Many farms regularly post mouthwatering images of harvested produce and farmers market booth layouts, and have attracted customers to their farm’s Instagram feed that want to learn more the people behind the farm and the story of their products.

Farmers are attracted to Instagram because it facilitates communication and connection with customers and fans in a spontaneous, organic way.  Here are some other features and add-ons worthy of exploring that might help you further connect with customers and make it easier for them to buy from you!

Profile URL for WFM2GO using Linktree

• Linktree.  Instagram supports just one outside URL link to your business in your profile.  If you want to share a recent article about your farm without losing the link on your profile to your main website, you are stuck.  Linktree solves this problem by allowing you to create multiple links from your Instagram profile – making it easy to provide links such as your main website, recent articles about your farm, and your e-commerce storefront.  Linktree offers both free and paid options.  The free service offers several theme options and unlimited links, while the paid service provides integration to your email marketing system and Facebook Pixel, removal of the Linktree branding, and more.
• Ads.  There are two main ways to create Ads on Instagram – through the Facebook Business Manager and by promoting posts directly from the Instagram app.  Creating ads via the Facebook Business Manager requires a bit more time to understand than sponsored posts, but offers some additional options for managing your ads.  As we have previously written, using Facebook Pixel data to display ads to people that have visited your website could provide tremendous benefits for encouraging CSA signups, event attendance and more. These ads can even be customized to reflect the part of your website they visited.  For example, if they visited your CSA signup page, Instagram can show an ad for your CSA and if they visited your farm events page, you can show an ad for your upcoming farm dinner. You will need to use the Facebook Business Manager to create and manage ads from Facebook Pixel data.  Ads, including those created as promoted posts, can use demographic data or your Facebook “look alike audience” to determine the targeted audience for your ad.  Most digital marketing experts recommend that you create ads using both methods and reviewing results after several weeks to determine the best targeting methodology for your needs.
• Promoted Posts.  Promoted posts are just one type of ad and and will appear in post history while other ads will not.  Promoted posts can include Call to Action buttons (such as Shop Now,  Sign Up, or Learn More) just like ads created through the Business Manager.  Promoted posts are arguably the simplest and most straightforward way to test whether Instagram ads are beneficial to your business.  To promote a post, simply click the “Promote” button on any post that you wish to use for an ad and follow the steps.
• Tagged Shopping Links.  Unlike ads and promoted posts which can feature a Call to Action button at the bottom of the post, tagged shopping links are appear as small shopping bag icons on the post itself – similar to the way people or brands that are featured in a photo can be tagged.  Using this feature requires first setting up a Facebook Shop, and setting up each product in your Facebook shop that you want to tag in an Instagram post.

As with any marketing effort, you will need to evaluate your results and adjust your effort depending on what is working.  Facebook Business Manager will track the effectiveness of your ads, including promoted posts – including average cost per click, the number of impressions, and more.  You can even see some basic results on any post via the Insights link on the Instagram app.  Google Analytics will also help you analyze your website traffic, including on your e-commerce storefront.

Are you using any of these tools on Instagram or others that you’d recommend?  We’d love to hear about it!  Contact us and tell us your story!

The post Farms & Instagram: Top Instagram Tools for Farmers first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Some ways pixels could benefit farms and food hubs:

– Increase CSA subscription rates. Perhaps someone came to your website to learn more about your CSA but didn’t quite sign up. If they see an ad to sign up for our CSA the next time they are checking their Instagram feed, it may be just the reminder they need to finish the process!

– Encourage consumers to buy your products. Whether customers can buy your products at your farm, a local grocery store, through your website, or the farmers market, seeing an image of a juicy peach, crisp apple, or a seasoned steak will help you build their loyalty and increase your sales over time.

– Remind chefs about your products and service. We hear all the time that chefs can be difficult to get in touch with. Many have active Instagram accounts to share beautiful pictures of the dishes they’ve created or promote events at their restaurant. If they’ve visited your website, a reminder while scrolling their feed about your service with a beautiful picture of some of the products you offer is the perfect reminder to place their first order. It can also be a great way to re-engage chefs that order infrequently.

– Increase your following on your Instagram or Facebook feed. Even regular customers may not be following your accounts and seeing your ad can prompt them to follow you. Increasing your following only helps you reach more customers in the future without paid advertising.

Steps to get started:

Create the pixel.  Installing the pixel is free and is your very first step. You will need to create your pixel from the Business Manager section of your Facebook page.  Adding a pixel to your website well before you create an ad will help you target your website visitors more effectively.

Install the pixel on your website.  Once you create the pixel, you will need to the paste the html code into the header of your website.  If you aren’t sure how to edit your website, we recommend contacting your website designer.  Most of the major website content management systems offer step by step instructions on how to add the pixel via their help system or video tutorial.

Create an ad.  If you aren’t familiar with creating ads for social media, you might consider working with a digital marketing company to help you create a professional ad and setup the targeting using your pixel data.  It is certainly possible to muddle through the process yourself, but most farmers we know don’t have a lot of time on their hands to figure out the intricacies of social media ads.  Pro tip:  Digital marketing is a specialized field that is rapidly changing.  Not all marketing companies have expertise in digital marketing, so be sure to ask questions before you enter a formal engagement.

Evaluate.  Facebook’s Ad Manager will track ad clicks for your various ads. If you are directing customers to your website from an ad, you will see that information in your Traffic reports in Google Analytics.

Are you using a pixel and/or social media ads for your business?  We’d love to hear about it!  Contact us and tell us your story!

The post Farms and Facebook Pixels: How Farms can Increase Sales with a Facebook Pixel first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

The post Selling to Restaurants, A Farmer’s Guide first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Located in the heart of Western Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley, Kitchen Garden Farm is a 50-acre, Certified Organic vegetable farm owned and operated by Tim Wilcox and Caroline Pam. They grow a full line of seasonal produce with a focus on specialty sweet & hot peppers and Italian vegetables like fennel, broccoli rabe and radicchio, as well as bottling fire-roasted salsa and Good Food Award-winning naturally fermented sriracha made with ingredients grown on their farm. They sell to restaurants, grocery stores, farm stores, and food hubs.  

Kitchen Garden Farm’s LFM feature:

“What I love is the integration between the orders coming in and populating invoices, and then with a click of a button generating my harvest list, my pack list, and my labels. That’s what saves me hours every week.”

Learn more about how they use LFM to offer a professional, simple customer ordering experience, that also makes it easier for them to process, prepare, and deliver orders.

The post Case Study: Kitchen Garden Farm first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

A long time customer, Idaho’s Bounty Cooperative, recently wrote a letter to their stakeholders that illustrates so much of what our movement is wrestling with as we try to take steps toward long term financial sustainability. I found the letter very refreshing to read, as it very honestly communicates the need to continually evolve and the sometimes painful, unpopular decisions required to grow and become profitable.

Undoubtedly, the conversations and decisions that preceded the letter were very difficult for staff, board, and producers. Big changes are often unpleasant in the short term. Adjusting your business model and streamlining supply are hard decisions when you know your customers and producers personally. Finding the right mix of having a diversity of sales channels while not spreading your resources too thin is a very difficult balance to find in local food. Although I certainly wish that Idaho’s Bounty (and others facing similar situations) weren’t forced to make these decisions, I find it incredibly hopeful that the conversations and decisions are happening. By moving beyond the exciting, charged startup phase of local food, we can find success.

We consider it a huge honor to support our customers on their journey from startup to mature business. As LFM has evolved the last 7+ years, we have continually shifted more of our resources to providing technology that helps our customers cultivate and maintain long term, profitable relationships with their customers and producers. Since releasing our brand new shopping interface with loads of new features this spring, we have turned our energy to improving the order process, invoices, payment collection, and cash flow. We’ve had several minor releases over the summer and look for another, more substantial one in the next couple of weeks.

Want to learn more? Contact us to setup a web meeting!

The post Reflecting first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

We are excited to offer promo codes as one of the sales and marketing features available on LFM’s software platform.* We’ve put together a guide for best practices for using these codes so that our customers can maximize their sales and profitability.  Before implementing promo codes, you will need to spend some time analyzing your customers, email list, and sales history to determine where promo codes will be most effective. Here are some common ways markets can use promo codes:

• 1.   Encourage customers to place their first order. Many food hubs have thousands of customers on their weekly email list, but receive orders from just a fraction of them. Help customers get over their first order jitters with a promo code to try your products. Consider creating an email with an included promo code to newly registered customers on a weekly or bi-weekly basis specifically aimed at encouraging them to place their first order.
  2.   Better yet, encourage customers to place regular orders. Providing a promo code after the customer places 10 orders encourages repeat business and a long term relationship.
  3.   Bring customers back that used to order regularly. Do you have customers that have mysteriously stopped placing orders after ordering every week? Reach out to them to see why and offer a promo code in exchange for their feedback.
  4.   Encourage customers to place larger orders or try new products. The most efficient way to increase sales is to sell more to customers that are already ordering from you.  Experiment with offering codes such as $5 off for orders over a certain size or a free product for orders over a certain size.
  5.   Encourage customers to tell their friends and business associates. Almost universally, the most effective way to get more customers is through your current customers. Offer referral codes after their referred customers place their first order.

Here are some best practices to help you implement promo codes successfully:

• Be careful that you don’t overuse promo codes as you may train customers to wait for a deal before placing an order.
• Make promo codes urgent and scarce to encourage immediate action. Be sure to make them valid for a limited time and consider allowing a code to be used a specific number of times (e.g. for the first 50 orders).
• Get the word out! Use partner organizations and producers to help you let customers know about your offer. Some companies offer an incentive to partner organizations based on the sales that result from their network.
• Use different codes in different marketing channels and events as a way to measure their effectiveness. For example, if you table at an event, create a specific code for that event. The promo codes will help you determine whether you want to table at the event in the future. We also recommend using different codes for various social media channels. This will help you determine where to focus your social media efforts.
• Promo codes aren’t just for selling to consumers. If your market sells to wholesale buyers, you can use it to encourage chefs to place their first order, to encourage them to try a new product, or to help them buy more product.
• Measure, measure, measure. Measure your sales, marketing, and profitability results before and after the promo.
  • • Do you have new, “regular“ customers that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise?
    • How has average order size changed? And how does that impact profitability?
    • Has demand for a featured product increased?
    • How has the open rate changed on your weekly emails? How about engagement on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter?

Not quite sure how to get started? We have a moderated discussion on Promo Codes on our Customer Forum.

* Please note this feature is available for Standard, Premium, or Enterprise packages using LFM’s new shopping template. If you use the Starter Package, you may purchase an add-on that will include this feature. Please contact us if you wish to update your site template to take advantage of Promo codes and the other new features available on the new shopping template.

The post Leveraging Promo Codes in Your Marketing Plan first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Photo Courtesy Central Mass Locavore

If you ask Jacki Hildreth about the genesis of her thriving business, she made the obvious analogy to a common kitchen staple. “It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion”. Jacki’s lifelong love of local food began working in her parent’s backyard garden and enjoying the bounty. In the early days of her relationship with her husband Tim, they often dreamt of one day owning their own food truck. Her husband’s two-time battle with cancer, now fully in remission, required that they put the best possible food on their family’s table. Their pursuit of healthy local food had them traveling all across Massachusetts just to pick up the best CSA box they could find. They also got plenty of encouragement from her brother in law, fresh off a once in a lifetime experience playing hockey in Switzerland, whom suggested they adopt some of the food practices he saw across Europe.

All of these “ingredients” combined to push Jacki and Tim towards planning and opening Central Mass Locavore; a local food home delivery service based in Westminster, Mass. They focus as much as possible on organic, local products, but also include some made with non-certified, sustainable methods. Keeping true to her roots, the storefront prominently features a weekly CSA style box, full of local, seasonal items. After speaking with a local developer who quoted them a hefty price tag to set up a shopping page, Jacki and Tim worked with our team at Local Food Marketplace to get their website and market up and running and have been working with us ever since. After beginning with nothing more than weekly boxes, they have since expanded to offer a la carte items such as eggs, prepared foods, cheeses, and meats. They offer home delivery to nearly all of their customers for the added personal touch.

When Jacki and Tim decided to jump into this venture Jacki explains that it was a “little like the blind leading the blind”. They had little to no business experience and her knowledge was based on her online research. She quickly found that between her busy family life, her career as a nurse, and the new business there wasn’t enough hours in the day to make everything happen. “Trying to get everything done in time and learning that you can’t fit 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5-pound bag was one of our first revelations”. Their biggest hurdles were finding out and working through the legal paperwork and as with most small startups, capital. There were the usual setbacks, and sometimes it felt like two steps forward and then one step back. Jacki is self admittedly the risk taker in her family, and while sometimes that can be cause for alarm, she says that in this instance it was a great thing that helped them take the leap of faith. If she could pass along one piece of advice for a home business she recommends checking zoning requirements.

After operating for a few months, the team was feeling as though they were getting busier and busier, but not working smoothly. They had already run into the small bumps in the road that any new business working with small local producers encounters. “Tim would get to the farm to pick up product only to find that it wasn’t available. This gave me sometimes a 1-2 hour window to find a replacement. We quickly learned which producers would be our core suppliers that could be counted on and who were the farmers flying by the seat of their pants.” They quickly learned that local agriculture is constantly shifting, and thinking on your feet to find supply solutions is a critical part of their operation. “Nobody is dying” quickly became a mantra that their team embraced. Even their packing team of retired Corrections Officers were learning on the fly. “These guys knew what a carrot and potato was, but everything else was complete guesswork for them. You should have seen the situation with the Broccoli Romanesco.”

Photo Courtesy Central Mass Locavore

Jacki and Tim took time to re-evaluate what they were doing and at that time realized that they needed to not only add and expand their business, but use their time wiser. “You aren’t going to get more hours in the day, so you need to work smarter, not harder”. They took time to evaluate the parts of the business that were taking up a disproportionate amount of time and restructure the weeks workflow to fit them better. “We had a few customers in the beginning who were really excited, but because of our limitations, we were delivering their orders as late as 9pm. Those customers left and haven’t come back.” They reorganized their work week, added some new modules to their LFM set up, and asked for and received a lot of support from family and friends. Jacki is quick to point out that without this needed support she would have a hard time doing what they do. Today Central Mass Locavore is as busy as they have ever been and they are gearing up for a wild holiday season.

“Local Food Marketplace has been an invaluable tool for our business. We literally could not do what we do without it.” Jacki is quick to point out that LFM is not only a technology that helps her business operate, but acts as a mentor for her to ask questions and bounce ideas off of. “Working with LFM is a whole package, not just software. It is straightforward and easy to use, the personal support is there for me when I need it, no matter how small an issue is to them, they understand that it may be a big deal to us and offer help accordingly.” Jacki found the technology by looking at one of her flagship producers, Caroline Pam at the Kitchen Garden Farm, and loved how clean it looked and its ease of use from the customer side. “The price point is there, the support and tools are there, and the customer service can’t be beat.”

Jacki and Tim hope to continue to grow and add more delivery areas. They have explored wholesale sales, however it isn’t a priority right now as Jacki reiterates that their main mission is to “Bring healthy food to the people” and home delivery is where their heart is. They plan to add on to their work space over the next few months roughly doubling their storage and adding a walk in cooler. If all goes as planned, they hope to someday open a storefront and add the kitchen that they dreamt about when they were cooking together on their first few dates.

We asked Jacki for any advice she might offer to anyone who is currently planning or starting their own food business. At first she said “Remember, even when you have your doubts, keep going. Don’t give up” and then she remembered a phrase often uttered by superiors in her days as a nurse. “If you do the right thing by the customer, you can never be wrong”.

The post Customer Profile: Central Mass Locavore first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

As the season winds down, are you reviewing how this year has gone for your hub and where improvements can be made? Did you experience trouble this season with a producer circumventing your hub and making sales around it? We hear on almost a daily basis the struggle that hubs face in maintaining a working relationship with their producers and avoiding the dreaded, “Sale around the hub”.

Our marketing team of Amy McCann and Ryan Crum have researched, analyzed, and written this report using input from the many hubs we work with across North America as well as their personal experience. We look at why producers may sell around the hub, what food hubs can do to avoid it, and key aspects of a producer agreement.

For more information on how LFM can help your hub make the most of your sales, and grow them, contact us!

The post Announcing LFM’s Free Whitepaper: Avoiding Sales Around the Hub first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Does your food hub sell to restaurants, catering companies, or corporate kitchens or are you thinking about it?  Restaurants are often the first step for a food hub that is aiming for the wholesale market and they are often a key piece of a food hub reaching financial sustainability. Approaching restaurants, and chefs in particular, requires nuance and flexibility.

Our Sales & Marketing Coordinator (and former chef) Ryan Crum breaks down best practices for whom to approach, developing a marketing plan, planning for growth, and a convenient list of Do’s and Don’ts in our recently published white paper, “Food Hub’s Guide on Selling to Restaurants”.

For more information on how LFM can help you and your food hub service restaurants better, please contact us.

The post Announcing LFM’s Free Whitepaper: Food Hub’s Guide on Selling to Restaurants first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.