The Market Gardener's Secret Marketing Weapon

Market gardeners need customers; customers come from effective marketing. Here's the secret marketing weapon that can help your build a successful farm (or home) businesses.

First, what DOESN'T work.

Trust me on this: space advertising - i.e. like in newspapers or magazines - does NOT work for farms or work at home businesses. Classified ads are expensive, they are not targeted - i.e. they go to everybody, whether they would be a good customer or not - and they rarely get a response. So, what does work?

The Market Gardener's Secret Marketing Weapon - Flyers!

We have used mail-out flyers to build two successful businesses in the last 5 years - our farm CSA, and a cleaning business owned by our daughter. Flyers were the secret to bringing in customers for both businesses. Here's the advantages that flyers have over other kinds of marketing:

Advantage 1: Flyers are targeted.

You can pick the locations you want the flyers delivered to (by the post office), and specifically target the areas that are most promising.

Advantage 2: Flyers provide lots of information.

Our flyers are 1 full page, printed on both sides; that is two full pages of information we can give to our prospective customers. We want lots of room to explain what we do and get our message across.

Advantage 3: Flyers get results.

We can count on about a 1% response rate from our initial flyer distribution in a given neighbourhood. This means that, if we send out 1500 flyers (comes to about $300, depending on printing costs) we will net about 15 customers. This means (in our case) about $9000 in sales from a $300 promotion - pretty good payback!

How to use flyers

Step 1 - scout the neighbourhoods that look like good prospects;

Step 2 - get the number of households in that area from the local post office; also find out how they need the flyers bundled.

Step 3: write your flyer

Step 4 - get the flyer copied at your local print shop (tip: we like to use colored paper, it costs a penny more per flyer but makes them 'stand out')

Step 5 - do the mailout from your local post office, and . . .

get ready to follow up with customers!

Our experience says flyers are a cost-efficient and results-effective way to build any work-at-home or farm-based business. No other means of communicating with your potential customers is as targeted, or provides such immediate results. Write on!

Article Source: http://blogticles.com

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated