Establish contacts with people in your field. For direct market producers, expanding their operations to capture local and regional wholesale markets can represent an opportunity. However, this change brings with it many changes in the way the farm is managed, since the expectations of wholesale buyers are very different from those of direct market customers. Scaling Up Your Vegetables Farm for Wholesale Markets guides you on the possible changes you'll need to consider when you plan to expand to wholesale markets.
These include business planning, working with wholesale buyers, and areas of production that range from increasing product yield and quality to harvest and post-harvest handling, food safety, and more. Direct marketing is a common strategy for beginning and small farmers. The main attraction compared to selling in traditional wholesale markets is that you receive most of the money from consumers and you have more control over the price you receive for your products. However, with direct marketing, you'll also incur additional costs, most of which is your time.
Be sure to evaluate each option carefully as part of an agricultural business plan. This marketing approach can be practical to a certain extent, especially in terms of brand awareness and visibility. Current customers who love your product can order more and help you market your products by word of mouth. If you have one product that works for small farms and another for larger farms, market differently in those two segments.
But if you've taken the time to create segmented audiences of farmers and messages for each of them, then you need to market so that you can reach them directly. Sales at farmers markets alone may not generate enough money to earn a living, so you need to look for other market channels, but markets can be a good place to start a business. Get a complete view of your operations with the latest agricultural news, grain market prices, hyperlocal weather and agronomic knowledge from the field. Once you have acquired detailed marketing data, you can take the next steps to implement your marketing strategies for agricultural products.
But if done right, a successful farmers market will attract a lot of repeat customers and offer good benefits. If you want to make a successful marketing and sales effort, it's essential to make the most of that data and use it to contextualize and interpret the needs of farmers. The main advantage of data-oriented omnichannel marketing is that it focuses on specific producers, not channels.
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