Defining Your Farm's Ideal Customer

Read time: 5 Minutes

Welcome back to Weekly Marketing Tips for Farms & Ranches.

Last week’s topic touched on how to craft a brand story and why it’s important to know your farm’s unique story to help create a framework for all your marketing materials! You can read last week’s newsletter here!

Today, we are going to take the next step and focus on who your ideal customer is, craft a customer persona and why it’s important to sell to customers who fit within that framework.

Why Can’t I Sell to Just Anyone & Everyone?

Now, before we begin, you may be thinking, “Mitch, why does it matter? Can’t I just sell to anyone and everyone?"

And my answer is yes and no. Of course, if someone new stumbles across your farmer’s market stall and doesn’t fit exactly within the parameters of your customer persona, absolutely make the sale and build that relationship.

But on the other hand, we don’t want to spend all of our marketing energy on convincing “potential customers” who are clearly not interested in your product, your farm's practices or values, and the rest of your brand story.

There are plenty of customers that are IDEAL, and that is what we want to focus our marketing and storytelling around. They are perfect customers for your farm or ranch, but they just don’t know about you yet and you don’t know about them yet (mainly what about them makes them perfect customers).

What is a Customer Persona?

A solid definition of a customer persona is, “the fictional profile that represents a target customer“.

You can think of this as your farm’s target market and aim, because without a proper idea of who it is that wants to buy from your farm, you will be essentially playing darts with your eyes closed.

The persona is made up of a variety of categories, some of which will be more important to you and others will be less, but they all create a complete picture of who it is you are wanting to target.

Below are some categories:

• Demographic

• Geographic

• Family Life

• Education

• Career

• Income

• Interests

• Needs

• Motivations

• Pain Points

• Persona’s Journey - Putting it all together

Example Persona for “CSA Organic Fruits & Vegetable Farm”

• Demographic - Women / Mother

• Age - 28-40 years old

• Geographic - Lives & Works in City

• Family Life - Married or Divorced - But has multiple children

• Education - College graduated

• Career - Busy but meaningful career

• Income - $80k personal income / $150k household income

• Interests - Cooking, outdoor activities, camping,

• Needs - Convenient healthy options for children & family

• Motivations - Wants to be healthy - for her family & herself. Wants to provide her family with pesticide, chemically free, organic foods.

• Pain Points - Doesn’t have a lot of time to plan meals, but wants to be able to serve healthy food to her family. Doesn’t have a lot of time to go the grocery store and when she does, the produce is lower quality, the organic

Example Customer Persona Journey

Jennifer is a 32 year old mother of 4 who lives and works in the city. She is active herself and leads a health oriented life. She works a meaningful career that keeps her busy and also produces enough money so she can buy organic produce and healthier foods for her family. She doesn’t have a lot of spare time between her work, children and family, so she is looking for a convenient way to purchase organic and chemical free produce. She also wants to cook them in ways that get her kids to enjoy them. When she goes to the grocery store, she can find some options that work, but wants to be able to know exactly where the food she is serving her family comes from.

As you can see, once you have some definition of who it is you’re selling to, you can start to use your farm’s brand story to create material that really speaks to the pain points, motivations and needs of the persona.

How Do You Define Your Ideal Customer?

First off, if you already have an existing customer base, you can take a look at them, figure out what similarities arise and write down what you observe.

Second, you can actually send out a survey to your email list and ask questions to get more of an in-depth picture of some of the reasons they purchase from your farm instead of the grocery store or another farm.

Lastly, know that this is just a framework and you are going to craft multiple personas that encapsulate different portions of your customer base.

Crafting an “Anti-Persona”

If you are still stuck on where to begin or having a hard time crafting your ideal customer persona, an effective route is to define what your ideal customer IS NOT!

Using inverse logic, you can strip away what DOES NOT fit into your ideal customer and eventually what your ideal customer IS reveals itself.

Until next week, keep up the great, meaningful, important and vital work of producing the food that fuels the communities we live in!

You can view past newsletter episodes here.

And when you are ready to grow your farm’s sales, schedule a call!

Happy Farming,

Mitch Hinrichs, Farm Marketing Founder

You can also find these posts on Medium