonal. The pigs are year round.
00:04:33
Speaker
With the pigs, we move them about every week or two weeks to a new pasture, just based on the weather conditions and how fast they tear up the ground that they're currently on. In the turkeys, we start them around the second week of July for Thanksgiving. So yeah, it's all non-GMO feed, you know, that for our inputs, we, in all of our pastures, we have two ton hog feeders.
00:04:54
Speaker
that the pigs always have access to with those non-GMO rations and that supplements what they're taking it on pasture for their feed. And we estimate their pasture consumption to be around 30%, like with the hogs.
00:05:06
Speaker
That's really cool that you've actually calculated that out. Yeah, great. I'm really excited to talk and dive into today's topic. We're going to be honing in on four specific tactics that farmers can use to leverage farmers markets to grow faster online, which I think a lot of farmers, when they start farming or as they've had their history in farming, the farmers market is always
00:05:25
Speaker
a really big part of the farming experience and connecting with your customers. But obviously I think there's this transition to online and into e-commerce. And I think the stat is 99% of Americans don't attend a farmer's market regularly at least. So making sure you're capitalizing on the times when people are there is a focus of today's topic.
00:05:45
Speaker
So for our first tactic is just in general, this focus on direct to market efforts. And so I think there's all these different channels that we have available or farmers have available to them. And among those, the web store, your email marketing, your social media. So I guess step one is really to be online and to have that place to go, which is obviously very important. If, if somebody's coming to the farmer's market for the first time might not be there the next week.
00:06:10
Speaker
Tom, could you maybe talk about how you've engaged customers and brought them online and how you use your web store to promote your business and how that is the focal point of your business operations today? Yeah, it is. So our farmers markets, the whole goal of that, obviously we do a lot of sales at farmers markets too, but my number as the business owner
00:06:35
Speaker
It's more important to me that our employees at the markets are conveying our online store experience to our customers as well as selling them products because we run a farm that operates year round June through August. We need those customers to buy from us all year round to make things flow evenly on our farm and to work.
00:06:55
Speaker
And so we can do it full time. So we spend a lot of effort trying to convert those farmer's market customers into online customers. Even if that means just trying to get those farmer's market customers to order online the week before the market to pick up at the market. So we'll do, we do home delivery. We do farmer's market pickups. We do on-farm pickups. So those are like the three ways that they can get our stuff through our online store. And like last month we ran a special in February
00:07:23
Speaker
just to try and drum up some more farmers market customers to get them into our online store to experience it for the first time so they could see how easy it was and so that way they had never used it before to maybe try and get them to utilize that more often and it was a huge success. We gave away a half a hog and the way that worked was we emailed it out to all of our customers that we were going to be doing this for the month of February
00:07:46
Speaker
And then we put it in the banner at the top of our online store. And then we told all the people at the farmer's markets, like, Hey, you can't buy this here, or you can order it online ahead. You'll get a much larger selection to choose from, pick it up here, and then you'll be in the drawing for our half hog giveaway we're doing at the end of February. So
Marketing Strategies & Email Tactics
00:08:03
Speaker
for every customer that placed an order online during the month of February,
00:08:08
Speaker
Each time they place an order, their name was put into a drawing that we held live on Instagram on March 1st for a free half hog. They get the full treatment that our paying customers get with that for our spring hog pickup. And that was a huge success. One lady, she probably ordered 16 times that month.
00:08:24
Speaker
through our online store. She was playing the system, but that's fine. There's no minimum on the order size, but she was ordering once a day and trying to get her name in the head as many times as possible. But she's really good at ordering online now, so she's not afraid to try it in the future. If you need a pork roast or something, don't just show up to my farmer's market booth and hope that I brought those that day. You can order online the night before and then it'll be there when you get to the market.
00:08:48
Speaker
We've seen a lot of growth in sales that month with our online store because of that promotion. Also at the farmer's market, every single customer that comes up and buys from us.
00:08:58
Speaker
they get a flyer advertising our online store in their bag at checkout. So that way when they get home and they're pulling their meat out, they'll see it and ideally go there and check it out. Whenever I'm at a farmer's market, I'm not only talking to customers, I'm also talking to other farmers. And I'm trying to help them out. And some of my buddies who are farmers, they're like, dude, why are you doing that? They're going to be your competition. No, man, we're all the same team. I'm not threatened by
00:09:23
Speaker
the guy who's selling chicken right next to me, I want to see him do good too. So I'm always talking to them and I'm like, Hey, have you tried this? Are you online? And they're like, yeah, I'm online. You can go to my website and email us. That's not online. No, having a website where a customer can email you and ask you for stuff and having an online store, they aren't apples to apples. So I see some farmers a lot of the times they think they're online because they have a website and because customers can email them.
00:09:52
Speaker
and request things, but that's, it's not the same thing. Being online is important, but being able to give customers the opportunity to take actionable steps to buy from you immediately online, that's important. That's where those spur of the moment I'm laying in bed at 10 o'clock at night thinking about bacon. And I come across Bennett farms website.
00:10:14
Speaker
And I can order bacon laying right there on my phone in two and a half minutes and it'll be delivered to my house. Like that's where a lot of those sales come in. A lot of our sales do come in late at night, between 10 o'clock and midnight. It's not uncommon for us to receive several orders in that timeframe. And I think two things that came to mind when you're speaking on all that, one, exactly like you're saying, in the last year, we've seen 65% of online sales occur through mobile and social media. So like you're saying, people laying in bed, ordering from their phone.
00:10:43
Speaker
When they think of bacon, they just pull up their phone and buy it. They don't want to have to take that extra step of emailing a farmer. They just want to be able to click a few buttons and know that they can get that product. And then the other 35% occurred through desktop and email. So again, just easy access, clicking a few buttons to be able to get those products. I also loved that campaign that you guys ran because you're hitting people on so many different channels. You're getting them to try out the web store. You're connecting with them at the farmer's market, but then also
00:11:10
Speaker
That added factor of doing the announcement on social media, going live is a really cool way to draw people towards that channel too and further grow your brand there. Yeah. That campaign was a win all the way around for us. So the amount that we had in the cost of giving away that half a hog, my direct cost would be around 250 bucks. And if I were to spend $250 on Facebook ads.
00:11:32
Speaker
I would have maybe gotten four orders. You know what I mean? It generated, I'd have to look back at February, but you're looking at somewhere between five and $6,000 worth of sales on that advertising. So it was definitely the return on that was really good. We're definitely going to do that more often because I would rather give our advertising budget to our customers anyways, in the form of free products, if they're going to
00:11:56
Speaker
drum up sales and share it with their friends like they did because that's what was happening. They were sharing with all their friends like, Hey, look, order here. You could win a half a pig. Cause I'd rather see them get to keep the money and enjoy that than Facebook. Yeah. That's awesome. Part two to this first tactic is what we've been alluding to this whole time, but engaging offline. And I think that's maybe the part that sometimes comes more naturally to a lot of farmers.
00:12:18
Speaker
but making those connections at farmer's markets and posting flyers at local businesses and being active and engaging with your community. What are some of the ways that you've been able to engage buyers in person? I think number one is probably the farmer's markets, but what are some of the ways you go about that? Yeah, the farmer's markets are huge. That's a big component. Some other things that we do as far as our community goes, things I've done in the past when I spoke at school, so sometimes an elementary school teacher will see us
00:12:48
Speaker
online and they'll reach out to us and say, Hey, can you come speak to our third grade class? We're doing chicken life cycle right now. I brought in chickens to schools and talk to them for an hour about how, you know, the, the process of creation of an animal works and things like that. Sometimes they'll need eggs because they're hatching eggs in their classrooms. But then every single one of those kids, all 600 of those third graders, they all go home with a vented farms flyer.
00:13:12
Speaker
to get into their parents like, Hey, this person came to our school today. All you kids, I tell the teachers, I'm like, yeah, I'll come in and talk. Just can I hand out my flyer to each of your kids on the way out? And they're like, yeah, that'd be great. And so there's some co-op in our area. We give them a discount and they buy through bulk through us. And we don't see a lot of sales through there, but it's good in building relationships with the people who are like in the note, they have,
00:13:41
Speaker
a pulse on all of the customers that are into that super local, high quality, organic type food. So you start running in those circles and your name will get referred a lot to other people. They also, I found out they have a homeless pantry that one day I was there and they had a lot of dry goods. I'm like, what's up with all this? They're like, oh yeah, on Thursday nights we have a homeless
00:14:03
Speaker
People can come in and get foods or not necessarily homeless people who are needing to use the food pantry type of thing. And I'm like, how much meat do you guys want? Cause I got tons of meat. That's like excellent quality. Like it's completely safe. But the problem is that the vacuum seal on that one package might be a little bit looser than it should be. I'm not going to sell it to my customers for $9 a pound if it ain't perfect. So it gets tossed into the box in the corner of our freezer.
00:14:30
Speaker
And every couple months we've got 600 pounds of meat. That's perfectly good. Like we used to eat it ourselves just so we wouldn't get wasted, but I can only eat so much meat. It's to the point now where we're doing so much that I've got hundreds of pounds of meat that I can donate.
00:14:46
Speaker
And so you do something like that in the community and they think you're a saint, but I'm just like, look, here you go. It's free, but you got to give it away. You can't sell it. All right. That's first deal. And second deal is you got to let the people know who are receiving this, that this is not representative of our like premium packaging. Typically like these are our scratching vent items. So that's another way we engage with our local community.
00:15:08
Speaker
Awesome. That's a really cool program too. So going into tactic number two is growing that customer base. And I think this is one of the most important takeaways from this whole thing. But I think a pretty crazy statistic is that one in seven people physically move homes every year. And with a farmer's market, you're locked by the people that are in the area. And so continuously growing that customer base and adding new people to it is definitely a must. Number one,
00:15:35
Speaker
that farmers should definitely be doing at the farmer's market is building up that email list. So Tom, what are some of the ways you emphasize that and drive people to sign up and just engage with your farm and grow that customer base, but starting from their experience at the market? Yeah. So if anyone ever buys through our online store, when they are
00:15:56
Speaker
and putting their personal information, boom, we got their email forever after that. It's in an email system. But for the ones that are buying just at the farmer's markets that aren't buying from us online, we're trying to capture emails there. So what we do is we put out a clipboard, um, at all of our booths where customers, they can sign up if they choose to be on our email list. And we just let them know we'll send out about one email a month, just updates around the farm, what's going on, maybe new products coming out, any specials or sales that are going on.
00:16:22
Speaker
But with your first email, you'll receive a $5 off coupon for your first online order. And we won't spam you constantly with that type of stuff. But what we do also with our sales staff at the markets is we pay them a dollar per email that they collect because I found that putting that clipboard out there, our employees really wouldn't ask.
00:16:42
Speaker
as much as I was hoping they would for those emails because they didn't really have any skin in the game. It didn't affect them that much if they collect emails. So what we did was we decided to give them all a dollar bonus for every email that they collected at each market.
00:16:56
Speaker
so that incentivizes them to collect those emails and it did boost our email collection substantially and so it just depends on how ambitious your farmer's market worker is that day on how many emails they'll collect because there's really no ceiling on it they could typically they could make an extra 30 or 50 bucks a day if they just collect 30 or 50 emails on top of their
00:17:15
Speaker
their base hourly and then we also give our employees a sales commission on top of their hourly. So it can substantially boost their daily income for those markets. That's awesome and Tom you've hosted the Connect program with us that we do every week but I think one of the number one questions that comes up in those sessions is how do I grow my customer base? How do I get more emails? And so I think you brought up a couple really good tactics there that obviously the dollar and email is awesome. That's a great way to
00:17:42
Speaker
get your your employees helping you out on that end but also having that promo and maybe telling people like hey if you sign up for an email you'll get five bucks off in the store can be another kind of nice little incentive to to get that email and then hopefully nurture that customer relationship down the road. So I've found this out a lot too through doing the connects just getting to talk with farmers when I'm on with their questions I'm seeing a lot of trends and and them having traction like building that email list and
00:18:08
Speaker
What I've been telling them is for it to work like it does for me, your target is a thousand emails. Like you need to try and get to a thousand quality emails as quick as you can. Because once you get to a thousand emails, that's when, if I was to spend right now, I could go and spend an hour crafting a beautiful email to my email list. And it's going to generate a couple thousand dollars in sales guaranteed. Once you have that many people in your email list.
00:18:34
Speaker
It reaches a point to where you can't lose when you send those out because you're going to have sales once you've got at least a thousand. And there's probably farms out there that have several thousand people in an email list. And that would be awesome. You might get three or four people if you got 150 emails that are going to buy on that campaign when you send it out. But once you get to a thousand, that's when I feel like you've reached the magical number to where it's just like going to an ATM.
00:18:58
Speaker
Oh, we need to generate more sales today. Let's send out an email. But you also, you want quality emails. Like you don't want to go out and just buy a spam generic email list. Our emails are all quality emails of people that want to be on our email list that decided to sign up that most likely were shopping with us at our farmer's market or bought from us in our online store.
00:19:17
Speaker
That makes a huge difference. All right, moving on to tactic number three is helping to convert market customers to online customers, specifically with your product offerings.
Sales Enhancement & Customer Convenience
00:19:28
Speaker
So I was curious, Tom, what are some of the maybe differences in what you bring to the market and what is available on your store, maybe even just with the quantities of what you bring and how do you use that as a tactic to get more people online?
00:19:40
Speaker
Yeah. So what goes to market? Typically it's our hottest selling stuff as far as chicken thighs and bacon. And if we've got tenderloin, we know from doing it long enough, what's going to sell in any given part of the year, most likely. But sometimes you guess wrong. Sometimes it's like.
00:19:56
Speaker
Why did we not sell any boneless, skinless breasts today? You don't know really. So we bring about 10 coolers to each market. If you want to see a picture of our farmer's market set up, there may be one here in the slide. I think there was actually at some point, but that's typically how we set up when we go to a market and we take 10 coolers. That means we can probably take around 20 products because most of the coolers have two items in them. And then we'll bring some restock coolers that we keep behind the table for
00:20:23
Speaker
for things that are really hot sellers. But sometimes the selection that we take market can be based on what was most convenient for one of our staff to repack into the coolers because they could reach it like in the freezer. So we tell customers, they come in and they're like, Oh, we wanted boneless smoked pork chops today. And I'm like, sorry, we didn't bring it, but we brought the bone in regular pork chops. But in the future, I tell all the customers, if there's something special that you're coming here for,
00:20:48
Speaker
You might want to think about ordering online ahead of time just to make sure that you're going to be able to have that for dinner tonight because our inventory that we take to the market is just, it's too unpredictable. And sometimes the coolers that went to say Chicago last weekend, once they get restocked, they might go out to Fort Wayne the following weekend and Fort Wayne's coolers might
00:21:08
Speaker
to Chicago because we just wanted to mix up the inventory at each market. And so the same thing won't be at that market two weeks in a row, occasionally. So we tell customers, if you want to be guaranteed to get what you want, order online ahead of time. They can order up until six o'clock the night before. You as a farm can set that timeframe to whatever you want. You can do it two days out. We just do it the day before at 6 PM because it's not a lot for us to pack it and throw it in with that market.
00:21:35
Speaker
So yeah, we tell them to order online. If they'd like to, we get a handful of customers at each market that do that every week. So it's not like hundreds of orders for each market, but it's usually a couple. And we're doing seven markets on Saturday. We do 13 a week total across all the days. But yeah, yeah, it works out good for the customers. And for us, like last week we had a guy who wanted
00:21:59
Speaker
13 pounds of smoked pork chops. And luckily he ordered them online ahead because if he would have just came to the market, he would have cleaned out all of our most of our smoked pork chops as soon as we opened. So it was convenient for us that he didn't do that. No, that's great. And I know too, subscriptions are a big part of your business. How do you tie those into markets or use markets to help get people onto subscriptions? And I guess, do you offer fulfillments for subscriptions at the markets?
00:22:25
Speaker
So yeah, so a couple things on that. Usually the way the subscriptions come up at the market is because for those flyers I had mentioned that we hand out to every customer advertising or online. One side of that flyer is all of our online store advertising.
00:22:40
Speaker
The backside of that flyer is actually our advertisement for our spring and fall hole in half bulk hog orders. And they can do that in our online store to sign up for those things. But usually what will happen is someone will see that hole in half hog order on that flyer and they'll be like, Oh, this is great. We just don't have for that.
00:22:58
Speaker
And I'm like, excellent. Because we actually offer a subscription box. So if you don't have the room, like a big chest freezer for that, but you want those savings, we'll actually deliver subscriptions each month to your house. A meat box subscription is pork and chicken, farmer's choice. And here you go to our website right there. You can learn more about it. And then we'll convert a lot of those customers who wish that they could be the whole and half hog ordering type of people, but they can't because they live in an apartment or they just don't have room for a chest freezer.
00:23:27
Speaker
and then we deliver it to them each month. And we've seen a lot of great success with the subscription boxes. They're actually a huge part of our sales every month.
00:23:37
Speaker
Awesome. That kind of leads nicely into the next tactic that we wanted to talk about today, and that's delighting buyers with convenience. And I think convenience has been the underlying thread here through almost everything we've talked about, but customers are lazy. That's really what it comes down to. So making it as easy as possible for them to get your products, to know where to get your products is a really big thing for every farm. Tom, what are some of the ways that you currently are
00:24:02
Speaker
Delighting really buyers with the way you make it convenient to order from you and get your products Yeah, we basically taken away all barriers for a customer to get our products So there's really no excuse that they could come up with anymore as to why buying from us would be inconvenient rather It'd be oh we live too far away. We'll deliver to you You're probably in our delivery zone unless you're just here on vacation unless you took a plane to get here You're probably in our delivery zone with home delivery farmers market pickups
00:24:31
Speaker
We do on-farm pickups online. The deliveries are great. I just had deliveries on, was it Tuesday? I think was my last delivery. We had about 28 deliveries go out that day.
00:24:44
Speaker
So it keeps us super busy and yeah, we love doing it. Yeah. I think another kind of part of convenience that doesn't often maybe first come to mind is how you're going to pay for a product. And I was curious with your subscriptions with Barnador, you can do pay as you go. You can pay upfront. You can even do like late enrollment. If the subscription schedule has already started, you can pop in late. Do you utilize any of those kinds of tools to, to be able to make it even easier for customers to sign up for a subscription?
00:25:12
Speaker
We're producing meats year round. So we don't really have a hard stop and start date. I specifically turned off the option for customers to pay in full, like day one, when I started our subscriptions, because the way that they pay, the way they pay now, they pay monthly it's billed to them like two days before the subscriptions go out and are delivered. It hits their card that's on file with us. And then as a farmer, you'll just want to check that.
00:25:40
Speaker
on your pick and pack orders to the right hand side and make sure that all of those are showing paid in green before you load them up and send them out because occasionally one of those cards will fail because it's expired or whatnot. You don't ever want to be in a position to where you're chasing money, you know, and cause it's, I've got more important things to do than somebody that wasn't 70 bucks, but we only offer the pay each month option mostly because
00:26:08
Speaker
When they see the paid in full number, it is a big number and it could scare, in my opinion, it could scare some people into backing out of that checkout because one of our Sarah 20 pound meat subscription box, it's 135 bucks a month, 135 bucks a month times 12. So they get to the end of their checkout. If they want to do the pay in full $1,620, like that might scare them. And they might be like, maybe this is a bad idea. It sounds way worse than one 30, you know, five a month.
00:26:37
Speaker
So we don't give them that option. And it's nice because I don't necessarily want all that money up front. I would rather have it spread out and come in every month over the course of the year when the product's actually going out. So we don't give them that option. We don't give our customers online.
00:26:55
Speaker
the option to COD or pay with checkered cash on delivery because our delivery drivers got too much stuff to deal with just getting older. We ain't messing with that. Like I'm not loading something into my van and taking it out for delivery unless I've already been paid for it because you get burnt a couple of times and
00:27:13
Speaker
There's no reason to offer that. You might lose like one person that's still holding out with their checkbook, refuses to get a debit card, but it is what it is. They're few and far between these days. Yeah, they are. They're a dying breed.
00:27:31
Speaker
Next, I think just to hone in on your farm specifically and the tactics you use, and we've covered a lot of these already, so a little bit of review here, but we've talked about some of the things we've highlighted is just your focus on converting farmers markets customers to online customers. You talked about incentivizing
Market Expansion & Podcast Conclusion
00:27:49
Speaker
your employees with a $1 per email and flyers at the market. I was wondering how has it helped you grow and what are you looking to improve?
00:27:58
Speaker
It's probably directly responsible for 60% of it, really. We had 20,000 farmer's market customers this year. Every single one of them got the spiel and the flyer to my online store. So that had to count for something. And you can see in my sales, you can see where Bennett Farms has a farmer's market presence, like on Google maps, like it's exactly the corridors where all of our
00:28:26
Speaker
online sales are coming from. It mirrors it. You could overlay our farmer's market footprint with our online store delivery footprint and they match. We get a lot of hits on Google as far as Google and farms near me. Our website traffic's about 3,500 people a month that go to our website in general and a lot of them are probably just cold hits that someone who hasn't known us before, but a lot of them are just
00:28:53
Speaker
people that already know us and they're just trying to find our online store because they're going to shop from us at the farmer's market this week. But our farmer's market presence is directly responsible for our online sales, I think a lot of the time. Most of the people who buy online have bought from us at some point in their life at a farmer's market. We're looking at this year, Chicago is a good example. We've had delivery up in Chicago for over a year now.
00:29:18
Speaker
And we hadn't had a lot of traction with it. Honestly, for as big of an area as it is, like we're doing a lot more sales in the vacation towns along Lake Michigan, where all the Chicago people come during the summer. Like that's just on fire with sales. Like we do great there, but we also have a lot of farmer's markets in those areas. So these people come from Chicago. They see us at the farmer's market. Cause that's what you do when you're in a small town on the weekend. And then they go back to Chicago during the winter.
00:29:45
Speaker
And we were hoping that would bring a lot of those customers, but it's been slow to catch in Chicago. It really has. But now we finally six months ago got into a Chicago farmer's market with the winter market. And now finally we're into the summer markets there too. So coming up for next year and we've already started to see it the last month or two, our sales to Chicago online have been increasing with subscriptions and deliveries and farmer's market pickups. So.
00:30:14
Speaker
I think that's going to help us grow in that area is just getting into the more physical farmer's markets in Chicago. And then we'll see a huge explosion in our online sales in that area. That's cool that the kind of getting that first footing there or like the tip of the iceberg almost is just getting into that farmer's market and then the market can grow from there.
00:30:33
Speaker
Just to recap everything that we covered today and these four tactics. Number one, focusing on those direct to market efforts and having those influence and I guess doing them alongside with all of your in-person efforts. Number two was growing that customer base. Tom talked about some great tactics and kind of
00:30:52
Speaker
campaigns that he's used to grow that customer base. Diversifying product offerings was number three. Being specific and thoughtful about what products you're bringing to the farmer's market and what is available on your store and how you can lock in buyers that way. And then lastly, delighting buyers with convenience. Like Tom said, making sure there's no buts, there's no excuse why they can't order from your farm.
00:31:12
Speaker
Those are our four tactics. Tom, I'm just kind of curious, what are your goals looking ahead for the next year? Obviously, it sounds like the Chicago market is a big priority for you, but what are some of those goals that you're looking forward to throughout 2020? It's been getting easier every year, so we're looking for a more less stressful 2022 than 2021.
00:31:30
Speaker
We've had a lot of growing pains as a farm. When you grow as fast as we have, just some of the other pockets we've done with us doubling year over year, like several years in a row, always feel like we're just putting out 50 fires a day to keep our heads above water because it's, it can be a real ride in the summer.
00:31:47
Speaker
But I think we've gotten a lot of the process ironed out and every year it gets easier and easier. Years ago, when we first started farming, it was a struggle to make it through the winter. It was like, I tell people, like the winter was just about surviving to make it back to the summer again. And now we finally, and this year was the first winter where we were in a really good financial position all year long. And that's mostly because of our online store. We don't have these feast and famine times.
00:32:16
Speaker
So that's gotten a lot easier too. And we're just, I think 2022 is going to be great as far as we got some really good markets. Online is hitting on all cylinders. We're going to expand into Chicago and focus a lot on growing that this year. We also are super excited about it. We just started with the new chicken butcher. It's actually a little bit more of a drive than
00:32:36
Speaker
We used to have, but it'll be well worth it. As far as some of the products we can get value added now with chicken brats and ground chicken sausages and chicken patties. We can do so much more now with our chicken options than we used to be able to do with our previous butcher. And even the price of that processing. We're going to be way more profitable on chicken this year than we ever have been before. So yeah, we're excited about that. Keep honing what it is we're already doing.
00:33:01
Speaker
I'm not trying to double this year. I was going to say, when you double your year over year, sometimes it's nice to take a year that's just a break and smooth things out. We'll grow for sure, but I just don't have the time really. I need to hire some more on-farm staff probably, farm workers that can just
00:33:19
Speaker
Focus on a lot of that all day. I'm excited to hear how the next year goes for you And I wanted to just call out a couple other resources one if you're a farmer and you want to talk to Tom He does participate in our connect program so you can learn more about that at barn to door comm slash connect But that happens twice a week Tom hosts just about at least once a month and then you can hop in there and ask him questions about farmers markets about marketing about and
00:33:41
Speaker
how he raises his products, really anything. It's just an open Q&A session, which is awesome. And then if you want to dive more into this topic, you can download our free ebook. It's titled, How to Use Farmers Markets to Grow Faster Online. So pretty much a really good parallel to this webinar and some of the topics we've talked about today. But definitely check out both of those resources. And finally, I just want to say, Tom, thanks. Thanks for joining with us today. And we got your social media here on the slides, but I don't know if you wanted to plug anything else in your website. Maybe hand out a flyer.
00:34:09
Speaker
Yeah, drop your address in our comments and I'll send you a flyer. You guys are welcome to check out our social media and see what we do. There's a lot of good stuff like farmer's market booth setups. For example, if you go to our Instagram and look at some of our booth setups, if you are currently selling your meat out of two chest freezers behind your table with a board on the front of your table.
00:34:31
Speaker
and you switch to the way that we're selling our meat, you'll increase your sales 30% that week, guaranteed. Again, it goes back to convenience for customers. We're doing that at the farmer's market too, but they're able to open those lids on those coolers and see the price on the packaging, see the item.
00:34:47
Speaker
and pick it out and hand it to me at the checkout without having to say, oh, can I see a roast? And then you've got to dig out the roast from your chest freezer, and then they feel bad if they don't want it. But yeah, you might be able to glean some little things that you might be able to do differently at the farmer's market. And we do use Coolershock as the ice packs that you'll want to use for your coolers. It's the next best thing to dry ice. It's a brand name.
00:35:13
Speaker
but it'll freeze a six pack of warm soda in one of those coolers in three hours. They work really good, so we can't recommend them enough. We wouldn't be doing the way we're doing with our setup at farmer's markets without that product. Insulate the lids of your coolers too. Drill holes in the back and fill them with window insulating great stuff foam, but you use the window and door, not the heavy duty, because that'll warp your lids, but that'll turn any $30 igloo cooler into a Yeti.
00:35:41
Speaker
So that's basically what you're doing by insulating the lids because they're all hollow with air, which is like the worst thing for insulation. That's an awesome tactic. Wow. That's great. Cool. All right. Yeah. Thank you, Tom. And thanks for joining us today, everyone. And we'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Direct Farm podcast. You can subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts to automatically download new episodes.
00:36:05
Speaker
For more free resources that you can read, watch, and listen to, visit farntador.com slash resources. Thank you again for tuning in and we'll see you again next week.