Social Marketing Ideas for NH Farmers

The way that online marketing is evolving these days, the tools and means for anyone to market online now exist. I was inspired this week after my regular visit with my family to our farm co-op in Stoddard NH. During the summer we visit the farm every Monday and pick up our share of the delicious fresh veggies. It’s fun because we never know everything we’re going to find which brings challenges and excitement to our meal preparation. We eat more veggies because they taste better, and our son gets to see how his food grows. We like the suspense and have fun with what we find.

Spreading the word

As we leave the farm each week the farmer always tells us to “tell our friends” and “spread the good word” and we are more than happy to do so, but they could be initiating and facilitating these types of recommendations and communications on a daily basis using free tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. There is no shortage of community connection tools available to businesses these days. They can use these free tools to generate conversation and equity for their brand of service or product. The numbers to support this are there! Facebook just recently passed Google and the most frequented web destination in North America boasting a user base well over 400 million (and growing) that on average spends about 20 minutes PER DAY on the site. That’s online engagement time that you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

I’ve heard this before. Tell me what it means for me.

For farmers in NH (or anywhere else for that matter) what it means for you is this…..you need to get a decent website and you need to start talking and engaging your customers online. Create yourself a Facebook account, set up a business page for your farm and then link those elements to your website that needs to have a form mechanism for customers to contact you about your products and services. If it was my farm, having both of those elements in place I would notify all of my customers that I would be providing them at least the following each week:

• Weekly updates as to what’s going to be available for shares
• Recipe Suggestions and Links to coincide with the available veggies that week
• Post weekly specials on your Facebook Business Page to entice more people to “like” your products/service
• Offer specials for people who sign up for your email updates

These simple tasks completed on a regular basis will help to build awareness of your services. It will make it very easy for all your customers using social media tools such as Facebook to be able to recommend your product and your content to all of their friends. Best of all every time people engage with your information and content online that activity and data is cataloged in all major search engines creating even more opportunity for your business to be found by more and more people.

Sound interesting to you? Not sure how to get started?

That’s where FirstTracks Marketing Group comes in! We are on top of all the new and current social media applications and we know how to use them properly to generate success for your business. We can help you set up Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or Linkedin. You name it and we can help you develop a strategy for it. Give our office in Peterborough NH a call at 603-924-1978 or fill out our request form to get started. We look forward to hearing from you soon!