How Marketing Can Help Your Farm Succeed
Join Tom Bennett of Bennett Farms as he reveals how prioritizing marketing propelled his operation to serve over 200 zip codes. Learn why building a loyal email list and removing buyer friction are the most critical steps to becoming a thriving, scalable Farm business.
For more Farm resources, visit: barn2door.com/resources
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast, the go to podcast for do it yourself Farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman and selling direct to local consumer and wholesale buyers. This podcast is hosted by Barn2Door, the number one business tool for Independent Farmers to manage their business, promote their brand and sell online and in person.
Let's dive into today's Independent Farmer Podcast.
Janelle Maiocco: Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm Janelle Maiocco, CEO of Barn2Door, and your host for today's episode. Barn2Door provides an all-in-one solution for Farmers to sell, direct, manage their business, save a ton of time. We're all about helping you build your brand, owning your own customer list, and selling online and in person.[00:01:00]
In today's conversation, we're going to dive in on some pretty juicy topics, I'll get to that in a second. But first, I wanna welcome Tom Bennett of Bennett Farms in Michigan. He is part of our Farm advisory network. We work with a number of Farmers very closely, they help give us great content to share out to other Farmers and inspire.
Through podcasts, eBooks, emails, and they even host office hours for other Farmers just to talk best practices and basically help each other be successful. He's worked with us for a number of years and we're delighted to have him on today's podcast. Welcome Tom.
Tom Bennett: Hey Janelle. Thanks for having me.
Janelle Maiocco: It was really fun cause I emailed Tom and I'm like “ hey, here's four ideas of what we can talk about” cause there's always so much to discuss when it comes to owning, your Independent Farm Business, running it successfully and everything in between. And I loved it 'cause one of the things you came back with was essentially, and I'm gonna say quote unquote, this is what we're talking about today.
I'm so excited. One is nothing changes. If nothing [00:02:00] changes and you'll fail or succeed on marketing alone, which is this. Great conversation in front of us about, if you're stuck, if you want things to be different, you do need to do things differently. Right. Which is kind of an interesting way to look at it.
And, Tom, especially in monthly, weekly, I think you're on monthly, but we have weekly office hours from Farmer to Farmer. You're often talking about marketing, I feel like it's probably one of the main topics you're discussing with other Farmers.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, that's right. There's a lot of really great Farms out there.
There's a lot of people in the country that can Farm a lot better than I can. I'm pretty humble about that. But there's not a lot of Farms that are willing to put in the hours and work that it takes to direct market to the consumer. So I love Farming, that's why I got into this.
But I quickly realized that if I don't move the product, I can't do what I love. So early on I quickly switch to making sure that I was focusing equally, if not more, on selling the product. And the raising of the product [00:03:00] is pretty easy in comparison.
Janelle Maiocco: That is so well said.
I appreciate that. It's funny 'cause I literally ran across a quote from Joel Salatin, it's from his book You Can Farm, and it says “If you spend all your time on Farming and not marketing, you'll have no one to sell to when your products are ready to harvest”.
Which is essentially the same thing to your point even though that's not always the most fun thing to swallow, right? In terms of like, oh, I can't just Farm. I actually need to think about who's gonna buy the product and keep that heartbeat going.
Tom Bennett: What excites me because when I first got into it, I just wanted to raise the chickens and pigs and cows.
I didn't like dream at night about marketing, when I started my Farm, and as we've grown and seen success, it's almost shifted to where I enjoy the game of trying to grow my Farm and my business, for my employees that we have now, for my family, I have some daughters who are taking a lot of interest in it now.
And they're excited to possibly do this or take it over someday when I get older and that excites me. So just, keep [00:04:00] trying to serve more families. Like I actually am starting to embrace and enjoy that now more than I did just raising the animals. So, it grew on me.
Janelle Maiocco: I actually love how you said that, the shift of actually enjoying the game of growth or the strategy that goes into how I can feed more families. It's interesting you say that because I know a lot of Farms that we work with love farming of course, and all that goes into that.
But many of them are also passionate about serving families. And I love that that's a bit of a bridge in terms of marketing because the efforts of marketing are actually helping you do that piece, which is feed and give health to more and more families in your community. And that is life changing and life giving to them.
So it's interesting 'cause I think many of the Farms that we work with come in and they're like Help when it comes to marketing. Or for them it's a big black box, or it's intimidating or they're afraid it's gonna take so much time. There's many layers of marketing, you can actually keep it pretty simple or you can make it really complex and still have a lot of success.
So I love the idea of sort of unpacking [00:05:00] that and hopefully inspiring Farmers of, Hey, you're feeding families. There's that value in this. You're also feeding your business. In your case, you're feeding the future success even for your family, which is incredible. Before we get too far in, can you please give folks who are listening an overview of your Farm?
Tom Bennett: In 2010, I got outta the Marines, came back home pretty much full-time at that point, and bought some land and put a house on it, and then started hobby Farming.
For myself and my family around 2012. Producing meat for our own consumption. Then we seen demand with that from just people that would come over and ask for our products. I'm like, well, maybe I'll do this, as a viable side hustle. So from 2012 to 2016, we did bulk animals just hole in half hogs.
Might've messed around with some eggs and things like that, but nothing too serious. I had a full-time job. Then in 2016 we started doing farmer's markets with retail cuts, and it only took about two months of doing that before I saw that there was something big happening [00:06:00] there. So from 16 to 18, we grew our farmer's market presence and those were a rough couple of years just because we were trying to do both things full time. That's a big hill for most people to climb. That weeds out a lot of people, I think, because it'll put a lot of stress on your relationships and you miss your kids' events.
There's just a lot of things you have to sacrifice during that period of full-time job and wanting to Farm full-time. 2018 we went full-time into Farming. Now we're up to, 27,000 pasture raised chickens a year, meat birds on pasture. We do a few thousand laying hens of 450 pigs. 700 turkeys, and we're running about 40 to 50 head of cattle on average right now.
So that's our products that we produce and we've been growing every year. We were doubling for a long time, but once you get to the size, it's hard to double every year. We have four full-time employees besides myself, and then we have about 13 part-time team members that [00:07:00] work markets mostly.
Janelle Maiocco: That's incredible. Do you own your Farm or do you lease, or is it a combination? And tell folks what areas you serve and how many farmer's markets are you at?
Tom Bennett: 29 a week during the summer, during the winter, we'll only be 12-13 a week. But during the summer we're at 29 markets per week. We own our Farm, our main Farm here. We use management intensive grazing with the cattle in the same way with the chickens. We're moving them every day on pasture, and so there's a lot of movement, so we can get a lot out of our acreage that's here.
We're all right with the chickens and the pork. We have started using neighboring Farms with our cattle and we're gonna be running turkeys on some neighbor's properties now, so we're expanding out, to get some more acres. Then we also carry products from other Farms around us, and I highly recommend that to Farms once they get traction with their online store, to bring in some products that would compliment yours.
Because anytime you can give the customers more options of items to put in their cart, it's a win for you, it's a win for the other [00:08:00] Farm and the customer. I joke that it's just free money because we sell milk from Amish Country Dairy, 20 minutes from us, and we'll go through thousands of dollars a week in their milk and we don't have to do anything except pick the milk up and deliver it to our customers.
Janelle Maiocco: Yep. In a process you're already doing, right?
Tom Bennett: Yeah. And we have customers that came to us because of say the milk subscription. So that might've drawn them to us in the first place and now they're loyal customers and they buy other products too.
Janelle Maiocco: That's wonderful. It's like taking over the cart is sometimes how we talk about that, right?
It's how can you, provide them the next thing in terms of the staples or the mainstays that people are buying week over week. Especially if it's a subscription. So tell folks, 'cause 29 farmer's markets a lot, for some people considered very large.
Why 29 markets, where, and who are you serving and, are you trying to expand that footprint or decrease it? How do you think about that?
Tom Bennett: We arrived at 29 because that's about all we could find that were worth doing within a hundred miles of us. There's still some that we're on a waiting list for.
I've been on a waiting list for some really good markets [00:09:00] for six, seven years. So there's still more room to grow in that probably get that up to 40 before it was all the way tapped out. Why do we do that? There's two reasons. One, it's the instant cash flow and revenue for our farm.
That's big. About three quarters of our gross sales from the year are gonna come from farmer's markets. The other 25% is gonna be our online store. The farmer's markets is what we used to feed our online store. So the reason we've had success isn't just because of Google Ads or because I did a Facebook post, or because I paid meta to advertise my Farm.
It's measurable, but it's not anywhere close to the amount of new customers we pick up, from doing all those farmer's markets. At the farmer's markets, we're constantly marketing our online store options, especially as the season's coming to a close and people are like, oh, I'm stocking up today.
It's so sad. We won't see you for three months. Let 'em buy their $200 worth of stuff and then let 'em know they can just order it for delivery for their house next week. We make sure everybody knows that they can get home delivery. And [00:10:00] that's where a lot of our online customers find out about us and come from, we do a hundred mile radius. I don't have an exact number of how many zip codes we serve, but it's gonna be at least 150, a couple hundred.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. It's neat to have the visual map of a hundred mile radius for you from a farmer market perspective. Right. I think that gives people an understanding of where you're targeting.
And then from there, are you doing home delivery in most of those areas then?
Tom Bennett: All of them. Yep. We have a full-time delivery driver. That's all he does Monday through Friday and even that's not enough. So, certain days of the week, Wednesdays, Thursdays, we have to have a second driver go out, but he'll be out 60 hours a week, just delivering our product all day.
Janelle Maiocco: Wow. Tom, do you deliver your round then? Because you said, during the summer you're doubly busy at your farmer's markets, and then when those wane in the winter months, Q4, Q1, that's how people are getting your food if the farmer market's not open.
So are you delivering summer and winter? Is it year round?
Tom Bennett: Yeah, year round and [00:11:00] I would say it's surprisingly pretty consistent. It's not like a huge influx in the winter versus summer. That's just because of summer home delivery is also so successful.
And we offer a lot of subscription options that go year round as well. We have meat box subscriptions, we have egg subscriptions, butter subscriptions, milk subscriptions, things like that. So that really ties a lot of our customers and that keeps us in contact with them year round.
Janelle Maiocco: A lot of Farmers that we work with love subscriptions because it equals recurring revenue that you can essentially count on. What percent of your overall revenue would you say is subscriptions? And is it right where you want it or would you make it more or less?
Tom Bennett: When we first started our online store, our subscription revenue was a big portion.
Like it would've been at least half or 70% of our monthly revenue. But now we do so much more revenue that I would say the subscriptions are gonna be, probably 30% of our monthly sales. It's huge.
Janelle Maiocco: Especially at the scale that you are.
Tom Bennett: Yeah. And to get back to that, why so many markets? [00:12:00] Because I don't like leaving opportunity on the table. It's hard for me to say that I'm doing the best that I can for my business if I know that there's still customers to be gained out there. I just have the personality that nothing's ever enough. Which can be a bad or a good thing.
I mean, it's good for the people that I take care of, but yeah, I don't think I'll ever say, okay, I've arrived. Now I can relax. And I think that's also what makes successful people a little more successful. You know?
Janelle Maiocco: I appreciate that. I think you hit on something there, which is and we'll get back to marketing for marketing's sake, but what you're talking about from being at farmer's markets is in person marketing and you're driving 'em for online sales, but there's really opportunities for marketing that go from end to end.
It's in person, but it's also online, right? There's all these different touch points for potential people that you could feed or, who are seeking local food. And they're not all in one place.
Tom Bennett: Yep. That's right. We run Google ads and we just hired a new marketing [00:13:00] company. They're starting in February because I was running my Google ads myself, and I had them do an audit of it and found out that I wasn't actually optimizing it to my full potential.
So hopefully we'll see some increase in that, but we do spend money on advertising with those sources as well. Our ad spend is about a thousand dollars a month, which is just, could be a drop in the bucket for some people or a lot for others.
But I looked at what my competition in my segment spends roughly per month and I just doubled it. So that's where I ride.
Janelle Maiocco: I have to say this, so this is really important. There are a lot of Farms out there who are doing little to no marketing, which is fine, but we also tell many of our Farms that they don't need to do paid advertising because there is so much unpaid or organic or grassroots marketing opportunities, that can beat many options for them to tap into local communities without, online advertising.
In fact, there is a threshold of online advertising and it can be very expensive in terms of trying to tap into that in various markets to [00:14:00] get an actual return. It just depends on a lot of things. But I will say this, you can waste so much time and money on marketing if you are not set up with convenience.
In other words, you can literally spend 10 or a hundred times as much as the next person if it's not easy to shop from you. And if it's not easy to get your food, you're introducing buyers into a very friction-filled or an inconvenient situation to try to buy from you.
If they have to email, text, phone, figure out what you have, they can't see it. It's like first fix the buyer experience and then start marketing. Cause if you're gonna do a whole bunch of marketing and it's like “hey, call me to find out more” or “ fill out this form and I'll get back to you”.
And they have no idea where you're gonna be, where they don't even know what you have. They can't actually purchase it with a credit card online by themselves. Like that self-serve online store. Don't have to talk to anybody, just wanna shop, pay the credit card. Ideally, I'm subscribing so I don't have to think about it again and I've gotten my eggs coming.
I really feel like in terms of the cart before the [00:15:00] horse, you do need the first fix. When you've spent the money and the time getting that buyer, what happens next? Is it so hard to buy from you that they don't bother and they go away and you've now wasted time and money?
Or do they show up and it's easy and delightful to buy from you and to get the food.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, I agree. And one thing people don't think about is if you are gonna be successful and grow your Farm. Form and email and phone call, that's not scalable.
You take it from me. There's no way you can hold the hands of every single one of those customers trying to order from you on a daily basis. If you're gonna try and grow your Farm to a size that can, provide for your family and employees. It's too difficult.
And a lot of things would be forgotten or mistakes would be made. We have software in place, with the Barn2Door, that automates a lot of those things. And we don't like taking orders. If someone emails us or calls us, we pretty much refuse to take 'em that way.
We send them the link and tell 'em, here, if you just go through our website, we could do it for you, but we don't wanna screw up your order or forget it or anything like that. So put [00:16:00] it into the system so that way it gets to you on time is the way that we go with that.
Janelle Maiocco: I appreciate that too, because you're encouraging them that it's gonna be in the system because then you're actually tracking inventory. You can see their order, it's paid for.
Tom Bennett: And if they don't want to do that, that's okay. Try a different farm. I mean, I cannot spend 10 minutes of my day once a week to sell you $7 worth of eggs. My time's too valuable as a business owner. I have thousands of other families I have to take care of too.
I give people the personal relationship, as much as I can, but with some people, you'll have to find where you draw a boundary. Cause if you have to send back and forth 15 emails for eggs every week to sell one lady, $14 worth of stuff to coordinate some kind of drop off and all these things, it's just not worth it.
Janelle Maiocco: You probably won't have a Farm. You can't do that, and that's not going to translate to a successful business. I mean, I don't mean to be harsh.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, I feel bad too because I like these people, but it's, you know.
Janelle Maiocco: But they get an experience of you. They experience your [00:17:00] brand, not like beyond a conversation with just you.
They're still experiencing your brand in a variety of ways. Whether it's they're in person at the farmer market, whether they're getting emails, whether they're watching you on social media, whether they're visiting your beautiful website to then go shop. All of those are quote unquote brand touches. Right.
So ironically, believe it or not, a lot of today's Buyers, them having a brand experience, if you will, which is every time they see your Farm and your logo. And see at the farmer's market that's just accruing, experience of your brand and ideally loyalty.
Tom Bennett: Yeah. And we will do anything in the world to make sure nobody had a bad experience.
I don't care if you just bought eggs from us and we screwed something up. I will move the world to make sure that they're happy in some way at the end of that experience. That's why we only have five star Google reviews. It's not about the money per se.
And that's one way I've always been, that's been great for our brand and our Farm. Somebody could call me because they're mad that a pork chop was tough, but by the time we're done taking care of that customer. They're still gonna talk about how great [00:18:00] our service was, even if that one package of meat like wasn't the best they ever had, we created a relationship with them and we refunded everything.
Even sent 'em out some free replacements, apologized and looked into it. And people remember that.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. I appreciate that. It's interesting to talk about scaling from a marketing perspective. So you said when you responded, which I thought was fun. Nothing changes. If nothing changes. Let's dig into what you meant by that.
Tom Bennett: Yeah. If you find yourself sitting on the couch, in your house. Saying, man, I wish my Farm would do more in business.
Get off your dang couch and get back out to the office and start marketing or writing the emails. You can't sit there and wish things were better. What did you do today? To market your Farm to send people to that website? You gotta do something, and before we had any of this online stuff, you know what I was doing on weekends, I was licking 500 envelopes a day, putting stamps on 'em.
I was mailing people flyers to my Farm to buy hole and half hogs. If I could get one person to buy [00:19:00] out of every 500 flyers I sent out, I would break. Even If I could get two people, I would make a profit. So I would send out 500 flyers a day on the weekends.
And that was my marketing. I wasn't just sitting around feeling sorry cause I didn't have any customers. And we started out like that too. When we first started our online store. It wasn't just like the day the store opened, it was just gangbuster busy. That doesn't work like that.
The algorithm has to catch up to your presence being something that it thinks people want before it starts just feeding them to you and it's not a replacement for you going out there and marketing or doing things to make your Farm better. I believe you fully control whether you succeed or fail.
That could just be a product of my mentality coming from the Marine Corps, but I think it's all on you and it's all on your shoulders, rather, this works out or not. And a lot of people don't like that because now they're responsible for it instead of just fate or the will of the universe.
So you can hard work yourself [00:20:00] into success, but you just have to actually get out and do something, just doing something small will actually mentally help you feel like you're still moving forward and it'll get you out of your slump where you feel like maybe you're not succeeding.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. I love that you said you put a website up and you're surprised that there aren't sales right away.
I don't think there's any company out there in any capacity that's been true for not even just in Farming, like anybody who puts up a website, nobody knows it's there. Right. You have to, to your point A, the algorithms have to catch up, but B, nobody knows that you have to send out your URL to people.
You have to promote your website, your store, point people there, whether it's through Facebook, through emails, through text, newsletters, et cetera. QR codes at the farmer's market. There's so many ways that you can point people there. And you said at the beginning you use the farmer market to point people to your store, which is, in my opinion, quite brilliant.
But I love that it's like, Hey, you can do this nine in 10 people, by the way, want local food. So get in front of them, but you have to get in front of [00:21:00] them. And I will say one more asterisk to that, which is don't count on just the algorithm because they will change.
SEO is not a magic bullet. A lot of people wish that it was and it can be helpful over time, depending on a lot of variables that you have no control over. So at the end of the day, by taking it into your own hands, the way Thomas is talking about, which is literally pointing people to your store, is very powerful and very true and very important.
And because the demand is there, which is awesome, if you do that, you should definitely see the outcomes.
All right. List of ideas for the, just do something. Early on you did fires, which was awesome. And because a lot of folks are just getting started.
Tom Bennett: Yeah. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't have an email list at that time. And I wasn't quite brave enough to just go start trespassing and putting hangers on people's doors.
So I figured I'd mail 'em you can search, everything from jobs to household income within certain regions and put in demographic information for maybe what you think your ideal customer might be. So you could do the [00:22:00] mailing, the flyers that's mediocrely successful. It wasn't anything great. Social media, of course, for us, that works pretty good. At least it puts people's brand in their brain. It puts my brand in people's home, in their phone, in front of 'em.
You gotta give 'em something right in exchange for them wasting their time watching your video. So either make 'em laugh or let 'em learn something about you or your Farm. But early on we would hear people walking by our booth and they'd be like, Bennett Farms I've heard of that Farm before.
It's because we were flooding their social media with our videos and reels and photos. Build an email list. Of course that can take a while though to get, and I don't know, you might have some advice on this. I really don't know how I would build an email list without the farmer's markets.
So that's something that I've never really put a lot of thought into. Cause we were always able to just extract just gobs of emails from the farmer's markets. We would pay our employees a dollar per email that they collect at the market on their market day. So it was just like an additional bonus on their daily income.
And we had some [00:23:00] people who were better at it than others. We had this one guy named CJ. He would collect a hundred emails at every market he went to.
Free press. So there's a lot of newspapers, a lot of small town papers, even some big papers, they need stuff to write about each week and you could even write your own story and send it to 'em. They can make some edits or ask you questions and get it published in a local paper. We were blessed with working with you with Barn2Door, we were in the Wall Street Journal, Acres, USA magazine, quite a few bigger publications all of those things will boost your name. And what I really like about the free press thing is that it gets links to your website on other people's websites in the internet, so now Wall Street Journal has a link to Bennett Farms like in that article, and that's gonna help the algorithm promote your Farm.
I believe, anytime you can get somebody to add your website as a link on their website, that's a win. So Free press that's always good. [00:24:00] Farmer's markets, obviously, that's what we're known for.
Cause we do so many of those. Those are gold mines for capturing emails, collecting new customers, being able to have the one-on-one moments to explain to them how you raise your animals. Those are great. That's where we built our Farm partnerships with other businesses.
We have some caterers in our region and we service some restaurants, but those are great too because they're sourcing our product at a wholesale price and putting it in their dishes that they're serving and they're tagging us in all of those things.
They're mentioning us and typically, a business would mention you because they're paying a premium price for your product versus what they could get it for, at a grocery store. So in order for them to capture the value of using. Premium product whether it be sustainable, regenerative or humanely raised, these type of things, they're gonna wanna mention your name so that way the customers that they're selling to know that, that's why, it's a premium product.
So those are helpful too. Just getting your name out there and helping to build your brand. Those are the ones that really come to [00:25:00] the top of my mind on marketing.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. I appreciate that. Sometimes, ad spend, algorithms, those kinds of things. It's good to try, especially if you have experts and you have some money to spend, but they are often going to be, less dependable than what you're doing at the farmer market, which is literally collecting emails from local customers who have shown up at farmer's markets who are very interested in local food.
And I agree. I think that is by far one of the best ways to build your email list, which is. Synonymous with a customer list. Because regular automated order reminders, newsletters are direct ways to remind them to order on a weekly basis. And arguably, again, we have firms that don't even have social media, but they're great at email marketing and they are doing great.
So I know that you appreciate, the importance of email to the point, and this is good for people to hear that you literally pay a dollar per email for whoever's manning the farmer market booth.
Tom Bennett: And some of it on the marketing, it just takes time to build a brand and a reputation.
As long as you do the right [00:26:00] thing, by people, you produce a quality product, you give great customer service, you give convenience. 'cause for us, we took away all excuses for people to say that buying our meat wasn't convenient, so we'll deliver straight to your doorstep.
We've got different options, but we removed all barriers as far as it being inconvenient for people. But if you just do those three things, take care of your employees and your employees will take care of you so your farm can grow, you really can't go wrong.
It just might take a little bit for the people around you in your community. If you keep at it, you can't lose if you don't quit, so keep improving and evolving to make things more streamlined and better for the customer. You'll get there. It just takes a little time.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. Thank you for saying that. I also loved your ideas. You said, first of all, if folks aren't at farmer's markets, like I said, that is a wonderful way to collect emails, and then input them. Or there's a POS that Farmers can use with Barn2Door.
Those emails are automatically captured and added to Farmer's email lists when they're checking out. So that even automates it further. On [00:27:00] Facebook, you encourage people to provide links or ways for people to provide their email or sign up for their newsletter. We make sure that every Farmer's website has a popup that again, automatically says, “hey, join our newsletter”.
So there's a lot of places online where you can capture emails automatically, even if you're not at farmer's markets. and Then I think to your point, if they're not at farmer's markets. They can also be collecting emails at any kind of popup of events or any in person. We often have people start with, whoever's purchasing from them today, even if it's just friends, families, neighbors.
Sometimes there's schools or churches that people go to so they can collect emails in those venues. A lot of people put flyers at coffee shops, and various local places, including some they might partner with, for deliveries or for drop off or pickups.
So I think be creative, be persistent to your point, and collecting emails. There's a lot of different ways to attack that. And often it's good to do it in multiple ways, not just one.
Tom Bennett: I would say our email list is the most valuable [00:28:00] thing that I had. If my barn was burning down right now, my operation center and I can only grab one thing, it would be. If I could somehow get my email list, that's what I would take. It's the most valuable asset that I have, 'cause it's an asset that just produces money. If I had my email list, I could rebuild this Farm but if I lost it, that would be devastating.
It's a quality email list of quality customers. It's not just some spam junk email list, of random people. These are all people that wanted to be on the email list that signed up with us, probably spoke with us, or they bought something from us and then they get put into the email list.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that you said that. It reminded me, this might seem like a silly analogy, but I have a cousin who became a dentist and he studied to become a dentist and he, when he came out, he had no customers. So he is trained to be a dentist, but he has no customers, and so he bought somebody else's practice.
What that really means is he bought their email list, It's the value of an existing business and an existing brand is the customers. And when you're doing what you're doing, [00:29:00] the email list today literally is that value. So that's to your point, if all of your Farming went away, but you had a loyal list of customers, you absolutely could rebuild
And I also loved your suggestion about, local press. Back in the day I was a food influencer, a food blogger, and we did so many press opportunities and they were reaching out to us and vice versa. But they're always looking for ideas, interesting things to write about.
That can be, local papers, local magazines, that can be even online communities. There's often online local food communities that you can dip into. There's probably even local Facebook groups that you can offer to make posts and et cetera. So I think seeking to have articles written about you is a great idea.
And influencers like go outside quote unquote normal press and who are the food bloggers? The foodies or even homesteaders or whatnot in certain areas. Cause there's a lot of folks that are more than happy to support local Farm and sometimes if they're a food blogger, give 'em some free product to post [00:30:00] about it and then they'll link back to you to shop.
Tom Bennett: A lot of our good farmer's markets, they do hire social media, food bloggers to come into the markets. They'll give them like $200 in market bucks to come in and shop with we had last summer, I mean, we do a lot in Chicago, so there was a lady that was sharing our stuff in her story and it was getting tons of likes and then I looked who it was and she was the wife of the Chicago Cubs, like center fielder. And they got millions of followers and that was in her story. I was like, that's pretty cool.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. Go find the local football teams. That's great, or the big, not just local, but Yeah.
Tom Bennett: Yeah. I sent it to the worker that's always at that market and he's like, no way. The redheaded guy, I didn't know he was on the Cubs, but they come shop with us every week, you know?
Janelle Maiocco: There you go. I love it. The other thing you said is you'll fail or succeed on marketing alone. Did you wanna expand on that?
Tom Bennett: Yeah, it all comes back to you can be the greatest Farmer in the world, but if you don't sell anything, your Farm's gonna fail. A lot of Farms I see they maybe one spouse is the head Farmer and the other spouse is the head marketer.
And that's a pretty lethal combo there for success. Because [00:31:00] you got two different people just doing what they love. And when I say marketing, it's not just, the five marketing things. Whether I see marketing as just selling and brand building really, moving the product, I guess is how I'm using that term.
If you're not putting as equal amount of energy or more into that, it's not gonna work. At least in my opinion, you would never get more than just a side hobby, vacation money type of prize if you're not marketing in some capacity or building a brand.
Janelle Maiocco: I'm glad you said that. I was gonna ask you to say what is marketing, because I had a podcast, I think it was over a year ago with a Farmer. He's like, I'm terrible at marketing. And then he proceeded to tell me that he had emails and he emailed them every week.
And he was doing all these things. I'm like, you're great at marketing. What are you talking about? You're not good at marketing. What does that mean to you? So it is like digging into what it, what is quote unquote, I need help with marketing or what does it actually mean?
We talk about it here, marketing for the purpose of sales, like a website hanging out by itself with no way to purchase without a store is pretty, [00:32:00] useless. If you have somebody looking at your website, getting excited about your product and they can't go click and buy right at that moment, you've lost a customer.
Tom Bennett: Yeah. I would say marketing for me is just, putting energy in some form into trying to move your product, I'm actually short for words on, on how to exactly encapsulate that.
Janelle Maiocco: Well, I will tell you this. When I went to business school, I dunno if they say it like this anymore, but in, in the day, one of the ways they looked at marketing is they said it's the four Ps.
One is product, so the quality of your product or what it is that you're actually selling, one is, pricing. So like pricing and packaging. So what kind of packaging and sizes and pricing are you putting on things? So it's pricing product. And then the other two are placement and promotion. And so placement is where can people find what you're selling? And then promotion is where are you promoting it? Cause at the time, I think people were talking about putting board games into coffee shops because they realized, oh, That's who wants to play board games are people who are buying coffee.
I know that sounds kind of funny, but it's thinking about [00:33:00] where can people find what I'm selling? The quality, the pricing, packaging, and then like constantly bringing it to the attention of people from a promotion perspective, to make sure that they're even aware.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, you gotta constantly remind people that you're there. 'cause even, you're thinking about your Farm all the time in your business, but they've got lives, they're busy. They may love your Farm and love your food and everything you have to offer, but life gets busy and they forget.
So those emails are huge. It just reminds people that you're there and brings 'em back.
Janelle Maiocco: And it gives 'em a chance to buy at any time. I think sometimes when we're thinking about, promotion and placement and everything else, those emails are directing them to an online store or social media directs them to your online store.
It's almost like all roads lead to Rome. It's really easy, but you just wanna make sure to lay out as many roads as you can to lead them
Tom Bennett: Right? And it does get easier. Some people listening to this, they might think that, oh my gosh, like what I'm doing right now is so hard.
I couldn't imagine growing my farm or doing as many markets as Tom and Bennett Farms. The truth of it is, it gets [00:34:00] easier. Honestly, I'm working less hard now than I ever have in the history of my Farm. And because we've got processes and things in place now everything runs smoothly.
We finally got to a size where I was able to hire people, so I don't have to do everything myself. And it does actually get easier as you get a little bit bigger. It's not just exponentially harder to do more in sales or handle more customers. My life's gotten a lot better in the last three years, when it comes to that aspect.
So I wouldn't be intimidated. Of, trying to grow, like, oh, we can barely do what we're doing. How would we do twice that? Well, you bring on one person and now you can do three times that, find good people to work for you and jump into that.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that encouragement because you did at the beginning say you had that aha moment in 2016 saying, wow, there's a market opportunity here.
People are very interested. And then you said the next two years were really hard. You're literally just continuing to push and push. And you've also said, don't get discouraged. Keep doing [00:35:00] quote unquote marketing type exercises. You will eventually build your email list.
You will eventually have habitual buyers who will buy from you regularly, who recognize you at the farmer's market, who now are subscribers. But it's harder at the beginning.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, everything's hard in the beginning. If I didn't have the knowledge that I have now and I had to go back and start over again, would I do it? Probably not. Maybe because I know what I know now. It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. And in hindsight, mean, could have picked a lot easier things to do.
Janelle Maiocco: What are those things?
Tom Bennett: Manufacturing, geez, I would love to just create a widget on a machine with a factory full of people. That'd be a lot easier than trying to keep,
Janelle Maiocco: wait, you're not supposed to discourage people from farming.
Tom Bennett: It's negative five degrees outside right now. So it's no, but in reality it's, there is a lot of similarities between the two, except our product that we are, that we're producing for our customers is, we have to shepherd it from the embryonic stage all the way through life. As opposed to just ordering supplies so we're making [00:36:00] something that's very, delicate and dynamic.
I produce blindly based on faith in myself that I will be able to sell it next year, and it's always served me well. But you have to plan for growth before growth has happened, because if you don't have enough, it's too late. So, I've always put myself in situations, bit off more than, most people would wanna chew. And, then get after it,
Janelle Maiocco: yeah, I feel like there's so many things to chat about, but I know we're pushing up against time here. I have, two more questions. One is a quick advice on just email marketing. Like how often do you do it? What do you recommend? Now that you have that email list, a lot of folks, wanna know what your best practices there.
And then my next question will just be if there's one or two things you can leave people with, what would that be?
Tom Bennett: Email marketing. We do it once a week. My daughter Alyssa, she took that over about six months ago. So she does an email about once a week. She has a flow to her email, maybe like a piece about the Farm, maybe some new products that are coming in stock or a special or, we'll highlight one of our employees typically.
Usually it's [00:37:00] a new person, so we'll do a little bio on the new person. Just give people some stories from around the Farm, what's going on? She does that once a week. Email is just chocked full of opportunities to buy stuff so you click on a word in that email where it says chicken chorizo, and it's gonna have a link to it.
If you accidentally click on it, you're gonna go to our online store for chicken chorizo. I like once a week, just because personally, that's like my threshold as a person from how often I want to hear from, somebody that I buy from. And that works well. It'll be exciting. I'll be taking over the emails. Coming up she's actually leaving, for the Marines, joining, February 1st, I believe she leaves. And that was mostly because, just for the leadership training. I mean, the nation's premier leadership school and, she's gonna do the reserves, so she'll still be a big part of the farm. She just has six months of training.
Janelle Maiocco: Tom, that is so cool.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, it's exciting. It'll be coming up in one of our next newsletters. She has to do two newsletters this week to give me a little buffer. One of 'em was gonna be about her leaving for that. You know, I was a Marine, her mom was a Marine and none of my kids [00:38:00] really expressed a lot of interest in it. But now that she's gotten into the business side of things and she's now managing people, I thought it would be really good for her. And then the idea grew on her. It'll be really good for her self-confidence and her leadership abilities.
Janelle Maiocco: I love it. Wow. Well, thank you and your wife for your service and wow, your daughter soon enough. That's really special. Thanks for sharing that.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, so yeah, I'll be taking the emails back over pretty soon for six months
Janelle Maiocco: For a little bit. Yeah.
Tom Bennett: Yeah. what was the last question?
Janelle Maiocco: One or two pieces of advice for people to take away from, I think we came into it saying if nothing changes, nothing changes.
We talked a lot about marketing, and just sticking with it. Especially early on, it'll pay off. I loved how you talked about making it so convenient for the buyers that there's no excuse not to buy from you. But there's just lots of gold, in there, but any bits of advice or encouragement as we're signing off?
Tom Bennett: Yeah, I mean, usually I've got some real good one line zingers there, but the, we get this out.
Janelle Maiocco: I remember one, [00:39:00] I know one of your zingers that it is. Every time you send an email, it's like going to the ATM.
Tom Bennett: Oh, it is. I'm sending a e an order reminder after this podcast real quick and just 'cause I wanna generate a few more thousand dollars before Monday, that's all it is.
I got stuff to pay for on Monday, so if I send out an email right now, I'll have a few thousand more dollars on Monday morning. I would say the best advice I could give to people starting out it would be just don't quit when it gets hard. Cause it's gonna get hard and it's gonna be hard. And that's the life that you're walking into. It's not easy for anybody. It look like it's easy, you seeing 'em on social media and things like that. It's a front 'cause it's not an easy life to take on.
But I would say if you can not quit and just keep with it, on the right path, I mean, obviously you don't wanna be keeping with doing the wrong thing, so make sure that you're doing everything to the best you will. But if you keep going and keep digging, you'll eventually make it and be successful.
Too many people reach a breaking point. And every time you do reach a point where you're like, this is crazy. I cannot live like that. I can't do this. If you push through that. [00:40:00] You just created a barrier for everyone else who's trying to be your competition, because they've gotta push through that too, and most of them will turn back.
When things are super hard, be excited about it because that means that's how hard it's gonna be for anybody who tries to follow.
I would say just keep pushing. Don't quit. And you'll get there. Be careful with your cash flow. That's gonna haunt you for a long time. Like real talk, even us doing the numbers we do now, like if you have cash flow problems you can't just grow your way out of those problems because whatever you're doing wrong to create those problems, when you're doing 50,000, a hundred thousand a year in sales, those problems are only gonna be magnified when you start reaching $2 million a year in sales. So you, can't just grow your way out of a bad financial management.
So make sure that you really, read some financial books and business management books and understand cash flow and accounting. That'll be really helpful for you as well. That's the other thing that's gonna get farms is that they get too overstretched on cashflow.
That'd be my advice. Those two things.
Janelle Maiocco: I [00:41:00] love it. Those are very valuable, for folks to take to heart and thank you for that. I appreciate it. Okay, thank you Tom, for joining us on this week's podcast episode. For folks listening, you can find Tom, on Instagram at @BennettFarmsMichigan.
Bennett is with two N's and two T's. Bennett Farms, Michigan. At Barn2Door we're humbled to support thousands of Independent Farmers across the country. We're delighted to offer services and tools to help farmers access more, customers, increase sales and save time.
We're incredibly passionate about the software that we've built that is built for Farmers. So if you need online e-commerce, promoting your brand, selling in person with a POS, we're not generic. We're built for Farmers and there's a lot of specifics that is very helpful for Farmers doing that.
We also have services like literally Tom hosts, office Hours in addition to a number of other Farmers to give advice and encouragement, which has just, been a real gem in terms of some of the resources we're able to provide. If you're an Independent Farmer and you want to learn more.
Go to Barn2Door.com/learn more. Thank you so [00:42:00] much for tuning in today. Thank you Tom for joining us, and for giving us this time out of your very busy schedule. And thank you for encouraging everybody. I love that if you keep edit it will get easier. You'll get smarter cause you're learning all the time, all these hard lessons.
So that's just great news for people who are pushing hard. Thank you again everybody for joining us and thank you Tom.
Thank you for joining us on the Independent Farmer Podcast. At Barn2Door, we are passionate about empowering independent farmers to build a thriving business. To all the Farmers out there, thank you for all you do to grow amazing food, care for the soil, and serve your local communities. You are the backbone of our country.
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