Home  /   2016  /   July

Monthly Archives: July 2016

What My Local Farm Taught Me about Customer Engagement

What My Local Farm Taught Me about Customer Engagement

FARMThey should’ve warned me about all that kale.

This summer we bought a CSA share in Allandale Farm, a gorgeous working farm right here in Brookline, MA. It’s where we go for pumpkins in October and Christmas trees in December.

The Community Supported Agriculture model lets consumers purchase shares of the coming season’s harvest. Since I love to cook with fresh food, this bounty is making the Summer of ’16 extra special. Every Wednesday I drive the 3 minutes to the farm and pick up my bushel, jam-packed with a generous amount of just-harvested herbs and vegetables, and the occasional fruit.

I love their produce, but I have a complaint: there’s not enough advance notice about what to expect. Most weeks, they send an email, but this week, we got none. I couldn’t plan my upcoming meals without knowing what we’d get (although kale is always included).

Years ago we bought our first CSA share at this farm. Back then, the bushel of food included not only a printed list of what was inside the box, but also a few recipes for those ingredients.

I miss those recipes. And while it’s pretty easy to Google “recipes with kale” or “what to do with garlic scapes,” receiving printed recipes from the farm would make the experience so much better for customers.

This summer, since I don’t want to scroll through my emails to find the one they may have sent me, I take a photo of the blackboard sign that’s by the pick-up area. (To be honest, it also helps me identify things I don’t recognize. Kohlrabi, anyone?)

Keeping your customers “in the know” with information they expect is crucial, whether you’re a farmer or a printer – or a freelance writer.

Then I realized the farm could do more to engage its CSA customers in ways that could help endorse and promote the program. What if they invited customers to do the following:

  • Share recipes we make with the produce
  • Upload photos of the dishes we prepare
  • Upload videos of our home cooking with their produce
  • Post questions for other CSA members in a member forum. (This would also be helpful if we want to swap any produce with other locals.)
  • Enter some sort of photo contest, like “Best Still Life with Vegetables,” to share online, in which we get our family and friends to vote as well.

Wouldn’t these kinds of customer engagement strengthen our connection to the farm? And once we take photos or videos, you and I know that we’d be sharing them in our social channels. #AllandaleFarm!

My question for you: can this inspire you to come up with ways to better engage your own customers? What contests or other challenges might you create to get customers to showcase your products and tell other people why they love them?

I wish Allandale held a “Getting Creative with Kale” contest, because I could use more recipes, and I’m running out of ideas…but not kale.











Two Simple Questions Will Help Your Marketing

Dilemma image - 2 questionsTruly, there are lots of things printers should consider when planning their marketing efforts.

To wit: In what industries are most of your customers? Do they work in marketing, purchasing, or creative environments? Are they typically inexperienced or pretty savvy when it comes to print production? Are they mostly designers? Do you sell in a small geographic area – or far and wide? Are they price-driven or quality-driven? And so on.

There’s another way to approach your marketing efforts. It’s not exclusive of all of those other considerations, but it’s something you need to think about:

What do most customers purchase from your company? What would you like them to purchase from your company?

Your answers are noteworthy. Consider the first question. If you do sell a particular product or service to most of your customers (newsletters, promo products, creative consulting, dimensional printing, etc.), then hopefully it’s very profitable for you. It’s what your company’s known for. And if you’re not already promoting this specialty heavily in all channels you use for marketing (including your site), you should.

Your answer to the second question – what do you want customers to purchase – will be more telling if sales for that product or service are slow. Something’s off. Maybe customers and prospects don’t even know about it. You’re clearly not promoting it effectively enough.

Indeed, if you want customers to purchase something that too few of them currently are, you need to address this with your sales team as well as your management team and your marketing specialist. You’ve got work to do.