National Farm Viability Conference

Which is more effective, Instagram or holding an event? It depends on your goals. Farmers often have difficulty focusing on the most effective marketing tactics for achieving their business goals. This interactive workshop session will provide a framework to help farmers make the best use of their marketing time and money. The framework includes three steps: 1) Specifying business goals (that can be addressed through sales and marketing); 2) Describing the target customers for each goal; and 3) Identifying the top 1-3 most feasible marketing tactics to achieve each goal. We’ll begin the workshop by asking participants to share our biggest challenges and successes in helping farmers with marketing. The facilitator will provide a brief presentation of the framework, using case studies and examples to demonstrate how focusing on the right tactics helps achieve results. Participants will receive a worksheet to use during the session and with clients. The worksheet will help us work our way through each step of the framework, using examples of specific business goals, target customers, and tactics from the farmers that participants have worked with. We’ll conclude with general discussion of how to put this into practice.

Learning objectives:
-Specify measurable marketing goals
-Describe target customers based on interests, needs, and behavior, as well as demographics
-Identify which types of marketing tactics are best suited for specific goals
-Help farmers to focus on the most likely and feasible tactics