Marketing is more than just setting up your farm stand and hoping for the best.
Utilizing social media for promotion, figuring out what your speciality is and giving customers first-hand experience of your produce is just the beginning. Here are four steps to getting the most sales out of your farm stand.
1) What is your specialty?
If you as a business owner has a certain specialty like potatoes, celery or apples, use that as your selling point. If your farm has an interesting story behind it, use that as another selling point. According to our Tips for Increasing Farmers Market Sales article, a word of advice is to be remembered, preferred and trusted to keep customers coming back each time, especially since consistency is key.
A part of a customer’s experience is knowing who they are buying from. That’s the perfect chance to let them know what your expertise and specialty is. Getting to know your customer and them getting to know you will ensure they keep coming back for your product.
2) Utilize social media
Traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are an important part of our lives today and it’s not going away anytime soon. Utilizing those platforms can help advertise your farm stand to the world and in turn, bring in more sales.
Making a Facebook business page for your farm stand and invite people to like it will put your farm stand in front of more eyes. With a Facebook business page, you can update it as frequently as you want to alert your customers to any sales, new items or anything else you want them to know. Adding photos to give your audience visuals are more likely to be clicked. The ability to make events on Facebook will also give your farm stand an upper hand in sales, especially if your audience invites their friends.
With Twitter, you have the ability to send out 140-character updates to all of your followers for quick updates before, during and after the sale. If your customers need to be alerted as soon as possible, it’s possible to do that with a Twitter account.
3) Attract customers to your stand
It’s no secret that customers are attracted to free items and colorful signs. Samples are another great way to attract customers and to give them a taste of what you’re selling. According to our Tips for Increasing Farmers Market Sales article, it’s crucial to be aware of food safety issues with samples and to have available toothpicks for testing food.
Bright, bold signs are another tried and true way of attracting customers while they walk amongst other stands in the farmers market. The Tips for Increasing Farmers Market Sales article recommends that signs should be easily read from 50 feet away and having a consistent logo and typeface for your business.
4) Educate customers
People who frequent farmers’ markets may or may not know everything and anything about the products sold at all of the farm stands. It’s up to you as a farm stand owner to educate customers on your products and help them make the right decisions when purchasing from you.
If you know of any easy, well-known recipes that your customers can make from the produce you sell, use that as a gate-way to educate and sell. Putting up a recipe on your table or even throwing in a small printout of a recipe in each bag is memorable and puts a personal touch on each sale you make.