A Farmer's Market(ing) Campaign to Grow Faster Online with Bennett Farms
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, Tom Bennett from Bennett Farms shares his tips on using Farmers Markets as a marketing tool to increase your Farm's online sales.
www.bennettfarmsmichigan.com
www.barn2door.com/resources
www.barn2door.com/connect
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[00:00:00] Rory: Welcome everyone. I'm delighted here to have Tom Bennett with us from Bennett farms in Michigan. Tom, do you want to maybe start by introducing yourself and the topic we're going to be talking about today?
[00:00:10] Tom Bennett: Yeah, Tom Bennett here. I'm a first generation farmer. We do pork and poultry on pasture.
[00:00:15] It's all. non-GMO antibiotic free up here in Michigan and we do about 13 farmer's markets a week, and we also utilize our online store, so looking forward to a conversation today and maybe give you guys some pointers on how to leverage your presence at the farmer's market into more customers online.
[00:00:33] Initially I didn't realize that was as big of a component of our online stores as it was until we started talking to some other farms that use Barn2Door and they're asking us how we're successful. And then it clicked for me wait a minute. It's probably these 20,000 farmer's market customers per year that I'm sending to our online store is why it's working so well for us.
[00:00:52] So we'll talk a little bit about that today and share some tips with you to hopefully grow your online sales.
[00:00:59] Rory: Awesome. And Tom, you're a first-generation farmer. I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about the history of Bennett Farms and how you got started, how you got into farming and then and maybe some of your background and some of the organizations you're a part of today.
[00:01:12] Tom Bennett: Yeah. The history of Bennett farms, I didn't come from a farming family. My grandfather was a butcher and my dad cut meat for a while too. So around that side of it as a kid. But no farming experience, as far as that goes, aside from my neighbors, having cows that we would go over and chase around the pasture when I was a kid.
[00:01:30] But when I was in the Marines joined in 2001, and I was going to be getting out around 2010. Somewhere around 2007, I started to think about my future and what that would look like outside of the military service. And I thought it would be a great idea, to have direct to consumer farm.
[00:01:47] Wasn't real sure how that would look. At that time there wasn't really a lot going on online with direct to consumer sales. So I started putting things in place prior to getting out of the military. Like I came home on leave a couple of years before I got out and bought, the land. It was an old corn and soybean field, basically all from a farmer that was retiring.
[00:02:07] So I bought the vacant land. And then when I had gotten out of the Marine Corps around 2010, we were able to, first you got to build the house and get an off farm job and kind of get your life reestablished because you're basically starting out at square one on everything. So we did that slowly built it up.
[00:02:25] So by 2012, 13, we were just hobby farming, more just raising animals for ourselves and our own consumption. And then it just kept growing from there as people were like, Hey, why don't you raise us a hog? Can, can you raise meat for us? And and so it grew organically to a point to where it was feasible, if I put the time into it required to make it a full-time job. It took a while. It wasn't like overnight, but we eventually got there and I became a full-time farmer in would've been in 2018 I quit my off farm job to farm full-time so.
[00:02:58] Rory: Great. Yeah. And I know you briefly mentioned, but the products you're producing do you maybe want to talk about those and the practices that you're using.
[00:03:05] Tom Bennett: Yeah, so it's all pasture-raised. We don't have any barns to speak of on our farm. Everything's done outdoors. We do pork year round, the poultry we can only do that, and we've learned the hard way, only run the pastured poultry up in our region between Mother's Day and Halloween. You got a little bit more leeway on the backend, With the end times, those chickens at the end, there they're full grown so they can handle a little bit more bad weather, but the chicks early on, if you, where we're at, if whenever I try and put chicks out on the pasture, before mother's day, they inevitably get snowed on or there's a flood, it's just always bad.
[00:03:43] So we wait until after then. So on the poultry it's seasonal, the pigs are year round. With the pigs, we move them about every week or two weeks to a new pasture, just based on the weather conditions and how fast they tear up the ground that they're currently on. Then the turkeys, we start them around the second week of July for Thanksgiving.
[00:04:03] So yeah, it's all non-GMO feed, you know that for our inputs, we, and all of our pastures, we have two ton hog feeders that the pigs always have access to with those non-GMO rations. And that supplements their, what they're taking in on pasture for their feed. And we estimate their pasture consumption to be around 30%, like with the hogs.
[00:04:23] Rory: That's really cool that you've actually calculated that out. Yeah, great. I'm really excited to talk and dive into today's topic. We're going to be honing in on four specific tactics that farmers can use to leverage farmer's markets to grow faster online, which I think a lot of farmers when they start farming or as they've had their history in farming, the farmer's market is always a really big part of of the farming experience and connecting with your customers.
[00:04:47] But obviously I think there's this transition to online and into e-commerce. And I think this, the status 99% of Americans don't attend a farmer's market regularly, at least. So making sure you're capitalizing on the times when people are there is the focus of today's topic. So for our first tactic is just in general, this focus on direct to market efforts.
[00:05:07] And so I think there's all these different channels that we have available or farmers have available to them. And among those, the webstore, your email marketing, your social media. So I guess step one is really to be online and to have that place to go. Which is obviously very important if somebody is coming to the farmer's market for the first time Might not be there the next week.
[00:05:27] Tom, could you maybe talk about how you've engaged customers and brought them online and how you use your webstore to promote your business and how that is the focal point of your business operations today?
[00:05:40] Tom Bennett: Yeah, it is. So our farmer's markets, the whole goal of that, obviously we do a lot of sales at farmer's markets too, but my number as the business owner, It's more important to me that our employees at the markets are conveying our online store experience to our customers, as well as selling them products.
[00:06:01] Because we run a farm that operates year round, June through August. We need those customers to buy from us all year round to make things flow evenly on our farm and to work. And so we can do it full-time. So we spend a lot of effort trying to convert those farmer's market customers into online customers.
[00:06:19] Even if that means just trying to get those farmer's market customers to order online the week before the market to pick up at the market. So we'll do we do home delivery. We do farmer's market pickups. We do on-farm pickups. So those are like the three ways that they can get our stuff through our online store.
[00:06:36] And like last month we ran a special in February. Just to try and drum up some more farmers market customers to get them into our online store, to experience it for the first time. So they could see how easy it was. And so that way, if they had never used it before to maybe try and get them to utilize that more often, and it was a huge success.
[00:06:56] We gave away a half a hog and the way that worked was we emailed it out to all of our customers that we were going to be doing this for the month of February. And then we put it in the banner at the top of our online store. And then we told all the people at the farmer's markets like, Hey, you can't buy this here, or you can order it online ahead.
[00:07:12] You'll get a much larger selection to choose from, pick it up here. And then you'll be in the drawing for our half hug giveaway we're doing at the end of February. So for every customer that placed an order online during the month of February. Each time they place an order, their name was put into a drawing that we held live on Instagram on March 1st for a free half hog.
[00:07:33] They get the full treatment that our paying customers get with that for our spring hog pickup. And that was a huge success. We had one lady, she probably ordered 16 times that month, like through our online store, just she, she was playing the system, but that's fine.
[00:07:45] There's no minimum on the order size, but she was ordering, once a day, trying to get her name in the hat as many times as possible, but she's really good at ordering online now. So she's not afraid to try it in the future. If you need a pork roast or something, don't just show up to my farmer's market booth and hope that I brought those that day.
[00:08:00] You can order online the night before and then, it'll be there when you get to the market. We've seen a lot of growth in sales that month with our online store because of that promotion. Also at the farmer's market. Every single customer that comes up and buys from us, they get a flyer advertising our online store in their bag at checkout.
[00:08:20] So that way, when they get home and they're pulling their meat out, they'll see it. And they can ideally go there and check it out.
[00:08:25] Whenever I'm at a farmer's market, I'm not only talking to customers, I'm also talking to other farmers, and I'm trying to help them out and some of my buddies who are farmers, they're like, dude, why are you doing that? They're going to be your competition. No, man, we're all the same team. Like I'm not in, I'm not threatened, by the guy who's selling chicken right next to me. I want to see him do good too. So I'm always talking to them and I'm like, Hey, have you tried this?
[00:08:46] Are you online? And they're like, yeah, I'm online. You can go to my website and email us. Dude, that's not online, no. Having a website where a customer can email you and ask you for stuff and having an online store. They aren't apples to apples. So I see some farmers, a lot of the times they think they're online because they have a website and because customers can email them and request things, but that's not the same thing. Being online is important, but being able to give customers the opportunity to take actionable steps to buy from you immediately online, that's important. That's where those spur of the moment I'm laying in bed at 10 o'clock at night, thinking about bacon, and I come across Bennett farm's website and I can order bacon land right there on my phone in two and a half minutes. And it'll be delivered to my house. Like that's where a lot of those sales come from.
[00:09:39] A lot of our sales do come in late at night, between 10 o'clock and midnight. It's not uncommon for us to receive several orders in that timeframe.
[00:09:46] Rory: And I think two things that came to mind when you're speaking on all that one. Exactly like you're saying, in the last year we've seen 65% of online sales occur through mobile and social media. So like you're saying people laying in bed, ordering from their phones, when they think of bacon, they just pull up their phone and buy it. They don't want to have to take that extra step of emailing a farmer. They just want to be able to click a few buttons and know that they can get that product.
[00:10:10] And then the other 35% occurred through desktop and email. So again, just easy access, clicking a few buttons to be able to get those products. I also loved your, that campaign that you guys ran, because you're hitting people on so many different channels.
[00:10:22] You're getting them to try out the webstore. You're connecting with them at the farmer's market, but then also that added factor of doing the announcement on social media, going live is a really cool way to draw people towards that channel too and further grow your brand there.
[00:10:34] Tom Bennett: Yeah that, that campaign was a win all the way around for us. So the amount that we had in the cost of giving away that half a hog. My direct cost would be around 250 bucks.
[00:10:45] And if I were to spend $250 on Facebook ads, I would have maybe gotten four orders. You know what I mean? It generated, I'd have to look back at February, but you're looking at somewhere between 5 and $6,000 worth of sales on, that advertising.
[00:10:59] So it was definitely the return on that was really good.
[00:11:03] Rory: Massive.
[00:11:04] Tom Bennett: We're definitely going to do that more often because I would rather give our advertising budget to our customers anyways, in the form of free products. If they're going to drum up sales and share it with their friends, like they did, because that's what was happening.
[00:11:17] They were sharing with all their friends like, Hey, look, order here. You could win a half a pig because I'd rather see them get to keep the money, and enjoy that than Facebook.
[00:11:25] Rory: Yeah. That's awesome. Part two to this first tactic is what we've been alluding to this whole time, but engaging offline.
[00:11:31] And I think that's maybe the part that sometimes comes more naturally to a lot of farmers, but making those connections at farmer's markets and, posting flyers at local businesses and being active and engaging with your community. What are some of the ways that you've been able to engage buyers in person?
[00:11:46] I think number one is probably the farmer's markets, but what are some of the ways you go about that?
[00:11:51] Tom Bennett: Yeah, the farmer's markets are huge. That's a big component. Some other things that we do as far as our community goes we, things I've done in the past went in and spoke at schools. So sometimes an elementary school teacher you'll see us online and they'll reach out to us and say, Hey, can you come speak to our third grade class? We're doing chicken lifecycle right now. I brought in chickens to schools and talk to them for an hour about how the process of creation of an animal works and things like that sometimes they'll need eggs cause they're hatching eggs in their classrooms . But then every single one of those kids, all 600 of those third graders, they all go home with a Bennett Farms flyer to give to their parents like, Hey, this person came to our school today.
[00:12:35] You all you kids. I, I tell the teacher, I'm like, yeah, I'll come in and talk just, can I hand out my flyer to each of your kids on the way out? And they're like, yeah, that'd be great. And so
[00:12:42] Rory: You've got a third grade marketing team!
[00:12:44] Tom Bennett: There's some co-ops in our area. We give them a discount and they buy through bulk through us and we don't see a lot of sales through there.
[00:12:53] But it's good in building relationships with the people who are like in the know, they have a pulse on all of the customers that are into that super local high quality, organic type food. So you start running in those circles and your name will get referred a lot to other people.
[00:13:10] They also, I found out they have a homeless pantry that one day I was there and they had a lot of dry goods. I'm like, what's up with all this? They're like, oh yeah, on Thursday nights we have the, homeless people can come in and get, foods or, not necessarily homeless, people who are needing to use the food pantry type of thing. And I'm like how much meat do you guys want? Cause I got tons of meat. That's like excellent quality. Like it's completely safe. But the problem is really, that the vacuum seal on that one package might be a little bit looser than it should be.
[00:13:40] I'm not going to sell it to my customers for $9 a pound, if it ain't perfect. So it gets tossed into a box in the corner of our freezer. And every couple months we've got 600 pounds of meat. That's perfectly good. Like we used to eat it ourselves just so it wouldn't get wasted, but I can only eat so much meat.
[00:13:57] So it's to the point now where we're doing so much, that I've got, hundreds of pounds of meat that I can donate. And so you do something like that in the community and they think you're a saint, but I'm just like, look, here you go. It's free. You got to give it away, you can't sell it.
[00:14:10] All right. That's first deal. And second deal is you got to let the people know who are receiving this, that this is not representative of our like premium, packaging typically. Like these are our, scratch and dent items. So that's another way we made with our local community.
[00:14:26] Rory: Awesome.
[00:14:26] That's a really cool program too. So going into tactic number two is growing that customer base and I think this is one of the most important takeaways from this whole thing. But I think a pretty crazy statistic is that one in seven people physically move homes every year. And with a farmer's market, you're locked by the people that are in the area.
[00:14:45] And so continuously growing that customer base and adding new people to it is definitely a must. Number one, that farmers should definitely be doing at the farmer's market is building up that email list. So Tom, what are some of the ways you emphasize that?
[00:14:59] And and drive people to sign up and just engage with your farm and grow that customer base, but starting from their experience at the market.
[00:15:08] Tom Bennett: Yeah. So if anyone ever buys through our online store, when they are inputting their personal information, boom, we got their email forever after that. It's in our email system, but for the ones that are buying just at the farmer's markets that aren't buying from us online we're trying to capture emails there.
[00:15:24] So what we do is we put out a clipboard at all of our booths where customers, they can sign up if they choose to be on our email list. And we just let them know, we'll send out about one email a month, just updates around the farm, what's going on, maybe new products coming out, any specials or sales that are going on.
[00:15:39] But with your first email, you'll receive a $5 off coupon for your first online order. And we won't spam you constantly with that type of stuff. But what we do also with our sales staff at the markets is we pay them a dollar per email that they collect, because I found that, putting that clipboard out there, our employees really wouldn't ask as much as I was hoping they would for those emails, because they didn't really have any skin in the game.
[00:16:04] It didn't affect them that much if they collect emails. So what we did was we decided to give them all a dollar bonus for every email that they collected at each market, so that incentivizes them to collect those emails. And it did boost our email collection substantially. And so it just depends on how ambitious your farmer's market worker is that day on how many emails they'll collect.
[00:16:24] Cause there's really no ceiling on it. They could typically they could make an extra 30 or 50 bucks a day if they just collect 30 or 50 emails on top of their base hourly, and then we also give our employees a sales commission on top of their hourly. So it can substantially boost their daily income for those markets.
[00:16:42] Rory: That's awesome. And Tom, you've hosted the connect program with us that we do every week but I think one of the number one questions that comes up in those sessions is how do I grow my customer base? How do I get more emails? And so I think you brought up a couple of really good tactics there. The, obviously the dollar an email is awesome. That's a great way to get your your employees helping you out on that end, but also having that promo and maybe telling people like, Hey, if you sign up for an email, you'll get five bucks off in the store.
[00:17:08] Can be another kind of nice little incentive to, to get that email and then hopefully nurture that customer relationship down the road.
[00:17:14] Tom Bennett: So I've found this out a lot too through doing the connects just getting to talk with farmers one-on-one with their questions.
[00:17:20] I'm seeing a lot of trends and and them having traction, like building that email list and what I've been telling them is for it to work like it does for me, your target is a thousand emails. Like you need to try and get to a thousand quality emails as quick as you can, because once you get to a thousand emails, that's when, if I was to spend right now, I could go and spend an hour crafting a beautiful email to my email list, and it's going to generate a couple thousand dollars in sales, guaranteed. Once you have that many people in your email list, it reaches a point to where you can't lose when you send those out, because you're going to have sales.
[00:17:56] Once you've got at least a thousand and there's probably farms out there that have several thousand people in an email list, and that would be awesome.
[00:18:02] You might get three or four people, if you got 150 emails, that are going to buy on that campaign when you send it out. But once you get to a thousand, that's when I feel like you've reached the magical number. To where it's just like going to an ATM. Oh, we need to generate more sales today, let's send out an email. But you also, you want quality emails, like you don't want to go out and just buy a spam, generic email list. Our emails are all quality emails of people that want to be on our email list that decided to sign up.
[00:18:30] That most likely were shopping with this at a farmer's market or bought from us in our online store.
[00:18:35] Rory: That makes a huge difference. All right moving on to tactic number three, it's helping to convert market customers to online customers specifically with your product offerings.
[00:18:45] So I was curious, Tom what are some of the, maybe differences in what you bring to the market and what is available on your store? Maybe even just with the quantities of what you bring and how do you use that as a tactic to get more people online?
[00:18:57] Tom Bennett: Yeah. So what goes to market typically? It's our hottest selling stuff. As far as, chicken thighs and bacon and if we've got Tenderloin. We know from doing it long enough, what's going to sell in any given part of the year, most likely, but sometimes you guess wrong, sometimes it's like, why did we not sell any boneless skinless breast today?
[00:19:15] You don't know really. So we can, we bring about 10 coolers to each market. If you want to see a picture of our farmer's market set up, there may be one here in this slide. I think there was actually at some point. But that's typically how we set up when we go to them. And we take 10 coolers.
[00:19:32] That means we can probably take around 20 products. Cause most of the coolers have two items in them. And then we'll bring some restock coolers that we keep behind the table for things that are really hot sellers. But sometimes the selection that we take market can be based on what was most convenient for one of our staff to repack into the coolers, because they could reach it in the freezer.
[00:19:52] So we tell customers, they come in and they're like, oh, we wanted, boneless smoked pork chops today. And I'm like, sorry, we didn't bring them. We brought the bone in regular pork chops, but in the future, I tell all the customers, if there's something special that you're coming here for, you might want to think about ordering online ahead of time, just to make sure that you're going to be able to have that for dinner tonight because our inventory that we take to the market is just, it's too unpredictable. And sometimes the coolers that went to say Chicago, last weekend, once they get restocked, they might go out to Fort Wayne the following weekend and Fort Wayne's coolers might go to Chicago because we just wanted to mix up the inventory at each market.
[00:20:30] And so the same thing, won't be at that market two weeks in a row, occasionally. So we tell customers if you want to be guaranteed to get what you want order online ahead of time they can order up until six o'clock the night before. You as a farm can set that timeframe to whatever you want. You can do it two days out. We just do it the day before at 6:00 PM cause it's not a lot for us to pack it and throw it in with that market. So yeah, we tell them to order online if they would like to. We get a handful of customers at each market that do that every week. So it's not like hundreds of orders, for each market, but it's usually a couple.
[00:21:04] And we're doing seven markets on Saturday. We do 13 a week total across all the days, but yeah. Yeah, it works out good for the customers. And for us, like last week we had a guy who wanted a 13 pounds of smoked pork chop and luckily he ordered them online ahead because if he would've just came to the market, he would have cleaned out all of our, most of our smoked pork chops, as soon as we opened.
[00:21:26] So it was convenient for us that he didn't do that.
[00:21:28] Rory: No, that's great. And I know too subscriptions are a big part of your business. How do you tie those into markets or use markets to help get people onto subscriptions? And I guess do you offer fulfillments for subscriptions at the markets.
[00:21:43] Tom Bennett: So we, yeah, so a couple things on that, usually the way this subscriptions come up at the market is because those flyers, I had mentioned that we hand out to every customer advertising or online. One side of that flyer is all of our online store advertising. The backside of that flyer is actually our advertisement for our spring and fall, whole and half bulk hog orders.
[00:22:04] And they can do that in our online store to sign up for those things. But usually what will happen is someone will see that whole and half hog order on that flyer. And they'll be like, oh, this is great. We just don't have room for that.
[00:22:15] And I'm like, excellent , cause we actually offer a subscription box. So if you don't have the room, like a big chest freezer for that, but you want those savings, we'll actually deliver subscriptions each month to your house. The meat box subscription has pork and chicken, farmer's choice.
[00:22:30] And here go to our website right there. You can learn more about it. And then we'll convert a lot of those customers who wish that they could be the whole and half hog ordering type of people, but there they can't because they live in an apartment or they just don't have room for a chest freezer and then we deliver it to them each month and we've seen a lot of great success with the subscription boxes. They're actually a huge part of our sales every month.
[00:22:54] Rory: Awesome. That kind of leads nicely into the. Tactic that we wanted to talk about today, and that's delighting buyers with convenience.
[00:23:00] And I think convenience has been the underlying thread here through almost everything we've talked about, but customers are lazy. That's really what it comes down to. So making it as easy as possible for them to get your products, to know where to get your products is a really big thing for every farm.
[00:23:17] Tom, what are some of the ways that you currently are. Delighting really buyers with the way you make it convenient to order from you and get your products.
[00:23:25] Tom Bennett: Yeah. We basically taken away all barriers for a customer to get our products, so there's really no excuse that they could come up with anymore as to why buying from us would be inconvenient.
[00:23:36] Rather it be, oh, we live too far away, we'll deliver it to you. You're probably in our delivery zone, unless you're just here on vacation, unless you took a plane to get here. You're probably in our delivery zone. With home delivery farmer's market pick ups, we do on-farm pickups.
[00:23:50] The online, the deliveries are great. I just had deliveries on was it Tuesday, I think was my last delivery. We had about 28 deliveries go out that day. So it keeps us super busy.
[00:24:03] And yeah, we love doing it.
[00:24:04] Rory: Yeah. I think another kind of, part of convenience that doesn't often, maybe first come to mind, is how you're going to pay for a product. And I was curious with your subscriptions with Barn2Door you can do pay as you go, you can pay up front you can even do like late enrollment if the subscription schedule has already started. You can pop in late. Do you utilize any of those kinds of tools to be able to make it even easier for customers to sign up for a subscription?
[00:24:29] Tom Bennett: We're producing meats year round. So we don't really a hard stop and start date. I specifically turned off the option for customers to pay in full like day one. When I started our subscriptions because the way that they pay in the way they pay now, they pay monthly, it's billed to them like two days before the subscriptions go out and are delivered.
[00:24:52] It hits their card that's on file with us. And then as a farmer, you'll just want to check that on your pick and pack orders to the right hand side and make sure that all of those are showing paid in green before you load them up and send them out because occasionally, one of those cards will fail because it's, expired or whatnot. You don't ever want to be in a position to where you're chasing money cause it's, I've got more important things to do than worry about somebody that owes me 70 bucks.
[00:25:18] But we only offer the pay each month option mostly because when they see the paid in full number is a big number and it could scare, in my opinion, it could scare some people into backing out of that checkout because one of our, say our 20 pound meat subscription box, it's 135 bucks a month.
[00:25:40] 135 bucks a month, times 12, so they get to the end of their checkout. If they want to do the pay in full $1,620, like that might scare them, and they might be like maybe this is a bad idea. It sounds way worse than $135 a month. So we don't give them that option. And it's nice because. I don't necessarily want all that money up front.
[00:26:01] Like I would rather have it spread out and come in every month, over the course of the year when the product's actually going out. Yeah. That's so we don't give them that option.
[00:26:09] We don't give our customers online the option to COD or pay with check or cash on delivery because our delivery drivers got too much stuff to deal with.
[00:26:20] Just getting older. We ain't messing with that. Like I'm not loading something into my van and taking it out for delivery, unless I've already been paid for it because you get burned a couple of times, and there's no reason to offer that. You might lose like one person that's still holding out with their checkbook and refuses to like, get a debit card, but, it's, it is what it is.
[00:26:44] Rory: They're few and far between these days.
[00:26:45] Tom Bennett: Yeah. They are. They're a dying breed.
[00:26:48] Rory: Next I think just to hone in on, on your farm specifically in the tactics you use and we've covered a lot of these already, so a little bit of review here, but we've talked about some of the things we've highlighted. Just your focus on converting farmer's markets customers to online customers. You talked about incentivizing your employees with a $1 per email and flyers at the market. I was wondering, how has it helped you grow and what are you looking to improve?
[00:27:15] Tom Bennett: It's probably directly responsible for 60% of it really. We had 20,000 farmer's market customers this year, every single one of them got the spiel and the flyer to my online store.
[00:27:27] So that had to count for something, and you can see in my sales, you can see where Bennett farms has a farmer's market presence, like on Google maps. Like it's exactly the corridors where all of our online sales are coming from. It mirrors it, you could overlay our farmer's market footprint with our online store delivery footprint and they match. We get a lot of hits on Google as far as Googling farms near me. Our website, traffic's about 3,500 people a month that go to our website in general.
[00:28:02] And a lot of them are probably just cold hits that, you know, someone who hasn't known us before, but a lot of them are just people that already know us. And they're just trying to find my, our online store because they're going to shop from us at the farmer's market this week. But our farmer's market presence is directly responsible for our online sales, I think a lot of the time. Most of the people who buy online have bought from us at some point in their life at a farmer's market. We're looking at this year, Chicago is a good example. We've had delivery up in Chicago for over a year now, and we hadn't had a lot of traction with it, honestly, for as big of an area as it is like we're doing a lot more sales in the vacation towns, along lake Michigan, where all the Chicago people come during the summer, like that's just on fire with sales.
[00:28:50] Like we do great there, but we also have a lot of farmer's markets in those areas. So these people come from Chicago, they see us at the farmer's market because that's what you do when you're in a small town on the weekend, and then they go back to Chicago during the winter. And we're hoping that would bring a lot of those customers, but it's been slow to catch in Chicago, it really has. But now we finally, six months ago, got into a Chicago farmer's market with the winter market. And now finally we're into the summer markets there too. So coming up for next year and we've already started to see it the last month or two, our sales to Chicago online have been increasing with subscriptions and deliveries and farmer's market pickups. So I think that's going to help us grow in that area is just getting into the more physical farmer's markets in Chicago. And then we'll see a huge explosion in our online sales in that area.
[00:29:41] Rory: That's cool that the kind of getting that first footing there, like the tip of the iceberg almost is just getting into that farmer's market and then the market can grow from there.
[00:29:50] Just to recap everything that we covered today and these four tactics. Number one, focusing on those direct to market efforts and having those influence and I guess doing them alongside with all of your in-person efforts.
[00:30:03] Number two was growing that customer base, Tom talked, you talked about some great tactics and kind of campaigns that he's used to grow that customer. Diversifying product offerings was number three, being specific and thoughtful about what products you're bringing to the farmer's market and what is available on your store and how you can lock in buyers that way.
[00:30:22] And then lastly, delighting buyers with convenience. Like Tom said, making sure there's no buts. There's no excuse why they can't order from your farm. So those were our four tactics. Tom, I'm just kinda curious, what are your goals looking ahead for the next year? Obviously it sounds like the Chicago market is a big priority for you, but what are some of those goals that you're looking forward to throughout 2022?
[00:30:41] Tom Bennett: It's been getting easier every year. So we're looking for a more, less stressful 2022, than 2021. We've had a lot of growing pains as a farm, when you grow as fast as we have just, in some of the other podcasts we've done with us doubling year over year, like several years in a row. Always feel like we're just putting out 50 fires a day, just trying to keep our heads above water because it's, it can be a real ride in the summer, but I think we've gotten a lot of the process ironed out and every year it gets easier and easier. Years ago when we first started farming, it was a struggle to make it through winter. It was like I tell people, a joke like the winter was just about surviving to make it back to the summer again.
[00:31:21] And now we finally, this year was the first winter where we were in a really good financial position all year long. And that's mostly because of our online store. We don't have these feast and famine times. So that's gotten a lot easier too and we're just, I think 2022 is going to be great. As far as we got some really good markets, online is hitting on all cylinders, we're going to expand into Chicago, and focus a lot on growing that this year.
[00:31:47] We also are super excited about we just started with a new chicken butcher. It's actually a little bit more of a drive than we used to have, but it'll be well worth it. As far as some of the products we can get value added now with chicken brats and ground chicken sausages and chicken patties, we can do so much more now with our chicken options than we used to be able to do with our previous butcher. And even the price on that processing, we're going to be way more profitable on chicken this year than we ever have been before. So yeah, we're excited about that.
[00:32:16] Keep honing, what it is we're already doing. I'm not trying to double this year.
[00:32:21] Rory: I was going to say when you're doubling year over year, sometimes it's nice to take a year. That's just a break and smooth things out.
[00:32:27] Tom Bennett: We'll grow for sure, but I just don't have the time really. I need to hire some more on-farm staff, probably farm workers that can just focus on a lot of that all day.
[00:32:38] Rory: I'm excited to hear how the next year goes for you.
[00:32:41] And I wanted to just call out a couple other resources, one if you're a farmer and you want to talk to Tom he does participate in our connect program. So you can learn more about that at barndoor.com/connect. But that happens twice a week. Tom hosts just about at least once a month and you can hop in there and ask them questions about farmer's markets, about marketing, how he raises his products really anything. It's just an open Q&A session, which is awesome.
[00:33:03] And then if you want to dive more into this topic, you can download our free ebook. It's titled How To Use Farmer's Markets To Grow Faster Online. So pretty much a really good parallel to this webinar and some of the topics we've talked about today, but definitely check out both of those resources.
[00:33:17] And finally, I just want to say, Tom, thanks. Thanks for joining with us today. And we got your social media here on the slides, but I don't know if you want him to plug anything else, on your website, maybe hand out a flyer.
[00:33:26] Tom Bennett: Yeah. Drop your address in our comments and I'll send you a flyer.
[00:33:31] No. Yeah. You're you guys are welcome to check out our social media and see what we do. There's a lot of good stuff like farmer's market booth setups. For example, if you go to our Instagram and look at some of our booth setups, if you are currently selling your meat out of two chest freezers behind your table with a board on the front of your table. And you switched to the way that we're selling our meat, you'll increase your sales 30% that week guaranteed. Again, it goes back to convenience for customers. We're doing that at the farmer's market too. They're able to open those lids on those coolers and see the price on the packaging, see the item and pick it out and hand it to me at the checkout without having to say, oh, can I see a roast?
[00:34:09] And then you've got to dig out the roast from your chest freezer, and then they feel bad if they don't want it, but yeah, you might be able to glean some some little things that you might be able to do differently at the farmer's market.
[00:34:21] And we do use a cooler shock is the ice packs that you'll want to use for your coolers. It's the next best thing to dry ice. It's a brand name. But it'll freeze a six pack of warm soda in one of those coolers in three hours. They work really good, so we can't recommend them enough. We wouldn't be doing the way we're doing with our setup at farmer's markets without that product.
[00:34:44] Insulate the lids of your coolers too. Drill holes in the back and fill them with with window insulating, great stuff foam. But you use the window and door, not the heavy duty, cause that'll warp your lids, but that'll turn any $30 igloo cooler into a Yeti. That's basically what you're doing by insulating the lids.
[00:35:01] Cause they're all hollow with air, which is like the worst thing for insulation.
[00:35:04] Rory: That's an awesome tactic. Wow. That's great. Cool. All right yeah. Thank you Tom. And thanks for joining us today, everyone. And we'll see you next time.