Marketing is an essential part of every agricultural business. While your passion may be for growing things or raising animals, it’s essential to put time and energy into marketing. How much time and energy you want to spend on it might impact your choice of how to market your products. In general, direct marketing is going to be more time and labor intensive than selling wholesale, but you also keep more (or all) of the final dollar the consumer spends on your food. It’s important to think about your strengths and weaknesses when in comes to marketing — including personal (i.e. personality, customer service skills, mission/values), enterprise (where will your products sell best, how long do they keep, what’s the season), and situational (distance from markets, storage and transportation infrastructure, etc.).
For more information on marketing channels, see our next sections on:
Direct to Consumer Marketing (i.e. farmers’ markets, farm stands, CSAs, etc.)
and
Wholesale Marketing (i.e. restaurants, grocery stores, schools, etc.
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