High-Impact Marketing Projects You Can Do in the Middle of Your Busy Season
When the grass starts growing (and the weeds), there’s barely time to send and pay invoices, let alone think about marketing your farm or food business.
It might feel like there’s no time to work on marketing your business—ever. Email marketing is daunting, let’s be real. Brand messaging? Market research? SEO?
It’s easy for these things to fall to the bottom of the list (if you considered them in the first place) when there are animals to feed, plants to tend, and orders to pack. And yet…you know this stuff matters.
If you want to stay in business, make more sales, and quit working off the farm for good—you need to spend time on your marketing.
That sales plateau after explosive growth during COVID? It’s not just going to magically go away. Marketing is a critical business tool, not just something that you’ll get to when you have time.
Marketing also isn’t something you have to do alone. No one person can, or should, do everything in their business. And it’s ok to ask for help.
The truth is that some marketing projects require a lot of intensive thought and effort on your part—best for the winter months when there’s a little breathing room. But others can make a big impact without requiring tons of time, especially if you’re getting help.
High Impact, Low Time (HILT) marketing projects are designed to maximize outcomes with minimal time commitment.
After working on these types of projects with lots of busy clients, we know that these are the easiest to implement when you’ve got a lot going on. We do most of the work while you take care of the fields, pack for market, and try to feed yourself before 9pm.
“It was really easy to get emails set up. We met to discuss what we wanted to say, and TPM drafted the emails and set up the automations. It saved us time and helped grow our business and converted leads into customers.”
Nathan Masser, Red Hill Harvest
What is HILT Marketing?
HILT Marketing projects are designed to help you without compromising your day-to-day activities.
These projects:
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Have a high impact on your business without requiring you to spend lots of time in the office
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Benefit all types of farms and food businesses
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Provide tangible outcomes that you can implement immediately
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Are designed to drive business growth
Who is HILT Marketing for?
You’re ready for HILT Marketing if:
- You’re a dairy, livestock, or vegetable farmer, or a value-added product producer like a baker, jam maker, or ice cream shop
- You’ve been in business for three or more years
- You know which of your products sell the best and how you currently reach the most customers
- You know who you want to sell you, but you need help finding more customers
- You need to market your business, but you don’t have time to do it all yourself
HILT Marketing Projects
Email Automation
- Email Marketing has a huge return on investment. It’s marketing on autopilot that will continue to drive growth while you run the rest of the business.
- This is a great project if you have a website and an email list, but aren’t capitalizing on them. If you mostly see your customers in person or don’t have a website, skip this one.
Website Build
(no ecommerce)
- A simple website build is a great way to build a digital presence, tell your story, and find new customers.
- This is a great project if you want more of an online presence and have a logo and some basic brand messaging. Skip this one if you want to do ecommerce (those websites are more of a time investment).
Marketing Material
Graphic Design
- Draw people into your farmers market booth or wow them at your next on-farm event with beautifully designed marketing materials such as banners, flyers, or tote bags.
- This is a great project if you have a logo, but aren’t sure how to use it best. Skip this one if you’re happy with your visuals.
SEO
- Maybe you have a website, but it’s not drawing people in like you thought it would. Our SEO experts will take what you already have and optimize it for Google searches. Let us help get you in front of the customers you want to reach.
- This project is great if you already have a website. Skip it if what you need is a website.
Digital Ads
- Digital ads are a guaranteed way to get seen, and with the right plan and a little patience, they can lead to significant audience and revenue growth over time.
- This project is great if you have a website and email automations, are looking to increase sales, web traffic, and email sign-ups, and you have the money to pay for advertising. Skip this project if your budget is tight, your customers aren’t active online, or you don’t have six months to see the full benefits of ads.
Marketing Plan
- Sometimes the hardest part of marketing is just figuring out where to start. Let our marketing specialists make the plan. All you have to do is follow it.
- This is a great project if you are available to meet a few times and know you want to do more marketing, but don’t know how or where to start. Skip this one if you need to take immediate action.