Optimize Your Sales Funnel Management for Animal Science

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you may have produced a beautiful farm product but nobody knows that it exists yet in order for you to make a sale people need to know that you exist we're gonna go to the first step in our sales funnel and that's awareness I'm going to talk about how I've generate a we're gonna I'm going to talk about how I've generated awareness for my business in the past and that's what what today's video is all about [Music] [Music] so when you're just starting out if you have the mentality of if you will build it then they will come well then you're gonna be just sitting on either a cooler full of veggies or a freezer full of chickens or whatever it is that you're growing because people don't know you exist there's a lot of noise out there there's a lot of stuff on the Internet I'm sure you are painfully aware how we're all inundated with marketing and advertising conversation and things for buying for our attention on a regular basis now the difficulty for you and me as producers is to stand out from all that noise and reach those people that we actually want to reach with our business our farm goods whatever it is that we have honey beef vegetables chicken eggs I don't care anyways so awareness what are some things I've done to say hey standing out from the crowd this is my business if you want some of this you can come and get it all right let's dive in one thing I've done is post fliers at local businesses I go to Home Depot Tractor Supply places where I think my customer set is going to be shopping is gonna be picking up stuff maybe with their kids and have to go to the bathroom and they're doing a project on the weekend so they're at Home Depot and my Home Depot has really great bathrooms something with it there's a message board it could be a supermarket could be yoga studio could be a Pilates place it could be a farm-to-table restaurant that has a place for public information but printing up a little flyer with your info we won't get into graphic design in this video but putting up a flyer with a little tear aways and posting them other local businesses I've gotten customers that way it's a way that works you know and find a way for you to track that so that you know which ones go back and check which ones are all the tabs taken and which ones still have all their tabs and it was kind of waste of time another thing I've done is set up booths at local events there's Earth Day events five K's people do runs bake sales whatever find some kind of event and set up a booth where you can showcase your stuff you may not get a lot of sales that day but especially in the beginning this was good for me for outreach where I went to this Earth Day event and I met a lot of the people who were all about Earth and hippy demand greatness and carbon sequestration and grass growing and vegetables and/or in it and it didn't matter if I got a lot of them but if I got five or ten great leads off of that one event in the beginning as a building blocks those people are going to talk to other people other people who couldn't make the event that day so setting up a booth sharing information it's a good way to go this one's fun I did chicken appearances at local schools and library groups where I would pack up some baby chicks or a full-grown chicken and a chicken crate or a cardboard box in a way that was as peaceful as possible for the bird and then went to that school or place a business and met with a group of either homeschool kids or actual classrooms full of kids and saw our chicken and talked about what a chicken is and how a chicken is the closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus Rex and how how moving how many eggs they lay in a day and answer all the little kids cute chicken questions and then while you're there have business cards and flyers that you can give to the principal or the teacher whoever's in charge to put in all the kids cubbies so mom and dad say what do you did it what did you do at school today they can say Oh a chicken guy came and then they'll have a point of reference for your information that you included for whatever it is you have in their cubby in the beginning it could be bringing started plants to that thing you know whatever your specialty is you can host an open house or a farm crawl let me tell you this one thing you're gonna have to advertise that so that is an event where you can have people come and show your growing practices and your transparency and all this beautiful way that you live and all those hard work that you do out in the farm to make things look great and produce food for people but you're gonna have to let people know about that too so you're back to generating awareness about your event so you can generate awareness through your event the event itself like a open open farm or farm crawl could be a further step down the down the sales funnel which we'll cover in the future but yeah having that open transparency if you have road frontage and people are driving by this might be perfect for you because people will see open house they don't have to buy anything but they're gonna come in see what you're doing hear your presentation and then they'll probably convert into customers from there hopefully you know that's dope another way of generating online awareness and this has worked for me in the past is taking out online advertising I don't advertise ments where you're taking out ads on the internet you could whether it be a social network like Facebook or you're taking out Google Ads unless you know what you're doing don't dive into this one as like the first thing that you're gonna try it does work but you have to be very targeted and that that advertisement platform is a little bit of a moving target and so unless it's your hobby or you have a friend who's really good at it yes it's on the table don't put it on the table right away do some of the low-hanging fruit first when you're just starting up your farm you might have a really good back story of how you got on land whether you inherited it or you sold your business or however you got where you are today everybody has an interesting story if they're excited and interested about it themselves and you can leverage that by putting out press releases to your local radio stations local TV and news they're usually starved for news other than national news because people go to different places for the news but local news really wants to tell some of those local stories and you my friend are a local story so find out how to do a press release send it out to your local media don't worry about making national news we're talking about developing a local business not a national business all you have to worry about is your area another thing you could do is cross market with other farmers in your area if somebody has a vegetable csa wants to have a meet offering maybe you can offer them meat and vice versa if people want to add honey if there's some way where you can get in benefit the other farmer by either increasing their customer base or their offering or offering a commission on the sales because they're doing the marketing for you whatever it is find some other farmers who aligned with you good friends you feel like you can do business have a contract not just a handshake together but you can do some really good high-quality cross marketing with some other farms after some of those things we really get into the online world where you're developing a website that people are gonna find so you have to learn a little bit about search engine optimization and get comfortable telling your story both with words and with pictures and you're gonna use those skills and your social media as well I like to focus on Instagram and then use Instagram to auto publish to Facebook Facebook is kind of a shifting sands environment more so than the rest of the internet at the time of me recording this video so I focus on Instagram and then have that cross published to my website and Facebook as well and then registering with Google Maps Google Places so that your registered business finding things like Yelp or Foursquare whatever is relevant at the time when you do your research in this video I have registered with Google Maps and Google Places I have an Instagram account and I have a farm website and these are all things throughout this entire video that I've done try to get people into my business or at least this is the number of things that I remember when I have to sit down and write a list to create this video if you want to hear the next step in the sales funnel series subscribe to the channel and wait until that next video comes out if you're missing the last step and you don't know what sales funnel is at all you can go back and watch the video before this one and if you're interested in sales and marketing selling more chickens as a pastured poultry producer this is the book that I have coming out in the spring of 2018 and whether it's whatever you're watching this video sometime in the future if this book is out or just about to be out or if you're watching this today I published it all the information more information about this guy right here is on farm marketing solutions com forward slash door you're gonna look for the pasture poultry packet number two love you guys thanks for taking the time to watch this video and until next time I will see you out of the field [Music]