Marketing your CSA – Broadfork Farm
You all may recall we ran a contest a couple of months ago to give away a professional marketing plan by yours truly to one CSA. It’s been our intention to post updates on Field Notes and then combine those posts into a downloadable ebook.
Broadfork Farm in Amherst, Nova Scotia in Canada was our winner and were ready to get started. In this first phase we’re going to do an abbreviated assessment of current marketing efforts. This will include:
- Website review
- 3rd party website usage and review (items like your profile on LocalHarvest.com
- Social media platforms usage and review
- Email usage (newsletter sends, etc.)
- Current SEO practices (search engine optimization to show up in Google, Bing, etc.)
I started this week with one of my favorite tools the Website Grader provided by Hubspot. It’s free and does a good job at looking at some key factors that drive inbound website traffic and engagement. Inbound traffic is when someone finds your site and then takes a look. If you have a website, and there is no reason not to these days, you want people finding you, coming to visit and ultimately buying something.
Hubspot specializes in growing inbound traffic but their products are fairly pricey for all but medium and big businesses.
The Market Grader looks at the following:
- Blogging
- Social Media
- SEO
- Lead Generation
- Mobile
It has a number of checklist items for each area and will tell you what you are doing well and what you can improve on. It also gives you a number rating from 1 to 100.
Broadfork Farm rated 80 out of 100 which is really pretty good. They only had one area for improvement and that was lead generation. They have a nice website, they blog, they use social media and their site is responsive. Responsive means the site scales to view correctly on mobile phones and tablets and that is becoming more and more important.
So today, go to the Market Grader link below, enter your website and run the grader. See what your results are and look at how you might improve areas where you are falling short. It’s a great tool and explains things in plain language that everyone and not just tech people can understand. If you have questions about your results, you can ask them in the comment section below and I’ll do my best to answer them.