Are you in that stage of business where you are aggressively looking for new customers?
Here's something important for you to know: New customers need to know that your product works before they buy. They need proof.
Period.
You HAVE to have a social proof element in your marketing system somewhere in the messaging sequence. As a marketer, our job is two-fold: to increase desire and possibility and remove doubt and fear. The social proof piece is what does this second part.
In this episode, I share 10 ways you can show social proof in your marketing system. You don't need to do them all. And none of them are hard to implement, although some are more powerful than others. I want you to listen in and see if any of them are in place in your farm business. Then... your homework is to pick one or two of these social proof ideas and put them into place.
I am willing to bet good money that you will see MORE new clients when you add this piece in.
Remember, if you need help building this piece into your marketing system, you can take my testimonial project inside of Farm Marketing School. I coach you through the process of finding 5 quality testimonials and tell you where to put them in your farm sales messaging sequence.
This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, my preferred e-commerce platform for farmers. Are you looking for a new solution for your farm? I can't recommend it enough. Easy to use inventory management, great customer service, continuous improvement, and a culture dedicated to equipping farmers with marketing expertise, Local Line should definitely be one of the e-commerce solutions you consider as you switch. Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2024. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline
Some of the resources mentioned in this episode:
Join my free email list! I have a great "Crash Course in farm marketing" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Subscribe at https://www.mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe
Episode 203: How to Build a Glamping Enterprise on Your Farm -- Everything You Need to Know with Kasey Marshall - I mention that my family is going on vacation this week to Canada, and we are glamping at Kasey's place this month! If you want to learn how to set up a glamping operation, THIS IS THE PODCAST to listen to.
Episode 151: Creative Badges for Your Product Descriptions - want some ideas for product badges to use for social proof? This is a great episode, plus I share a cheatsheet of popular badge labels you can use on the show notes page.
Farm Marketing School - my monthly online marketing school membership just for farmers. Farm Marketing School is an on-demand library of marketing workshops and project plans that will help you build some of the most important marketing elements in your farm business like: building a promotion calendar, setting up your Google Business Profile, auditing your sales funnel, updating your home page of your website, building your first email nurture sequence, acquiring and deploying testimonials, and practicing different types of offers. You get to chose what you want to study and build each month. These projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days, so that you slowly build your marketing system piece by piece. Use the step by step project planner and resource folder to help you jumpstart your work. Take advantage of my new marketing crash course inside or take the onboarding assessment tool to help you identify where your funnel is broken and what project to do first. To see what courses are currently inside of FMS, or to try out Farm Marketing School for a month at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms Start and cancel your membership anytime.
Find my marketing Facebook group for CSA farmers!
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Do you have a social proof element somewhere in your marketing system? If not, then today's episode is for you because my friends, I'm here to tell you that people do not take action and buy from you unless this piece happens, unless there is one moment in time where they go and check to see that your product works for someone else. In today's episode, I'm going to show you 10 different ways that you can show that social proof in your farm business. Let's get started. Hey there, this is Karina Bench and welcome to the My Digital Farmer podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer podcast, where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing. Learn how to find more customers, increase your sales and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 272 of the My Digital Farmer podcast. I am your host, Karina Bench, one of the farmers that shared legacy farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of My Digital Farmer.com, which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. Big shout out to all of my regular listeners, my binge listeners. And if you're new to the show, I'm really glad you're here. Welcome to the community. Make sure that you subscribe to the podcast. You're going to want to do that, and then go check out some of my back issues. You can scroll through. I've got over 250 of them now. And I'm sure you can find something there that piques your interest. If you're really new to the marketing space, though, and you need kind of a 101 crash course, I recommend that you go listen to the first 10 or even better get onto my email list because when you do, I'm going to send you a weekly email for like three months that's going to walk you through the marketing jungle and kind of get you onboarded into what you need to know. And you can do that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe. I get really good reviews for that. So definitely take advantage of that. Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at localline. Switch to localline and grow your farm to new heights this season. Localline is the most comprehensive sales software built for farmers and food hubs. These features include e-commerce, automated inventory management, subscriptions, a website builder, point of sale and more, helping you increase your sales and streamline your processes. So whether you're a CSA farmer or you sell meat, you run a food hub, or maybe you sell wholesale or offer a herd share, localline has the tools and features that you need to succeed. We're a big fan. Are you looking to switch to a sales software that does it all? Let's start as low as $49 a month with no set of fees or sales percentages. That's huge for me. Plus if you join localline today, your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront at no cost so you can be up and running in no time, even in the middle of the season. As a bonus, if you are a podcast listener, localline is also offering a free premium feature for one year with your subscription when you use my coupon code MDF 2024. So go to mydigitalfarmer.com/localline and then enter the coupon code MDF 2024. Make the switch today. And now back to the show. Well I'm back. Hello everyone. Right now as you listen to this, I should be on vacation with my family in Canada. That's right. We are heading north of the States and taking my boys to the cold lake air show in near Edmonton, which is in Alberta. So I'm actually getting on a plane, flying with my boys in a few weeks. My husband, we're taking time off from the farm, getting away for, I think it's four or five days, four nights I think, had to get passports for the boys. They're very excited. So if you have just started following me, maybe you don't know this, but both of my boys are really into aviation. In fact, Jed is going to an aviation school where he's learning to be an airplane mechanic, not a pilot, but a mechanic, is very, very good at it. And my youngest son is also really into planes now, probably because he likes to hang out with his brother. They fly RC airplanes, they build RC airplanes. And I think Josiah is probably going to end up going to engineering school. He just loves engines. He reads engine books for fun. He builds engines, vacuum engines, like using a vacuum cleaner out of Legos. And then they're working engines, it's crazy you guys. So anyway, we're going to have a good time. We're hopefully watching an air show as we speak. And I just want to give a big shout out to Casey Marshall for giving us this adventure. She gifted us some VIP tickets to go to the air show and to stay at her place. We're going to be glamping in one of their geodesic domes. And Casey was actually one of my guests on the podcasts. I'll make sure I link up that episode in the show notes. It's an amazing interview if you want to get a glamping operation started on your farm. She is definitely one to follow. It's basically a mini course on how to do glamping on the podcast. So I'll link it up in the show notes really, really good. And she was in my accelerator program last fall. So we became friends. And I'm super excited to hang out with her and her husband. And just, yeah, get away from the farm. So I'll let you know how it goes. I'm sure there's going to be many adventures. And I'm starting to feel better. I had a real turnaround in my health last week. I started taking digestive enzymes. I know you don't really want to know all the details, but I've really been struggling with acid reflux. It's gone into my throat, which is why I've been chewing gum for the last few months on the podcast. And yeah, my throat has actually started to heal over the last 10 days. Ever since I started taking these digestive enzymes. So now I feel like there's a whole new frontier that I'm reading up on and learning about, which is gut health. Some of you are nodding your heads right now because I know you've been there. And I'm still at the beginning learning it all. So really just taking a lot of time to R&R this summer so that I can focus on healing and really just trying to get my voice back. So if my voice sounds scratchy and I'm clearing my throat a lot, it's just because it's gone into my throat and it's still kind of strained to talk for a long period of time. So I'm going to keep this kind of short today, but continue to pray for me. I really do feel like every few weeks I make progress, I either literally have a lowering of my symptoms or I learn some information that's going to help me figure this out. So I'm hopeful that I'll eventually get there. Okay, we're talking about social proof today. And the reason why this is I've made these notes for this particular episode like six weeks ago, but it's been sitting in my folder here for a while waiting for the opportune time. And I feel like it's a good time to talk about it right now in the middle of the summer because you know, we're right in the middle of trying to sell our stuff. We're always trying to find new customers while we're always trying to attract new people into our community. And these are some things that are going to be really helpful for you. I think it's going to be a quick list of kind of 10 ways that you can show social proof. I'm not going to do a deep dive on each one, but I'm just going to kind of list them off, some examples. And I want to start out by reminding you how important it is to if you want to find new customers, we need to have social proof in our messaging somewhere. And some of you are really focused on finding new customers. If you are at the beginning stages of building a farm business, this is the focus, right? Giving out what your offer is, your gateway offer, and finding as many new customers as possible. If you've been in business a while, our focus isn't so much on getting new customers as it is on really working the ones we already have, taking good care of them, making more offers for them, increasing our cart value, our average order value, and the number of times they come back and buy. That's how we're maximizing profits. But we're still, of course, always willing to take new customers. And the social proof element in the marketing system is, in my opinion, mostly there to attract the new client. Because once a person has become a customer and they've bought from you many times and they're bought in and they like you, they don't need to be convinced that you're good enough. They don't need to go and read more reviews and see all the badges and certifications. Like they've been convinced. So the social proof messaging element is really there to help you find the new client and convince them to take action and buy, either get onto your email list or actually turn into a paying customer, move from being a lead and actually buy your products for the first time. So we have to have a social proof element in our marketing system somewhere. If you don't have this yet, please listen to me. This is an easy thing to build and put into place. And it may just be the thing that's keeping you from turning more people into clients more quickly. I have noticed that personally, just anecdotally, when I buy something from someone for the first time, I almost always read the reviews or I'll give some other examples of what social proof can look like. But I am looking for proof that the solution works, either that it solves a problem that I'm currently experiencing, that it's worth my time to investigate it and look more into it, and even putting out money to try and, you know, try the product, or that it's going to meet my desire, the thing that I want, it's going to help me meet that. The goal of today's podcast is to show you a quick list of examples of ways that you can be showing social proof. Some of them are very easy to do. And these are things you can put in place in under 20, 30 minutes. And they're going to grease the wheels. They're going to help those new people feel like they're more comfortable taking action, taking that risk so they can buy from you for the first time. My hope is that you'll hear some of these suggestions and that you're going to go pick one or two of them and quickly implement them and hopefully see an increase this week in your, the number of new customers and the number of new sales that you make. Okay, so let's just review what social proof can even look like. And I'm going to start with the most powerful one. This one is word of mouth. Now this is a little bit hard for you to actually leverage and dial up and down. And I believe that word of mouth is still king. If you can amaze a customer enough and encourage them or create a culture where your customers talk you up, that will win every time over any other of these social proof elements. If you ask most of my CSA members how they heard about my CSA, a large percentage of them will tell you that someone told them about it. And that right there, that endorsement from a trusted source is a form of social proof. It may not have been done as a post or a comment on a post. It might have just been talking with this friend over coffee or out of play data at the park or wherever and the friend mentioning that they are a part of my CSA and a conversation started and it got that person thinking they went and looked me up and they decided they would try it. So word of mouth, I mentioned it first because I think it is actually the most powerful. If you can somehow encourage your clients to be telling their friends, if you are literally trying to fill up your CSA for instance and you have 10 more spots left, you can probably get there by reaching out to 10 specific clients, getting on the phone with them and asking them to please help you find one more person each and they'll go to work for you and they'll do it. So that's just the first one I wanted to mention. Not going to spend a lot of time there. Number two is what I call user generated content or UGC for short. That's the acronym out in the marketing space. And this is any kind of content that your current customers create that they drop out into the world and other people look at that and they mirror themselves. So an example of this would be a customer drops a photo of a dish that they made using your CSA box or using the chicken they bought from your bundles. And they kind of show up, hey I made this for dinner, it was so delicious. And I got it from XYZ Farm. But right there is an example of user generated content you didn't create it, someone else did, but you can potentially benefit from it because someone else sees it, they see how someone is happy using the product, how they're proud of it, how it's delicious, it creates longing and desire and it holds up a mirror for them of this is what your life could look like if you bought this food too, okay. So don't discount the user generated content category. This is really powerful. I'm always collecting photos that my customers share in my private Facebook group. I sort of have a blanket rule when they sign up for that group. They have to agree to all the different rules and regulations and one of the things I make clear to them is like, hey this is like any of the content that you post in here is fair game for me to use for marketing purposes. Now if it has a kid in the picture I always double check, but I'm taking, I'm saving photos on to my phone all the time from inside my group and then putting them into my, into special folders on my Google photos drive. I have one called UGC and then that way I, if I ever need to leverage a photo and say, hey so and so made this or here's some pictures of some of the things my CSM members are making or putting those photos in an email, a sales email, I have them ready to go. UGC, really powerful, you can put them in a lot of places, email in your own social post, you can put them on your website, on your reviews page, on your flyers and so forth. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. This is my monthly membership where farmers can come in and build marketing assets one at a time in special 30 day build projects that I've created for you. There are currently over 14 different projects inside of Farm Marketing School including your website homepage, building a promo calendar, building a promotional email challenge, testimonial and reviews, how to build a better offer, your email nurture sequence, your lead magnet, there's a sales funnel audit, there's a ton of good stuff in there and I'm adding new material every couple of months, plus you get a monthly zoom meetup with the whole group in the middle of the month and we'll be doing some book studies off in the fall, I'm really there just to try and empower you and help you get your marketing assets built. So the way this works is you subscribe, from month to month you can cancel whenever you want, go in, you take the assessment, there's also a crash course in marketing that you can watch just learn the lingo and the vocabulary and the framework and then you get started building your first marketing asset. Every project includes a hour long tutorial, a resource folder that gives you lots of templates and examples to help make the process of actually building your own version really fast and also a project planner to help you time it out and make sure you get everything done. If you want to learn more about how to join Farm Marketing School and try it out you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com/fms. This is my new kind of flagship offer, my community that I'm going to really be pouring myself into over the next six to twelve months, really excited about it so I'd love to interact with you, join at mydigitalfarmer.com/fms and now back to the show. Number three is the obvious one, a Google review or a Facebook review, someone goes and actually leaves you a testimonial somewhere. They take the time to click on a link, think about what they want to say, they are so moved to help you and support you that either you request it and they're like yeah I want to do this for my farmer or they're so moved by their experience because you created an amazing customer experience that they go and actually find you, leave a review. Now one of the things that I've got on my website, I use a tool called EmbedSocial and I pay, I want to say I pay like 20 bucks a month for it and what it does is it pulls the latest Google reviews onto a widget on my website so that as a person's coming to my website, there is an element, a social proof element on the website that shows the reviews. I can customize what the headline says but it's got the most recent reviews coming in. So if you're a farm that has a lot of reviews, this is a really awesome tool because you can quickly demonstrate in a blink of an eye, holy cow, a lot of people use this product, look how many reviews there are, look how many five star reviews there are, there's thousands of them or even in the several upper hundreds you know looks impressive. So they're going to not, they're not going to take the time to read all those reviews, they'll probably read two or three but it's going to, there's the sheer volume of reviews is going to prove to them that a lot of people do this so it's therefore safe for me to do it too. So don't overlook, that's a really obvious one and I've got several episodes on the podcast all about how to get people to leave you testimonials like that but I wanted to make sure I said that. Number four is comments on social posts that are essentially testimonials. I don't know if you've, if you know what I mean but sometimes you'll create a post or someone else will create a post in your community about something and somebody will comment on it and be like, oh my gosh that is the most amazing broccoli this week in the CSA that I've ever had, it's so delicious I can't believe it, how much better tasting it is and the stuff you get at the store, okay? A little innocuous comment like that is actually a hidden gem of a testimonial, a form of social proof and so you can grab a screenshot of that and look for ways to incorporate that into your marketing whether it's in your social media, in your email, on a website, reviews page and so forth, okay? So be looking for social proof hidden within comments if it's a really good one it's worth saving, taking a screenshot of it. All right, number five is tagging you in an Instagram story or real. To me that's a form of social proof, have you ever done that where, or have you seen that where a customer takes a picture of something and then, or has a video and comments about something and they tag you in that piece of content. That content is now going to all of their friends, their community, their followers. People are seeing your name associated with them and they may come and follow you, they may come and look at your stuff but your name is being lifted up and you're getting some applause, right? That is a form of social proof and you have some people in your community that do that a lot, I know I have a handful of customers that are constantly tagging me, I really value those people and they are showing social proof every time they do, they're saying this works and I just imagine how many people are being exposed to that over and over and over again that some of those people might eventually decide to buy. Number six, wearing your swag. Do you have swag, my friends, do you have a t-shirt that identifies your customer as part of your group, of your community? It could be other forms of swag too, it could be bags, it could be a mug, I know there's all different versions of this but whenever somebody buys something that labels them as being a part of your team, it's like they're able to show it off to the world that I belong, I belong to this group and that is a form of social proof. I want to be a part of this group, this is how I identify, I'm a foodie, okay, so just some of you don't even have swag yet, that's fine, eventually you'll get there but swag is basically a form of social proof and you could create promotions around encouraging people to wear your swag on a certain day and they get a discount, there are things you can do to make large crowds of people wear the t-shirt on a certain day and if it's a very distinctive looking t-shirt or a certain color, it's got a cool design and everybody wants to have it, everybody wants to belong, like that's powerful stuff. Number seven is product badges, so some of your products are things like best sellers or customer favorites or top rated, maybe you even have something that has won an award, best cheese, international cheese award, like you want to have visible badges on these products when you're talking about them or on your website, on the product description itself, don't just hide that information in the product description, have some sort of a visual element that lets someone know this is a really good product, this is loved by a lot of our folks, start here, so that is a super easy way to communicate in a split second to a brand new potential client that you are an award winner or you're really good at what you know, you're really good at what you do, that this is an amazing product that a lot of customers like it, instant social proof, so if you've got a product like that that's won an award, this might be the thing you can do this week that takes 10 minutes and you add it on there and now you're going to notice more people start buying that product because you added that element, it's pretty cool, so that's a big one. Number eight is what I call name dropping, if you have some customers that are big time, either well known in the community, maybe you have some politicians that are customers or owners of big businesses or a chef, that's a big time name, make sure that you are dropping that name from time to time, show pictures of the two of you collaborating or passing the box to them or maybe it's even a testimonial from them or show on your website that you work with these restaurants, this is a very easy way for you to elevate your brand when you are in community with other people who have an elevated status, so that's definitely a form of social proof, number nine is statistics, statistics that matter, things like farming since 1969 or serving thousands of clients in the metro Toledo area or 85% CSA retention, what are the statistics that are going to communicate to a potential new buyer that a lot of people like you, that you have a lot of customers who are satisfied, so if you have thousands of customers, make sure you mention the thousands in a heading maybe on your testimonial widget, if you have thousands of five-star reviews, make sure you tell people I have thousands of five-star reviews, if you have been farming for more than 15-20 years, that experience is going to mean something to a brand new customer, they might choose you over another farm because they are looking for someone who is a little more established and a little more secure, remember we are trying to reduce the risk for people, that's always the balance when we are doing marketing, we are trying to increase desire and possibility within the hearts of our customers while reducing the risk and the fear, so when we are putting social proof together, showing to other people like our stuff, it works, we are reducing that risk, statistics can do that, if you have a really high retention rate with your CSA, find a way to mention that, hey, 85% of our customers come back every year, meaning the likelihood is pretty good that you will too, and if you can brag about something like that, you should be, that's going to reduce the risk for someone. Okay, I wanted to make sure I said put those statistics, don't forget you have to actually put them somewhere, so an obvious place to put them would be on your website, you can also put them in social media, you can put them in your emails, in your sales emails, you can share that information with your customers so that they can be talking about it when they do word of mouth, right, make sure you have those talking points in key locations. Okay, the last one is certifications, badges, and seals. This is stuff like certified organic, or free range, or pasture fed, pasture raised, or you know, if you're a part of a certain statewide affiliation, that's going to mean something to your customer, like putting those badges up on your banner, on a widget on your website, and you're the top, again, quickly communicate to a potential new client that a third party authenticator has come into, you know, your business and given you their seal of approval, though that the customer doesn't have to go through all the work of trying to make sure that you're legit, someone else has done that for them and they can trust you. These are really powerful, especially things like USDA organic, that those are sometimes like looked for by very specific people, they're trying to make sure that they see that seal, and if they don't see it, they might leave, so if you have it, make sure you're flaunting it a little bit, don't hide it, put that seal somewhere obvious in the right spot in the customer journey, okay? All right, there you have it, that's my list. I'm going to review them really fast. Are you ready? Word of mouth, user-generated content, Google reviews, comments on social posts that essentially function as a testimonial, tagging you in an Instagram story or reel, or social media anywhere, for that matter, wearing your swag, using product badges like bestseller or customer favorite or award winner, name dropping, statistics and certifications, badges and seals. Now my hope is that you're going to hear that list and that some of them you're already doing and you're going to patch yourself on the back and be like, "Awesome, I have something in place somewhere in my funnel that is taking care of this." Some of you are going to listen to that list and say, "I don't have anything like that yet." And then I'm here to tell you, jump on that this week and start working on one of them, just one of them because my friends, I promise you this piece is so important to turn a lead into a customer. They don't know that they're looking for this, but they're looking for this. And all it takes is for them to see an element of social proof and they're that much closer to saying yes and buying from you for the first time. This is an easy thing to implement. Now I have an entire project inside of Farm Marketing School called the testimonial project that its whole purpose is in 30 days because all the projects are 30 day projects, to find five testimonials and to put them in the "right spots" in your sales funnel. There are certain key locations that we put them where the potential new customer goes in their journey. You need to have it in the right sequence, in the right location so that they see it at the right time. And so you'll learn how to do that inside of Farm Marketing School in that project if you decide to take that. Just know that that is a resource available for you if you want to take care of that either right now or you can do it in the fall. So that's at mydigitalfimer.com/fms. Farm Marketing School is my monthly membership. So I have a ton of different projects in there that are really, really good that will help you build your marketing machine. A quick announcement before I go through my final wrap up, I want to make sure you know that next week I am not going to be releasing a podcast. I'm taking a week off and that's because this July I'm actually going on a vacation to Canada as I said at the beginning. And it's just easier for me to pause the show for a week than it is to try and get too recorded in one week, especially with my voice still being a little bit weak. So if you don't mind, we're just going to hit the pause button and I will catch you back at the beginning of August. Let me know what you think of this episode, I'm going to put the links in the show notes, which is mydigitalfimer.com/272. If you liked today's episode, please go leave me a rating or review. Share some of that testimonial love, I would love it. Or use your word of mouth, this is so meta. And go tell a friend about the podcast, maybe in one of your Facebook groups that you're a part of or on your listserv or if you're just hanging out with some farmer buddies. We'd love for more people to know about this podcast. Don't forget I have free stuff to send your way if you need some help just learning the ropes of farm marketing. I want to help you. You can subscribe to my email list, mydigitalfimer.com/subscribe. When you do, I'm going to send you an email like every five days for about four months. It's free, it's going to walk you through the key fundamentals that you need to know. And if you can't read all that stuff right now, that's okay, subscribe anyway, and just stick it in a Gmail folder and get to it in the fall. This stuff is really good. Like I said, it's free and it's a great place to start. If you want to go deeper and actually start building the projects and you feel like you need like the video tutorial and you need the cheat sheets and the templates to get started, that's when you can kind of join for a marketing school month by month and build those projects as you want. Okay. I'm going to go to mydigitalfimer.com/fms. Super excited to invest in that monthly membership program that's taking the places of accelerator this fall. I've decided to take a break from accelerator and instead work on my monthly membership and really concentrate on the folks that are in there. So excited to invest in those folks this coming summer and fall. All right, if you want to continue the conversation and your own Instagram, then go follow me @mydigitalfimer like to show up there in stories with a mindset coaching tip or a marketing tip. We'd love to connect with you there. Thanks for joining me today, everyone. Have an awesome week. Remember, I believe in you. I'll talk to you next time. Goodbye. [MUSIC] (upbeat music)
