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Direct Farm Tactics #3: Preparing for your Farm's Best 2022
156 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of Direct Farm Tactics, Cade and Sebastian will cover tips to help prepare you Farm for the most optimal 2022. With ideas around refining your inventory, engaging customers, financial sustainability, and measuring success. These topics and more are covered in our 2022 check list eBook available for download below:
Show notes:
https://www.barn2door.com/resources
https://www.barn2door.com/e-books/new-year-checklist-improve-your-margins-in-2022
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Transcript
Introduction to Farm Success Levers
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 everybody, thank you for listening to the Direct Farm podcast. My name is Sebastian. And I am Cade from the marketing team at Barn to Door. And today we'll be hosting this podcast of the Direct Farm Tactics. If you're new to this podcast, our Direct Farm Tactics series is all about giving farmers applicable tips that they can apply immediately to their farm business.
Winter Preparations for Farms
00:00:44
Speaker
And for today's session, we're going to be talking about 2022 and what your farm needs to do in order to be best prepared to take on the new year.
00:00:51
Speaker
Right, Cade? Yeah, this is a great topic. We talk to farms about this all the time, especially, you know, this time of year when things are kind of winding down for many farms as far as production goes. Depending on where you're at in the country or what you produce on your farm, the winter can definitely be a bit of a dead period as far as actually producing things, you know, selling them. And so a lot of farms, you know, might have the tendency to kind of wind down and kind of shut down over the winter months. But what Sebastian and I are going to be hitting on today is a lot about what you can still be doing
00:01:20
Speaker
in December, January, February, to be active and set yourself up for the best possible scenario next year in 2022. And everything we're going to be talking about today as well is actually featured more extensively in our ebook called The New Year Checklist.
Inventory Management and Bundling Strategies
00:01:36
Speaker
So if you go to barnedore.com slash resources, you can download that and learn even more about any of the stuff that Sebastian and I are going to be covering.
00:01:43
Speaker
We can just hop right into it and talk about the first one. You know, like you said, winter time, it is a slower period for most farms across the country or depending where you live, maybe not. But while things are kind of slowing down, it's a great opportunity for you to make changes within your business while things are still slow. And the first one that we're going to talk about is refining your inventory.
00:02:03
Speaker
Right. Winter is the best time to really reconsider what you're going to offer next year and maybe capture some of those sales early and generate this cashflow during winter. What are some ways that farmers can start to change around their inventory and get ready for the new year, Cade? First off, just talking about refining your inventory, reconsidering what you are actually selling from your farm.
00:02:23
Speaker
It's a really good opportunity to look back on the previous year, you know, in 2021, which of your products sold, what's popular with your customer base, what's less popular, you know, take that stuff into account, especially when you're considering what you're going to be selling this next year. And even with those unpopular items, I think that this is really key, right? Is how you're actually packaging and offering these products. It's not necessarily that you need to completely stop selling things if they're unpopular.
00:02:49
Speaker
or maybe purchase less often. It's really more of how you are selling it and how you're presenting it to your customers, right? So even if you have a less popular item, like maybe a particular cut of meat or a particular vegetable or something that was selling a little less popularly at the, at the farmer's market or in your online store.
00:03:06
Speaker
A great thing to do would be to set up a bundle box and offer that item within it along with some higher value, higher demand items as
Customer Engagement Strategies
00:03:14
Speaker
well. And then all of a sudden you're bringing those two extremes a little closer together and bringing some more consistency to your business. So it's a really good opportunity to start thinking about how can you start to bundle things or how can you present your items in a way that'll get customers more engaged. You know, another thing is maybe if you offered a hundred plus items in your store last year and
00:03:35
Speaker
people only ever really browse through the first 20, maybe it's a good time to cut down on that. And again, you know, bundling and things of that nature can really help you with that. Right. And some of the things that we see here at Barnadore, a lot of our most successful farms actually really offer only five to seven bundle boxes. That doesn't mean they don't offer other items.
00:03:53
Speaker
But the reason why our most successful farms offer around five to seven bundle boxes is that they're able to accommodate many different household sizes that exist across America. That allows them to move their product much faster. The key there is to make sure that you're not offering so many options that people get option paralysis and they can't choose what they want to buy because there's just so many things to choose from.
00:04:14
Speaker
So that five to seven is really a sweet spot because you can still offer different sized bundles and maybe a couple of different types of bundles, you know, depending on how large, uh, you know, the household, the person lives in, if they're trying to feed five people or if they're only feeding themselves, obviously that's kind of a different customer and a different sized box. So you really can hit that sweet spot there of around five to seven options.
00:04:35
Speaker
And I think what goes hand in hand with that is also offering your items the way that your customers want to buy them. For example, if you have people coming to you regularly buying your items every single week, you know, maybe signing up for delivery every week to get that bundle box or to get, you know, your individual items, seriously think about setting up subscriptions too, because people want to have that consistent food shop at their door.
00:04:57
Speaker
It's super easy. They don't have to think about it. I get subscriptions for all sorts of stuff. So it's a great opportunity to set those up as well and even start taking pre-orders for those subscriptions ahead of time. Start now. People are already selling out CSAs and subscriptions for next year. They started months ago even in some instances. So it's not a bad time to start getting in front of your customers with that and giving them the option to secure their local
00:05:23
Speaker
great food for the next year. Exactly, kid. People are not going to stop eating, right? So if they start off as a customer and they buy a high ticket item and then they maybe take a deeper dive and buy a bundle box, now would be a really great time to set up that subscription and get them hooked on consistently because they're always going to continue eating. If you feel like they love your products, they're probably going to love your products even more once they get it on a consistent basis, right?
00:05:47
Speaker
only good things to say and you know, they're going to tell their friends and you're going to be set with your subscription for 2022, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, yeah, that's exactly the thing, right? Like things come up, people are busy. They might forget to order one week, even though they totally intended to and wanted to get their bundle box that week or their items that week from you. But a subscription just eliminates that challenge completely. You know, people are guaranteed to be placing their order every week and you don't have to worry about it and they don't have to worry about it either. So really just a great situation all around.
00:06:15
Speaker
So just moving along to the next one is engaging your customers. Now would be a great time to start either planning your touches out to your customers and Cade will get into them here in a little bit. But it's a really great idea to stay on top of mind with all of your customers during the winter, right? Let them know that, hey, I'm still around.
00:06:33
Speaker
Absolutely. That's so critical, especially during the season, you might be at markets or you're doing your delivery routes, you're seeing your customers on a regular basis, engaging with them, keeping that personal touch going. That's really important. You can't just let that fade away in the winter and, and, you know, be completely forgotten about because when it comes time again, where you're asking them to place those orders again, maybe start pre-ordering their subscriptions for next year, it's going to be that much harder if you haven't communicated with them in any capacity in months.
00:07:01
Speaker
But instead, if you can use your online channels to still access your customers over that time, like Sebastian was saying, you can stay top of mind, and that's going to make it so much easier for you when you are asking your customers to start purchasing again, placing those pre-orders, signing up for subscriptions, all that good stuff, right? What are the channels that farmers should be keeping in mind to stay on top of, right? Because there's so many options out there. What do we see at Barnadore be the most successful for farmers?
00:07:28
Speaker
Yeah. So I think that there's a couple to really prioritize because you're right. There's so many options out there, but I think the two that come to mind that I think we've seen the most success with, with our farmers, especially in the off season, but really year round, I would say first off email is a huge one. You know, if you don't have an email list, you need one, you need to build one right now. And we've got great resources on how to do that.
00:07:49
Speaker
But take your email list and make sure that you're engaging with your customers that way regularly. It's really nice just to send that weekly or monthly newsletter to your customers to give them an update on what's going on in the farm. Tell them about any potential pre-orders or products that you're offering at the time.
00:08:04
Speaker
And just give them a general update because that can feel really personal to your customers, makes them feel more connected to your farm. And you know, you might even hear back from some of them and that can be a great way to stay engaged with your customers over the winter too. And the great thing is, is that, and we've got tons of other great resources on this at barnadore.com slash resources. But with the Barnadore and Mailchimp integration that we offer, there's actually a lot of ways that you can automate this as well. So you don't necessarily have to be going in and sending up a whole bunch of emails, spending a bunch of time.
00:08:34
Speaker
you know, sending out newsletters every single day or anything like that. You can actually use, and we talked about this in our first episode of the Direct Farm Tactics podcast series. You can use customer journeys to automate a lot of this email outreach. So you can set up the emails one time.
00:08:49
Speaker
They'll go to your customers whenever the criteria that you set is met. And then you'll have that regular engagement running without you even having to do anything. So great way to save time. I won't get too into it right now, but if you're curious to learn more about how that works, definitely go check out that podcast and the other resources we offer on it.
00:09:08
Speaker
No kidding. So you're saying that if I just set it up once, it'll just run forever. Yep. That's the beauty of MailChimp. You know, it makes it super easy. You know, you've got all your email templates in there and everything. So all your emails are going to look beautiful. You don't have to start from scratch every single time. It just saves you a ton of time, makes it easy and makes your marketing effective too.
00:09:28
Speaker
And then I would say the other channel that's really big is of course, social media. You can't forget about those accounts. People on social media all the time. And it's another great way to have that personal touch with your customers and engage with them on that personal level. So make sure that you're posting on your Facebook page or your Instagram account. Just little updates from the farm can really go a long way with your customers, even if you're not necessarily producing or growing anything at the moment, there's still a lot, just sneak peaks into the life of a farm during the winter that your customers will really appreciate.
00:09:58
Speaker
Right. And something that we hear a lot of, Cade, farmers will often tell us like, hey, I don't have anything to post. Nothing is really interesting. We've said it on this podcast many times before, but we often do come back to the three E's. And for anybody that's new to this idea, the three E's stand for educate, entertain, and e-commerce. All that really is, like Cade was saying, just kind of post daily life stuff about if you want to just entertain people, maybe add something factual or something that they could take away as far as educating them about
00:10:27
Speaker
how you raise your products, what goes into what you do as a farmer. And also lastly is e-commerce. Maybe once in a while remind them that, hey, I'm still here and I still sell stuff because you are running a business, right, Cade? Yep, exactly. Yeah. You got to remember that any marketing you do is not really worth it if you're not getting sales out of it at the end of the day. So you've got to have some element of the e-commerce in there, but
00:10:49
Speaker
Yeah, as long as you're posting on a regular basis, pick what works well for you. If it's daily, that's fantastic. But if it's weekly, you know, that's great too. Just make sure you're consistent and then mix up your posts between those three E's and you'll be on track to really set yourself up very well for staying top of mind into 2022.
00:11:06
Speaker
Speaking of driving sales, is it too late, would you say, Cade, to offer holiday promotions? Were writing the holiday season? Is it still worth it for me to offer promotions or is it too late? What do you think? I would say it's still a great opportunity. And really, you know, while you're trying to keep people engaged over the winter, I think that promotions can be a great way to offer that continued engagement with your sales, with your products, even if they might not be getting them right away. For example, you know, if you wanted to offer a promotion for anyone who
00:11:35
Speaker
pre-orders a subscription for next season. If they do it before the end of the year, for example, like before the new year, you'll get some percentage off of your subscription pre-order for next year. You can really drive a lot of good FOMO or fear of missing out with that. Get people locked in before, you know, it's too late before they miss out on that promo and you'll really drive a lot of sales that way.
00:11:55
Speaker
It really doesn't matter if it's specifically for a specific holiday or just throughout the winter to drive more sales for
Financial Health and Analytics
00:12:03
Speaker
your farm. Always be thinking about how you can leverage promos for that.
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah, people are feeling quite joyous and quite generous over the holidays. So if they need that little promo code to push them over, you might just have to give them that, right? Exactly. So the third thing on our list here is to check up on your farm's financial health. A lot of the farms that we work with are sustainable, but they also need to be financially sustainable in order to make sure that they're able to keep the lights on and keep going. And what are some things that if farmers aren't already looking at, should be looking at, Cade?
00:12:31
Speaker
Super important to have a good pulse on how your business is actually doing because it's one thing to, you know, be selling products. That's great. But you have to know in the bigger picture, what do the financials look like? Where's that money going? Are you making enough of a margin on those products to have a sustainable business, like you were saying, Sebastian. So that's really important to be very closely keyed in on.
00:12:52
Speaker
Thankfully, there's some great tools now that make that a lot easier. So you don't have to do quite as much manually, you know, or kind of pass the era of just a bunch of random sticky notes in a shoe box or whatever the situation may be. There's much better tools now that can make your life a lot easier when it comes to, for example, getting prepared for tax season, which I know for a lot of people, you know, small business owners can be a real headache and a huge time suck.
00:13:17
Speaker
Or even if it's just your basic day-to-day accounting, there's a lot that is offered now that'll make that a lot easier. For example, Barn to Door has integrations with both QuickBooks Online and Avalara for taxes. We have other great resources about both of those if you're curious about learning more.
00:13:32
Speaker
But just making sure that your farm is set up with both of those integrations where applicable, you know, if you're in a state with difficult tax laws, that can be really helpful. So that way when it does come time for tax season, you know, you're not floundering trying to figure out what all is taxable and where exactly all that money needs to go. You'll have all of that already taken care of. Same thing with QuickBooks. If you can make your accounting easy, streamlined, not have to think about it quite as much. That can just save you a ton of time and also give you the confidence in knowing exactly what's going on inside of your business.
00:14:03
Speaker
Great tips from Cade there. And yes, definitely take pulse of your business. And if you need to move pricing around after assessing your last year and feel like, I'm not sure if the margins were exactly where I wanted them to be, now is the time to reconsider what you want to do coming into the next year here. Last but not least, we want to make sure that we're measuring our success and how can farmers go about doing that, Cade?
00:14:27
Speaker
Yeah. So this one's really big too, because you might be thinking about all this great stuff now, right? We're finding your inventory, you're engaging your customers more. You maybe have done a deeper dive on your farm's financial health. That's all great. But you know, at the end of the day, if you're not prepared to measure the impacts of those efforts, you're not going to know if that was even worth the time that you put in. And ultimately, like with how little time farmers have, you really have to prioritize the things that you're going to be getting the most return out of.
00:14:53
Speaker
So it's really critical to be measuring your success and know where you need to look in order to measure your success too. So if you're looking at, you know, engaging your customers, if you're starting to send out that monthly newsletter, you're starting to post on social media more regularly. Look at those analytics and the data that those platforms provide, whether it's your email open rates or your purchases that come out of those newsletters or the likes and engagement that you're getting on your social media posts, pay attention to that.
00:15:19
Speaker
Track those numbers. Obviously we want to make sure that that stuff is continuing to increase and that your sales are increasing from it as well. Because ultimately if you're not tracking what works best, you're not going to know if whenever you do one of those marketing projects or one of those posts, if it's actually worth the time you're putting into it.
00:15:36
Speaker
And then, you know, on top of that too, with your inventory, if you're making these great inventory changes, offering these new bundle boxes, you got to pay attention to which items your customers are purchasing, what things are they excited about, you know, what is getting the most sales, what is getting the least sales. So that way, again, for next year, it'll be even easier or sooner than that if you want it to make a change.
00:15:56
Speaker
in the middle of the season as well. Next year or whenever you make the change, you'll be prepared and have the information you need to make as good of optimizations as you can.
00:16:08
Speaker
Yes, exactly. You know, we went over a lot of stuff, but just to kind of touch back on everything we went over, Cade, would you mind walking us through the recap? Yeah, absolutely. So just to highlight the tactics that we talked about, number one, refine your inventory, you know, look at how your products have been selling over the past year and think about things like bundle boxes, subscriptions, pre-orders to drive even more sales, potentially even starting right now in the off season.
00:16:31
Speaker
Remember also to engage your customers even while it's slow, even if you're not seeing them like you were at the farmer's market or on your delivery route. There's great online channels now to keep that engagement alive and keep that relationship alive. That'll keep you top of mind and make it a lot easier when you go and ask for that sale when the season starts back up.
00:16:50
Speaker
Then you also want to make sure that you're checking in on your farm's financial health too. If you don't have that visibility into how your business is doing, that's a pretty scary spot to be in and it'll make it a lot harder for you to make those important refinements when we come around to next year. It'll also make everything that you're doing take a lot more time, which is obviously difficult when you already have so little of it.
00:17:11
Speaker
Finally, you're gonna wanna make sure to measure your success because ultimately if you don't know how these efforts and how all this stuff that you're doing is actually working out or impacting your business, it's gonna be hard for you to tell what you should spend your time on next year as well. So make sure that you're looking at those analytics and the data and making educated decisions in the future too.
00:17:30
Speaker
Thank you so much, Cade, for walking us through the recap. And like Cade mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, we do have an ebook. If you'd like to take any of the topics back with you today or even cement all the tactics we went over. Or if you would like any additional information on any of the topics that we discussed, you can feel free to go to barn2door.com slash resources and in the show notes section below. Thank you so much for tuning into the Direct Farm podcast. We'll see you next time.