Over the twenty years we have been helping small to medium-sized businesses to flourish, we have found there are four key areas where you can spend your time and money to see the biggest impact on your sales.
1. Update Your Branding
Good branding helps you to stand out and capture the attention of your ideal customers. By clearly communicating who you are, what you do, and what you stand for, you dramatically increase the chances of customers buying from you.
You need your potential customers to know it is you whether they are looking at your website, your business card, or your product packaging.
People buy from businesses they know, like, and trust. If you are a laid back, easy-going kind of person, your branding should reflect that. If it is too corporate, you aren’t going to enjoy working with the customers your branding attracts. You want your branding to show your personality and attract people who would LIKE you.
2. Post Consistently On Social Media
Sharing behind the scenes photos and videos from your homestead will allow your potential customers to get to KNOW you and the way you do things. They will become invested in your homestead and want to be a part of your success.
The key to using social media successfully is having a good plan. Consistency will get you further than a lot of activity all at once and then none when you get really busy in the garden.
TAKE AWAY: The next time you are fired up about marketing your homestead business, make a social media posting plan. Schedule out those posts, so you get one post per day.
3. Get A Better Website
More than half of people stated that they won’t trust a business without a website. If you have a good website that covers the TRUST part of what I was talking about earlier.
Your website basically becomes your virtual Farmer's Market booth, only it is open 24/7, 365 days a year. You don’t have to be glued to your phone and computer in order to get every sale. A good website will answer all of your potential customer's basic questions and convince them that they need your product or service.
So how do you know if you have a good, successful website?
You need to make sure your website looks good on all devices like computers, tablets, laptops and mobile phones.
You need to have a Google Analytics account set up for you so you can track how many people are visiting your website, what pages they visit, and where they are coming from.
You want people to go to your website and stay on your website. Half of your potential customers will leave your website if it’s not immediately clear what you do and how it benefits them.
If less than 10% of your visitors are from search engines then you need to optimize your website, so it is easier for search engines to find your content, and you need to share a blog post at least once a month. They give businesses extra points for consistently adding new blog posts to their website.
Your website needs all of the essential pages you need to answer all of your potential customer's questions and lead them to buy your products or services. (Click here to watch the Essential Pages For A Successful Homestead Website webinar.)
4. Start A Newsletter List
It is so important to have a newsletter list where you can reach your customers without having to pay extra. You want to have your newsletter sign up on your website, at in-person events, and at your location.
Some people are scared of starting a newsletter list because they think it is going to be a huge amount of work on top of what they are already doing. But that's because people tend to write a blog post, social media posts and a newsletter made up all unique content instead of sharing the same things they would post on their Facebook page in their newsletter and on their blog.
Your posts will only be seen 5% to 10% of your social media followers unless you pay for extended reach.
TAKE AWAY: Every Facebook or Instagram post can be a blog post. Every blog post can go into your newsletter. When you are making a marketing plan, you want to get the most mileage out of your content.
What's next?