Direct Market Farmers: Keep More Customers by Defining Your Value Prop (Webinar)

Good customers can be hard to find, and hard to keep! Have you ever earned a customer’s business, just to lose it to another farmer producing something similar? It happens all the time, especially if your enterprise has low barriers to entry. If you want your customers to remain loyal, they need to realize what makes you special. What makes your farm business and its offerings one-of-a-kind? Can you name something that can’t be easily replicated by a new farmer that comes onto the scene? When pressed, farmers’ default answer is usually their origin story, which may indeed be unusual or distinctive, but frankly, everyone else has an origin story, too…

A value proposition goes beyond your origin story, and really ought to be more customer-facing. Your value proposition communicates the full suite of benefits a customer receives when they do business with you, especially those which are hard to copy, and what kind of price premium those benefits should command. And if you want to build your brand, you must consistently communicate your value proposition in your marketing messages, making sure to use terminology that resonates with your audience. In this hour long interactive session, we’ll start to craft your defensibly unique value proposition, and show how it is essential to the ongoing success of your overall business model.

About the Speaker, Andy Larson

As Farm Outreach Specialist for the Food Finance Institute (FFI), Andy works with entrepreneurial farm businesses to build farm financial management capacity and access the capital they need to grow. He brings his expertise in farm business and marketing, agricultural lending, and grantsmanship to Farm Boot Camp.

Andy’s background includes working as an Agriculture and Commercial Loan Officer at a community bank, providing commercial credit to family farms and small businesses in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. His portfolio included crop farms, dairy farms, and a wide variety of local food farms. Andy also worked in university extension in both Iowa and Illinois, providing programming on the business and marketing side of small farms, local foods, and sustainable agriculture. In addition, Andy grew up on a dairy farm, and now lives with his wife and three daughters on a small-scale poultry farm just down the road, where they produce free-range brown eggs for local restaurants, retail stores, and farmers markets.

This webinar is presented with Think Regeneration. THINK REGENERATION is a coalition of organizations, farmers, ranchers, scientists, researchers, and philanthropists who want to accelerate on-the-ground regenerative food supply projects. Our programs support projects that repair food growing ecosystems, reverse trends in chronic disease rates, elevate the voices of regenerative growers, and build more community resilience.