Creating a Plan for Email Marketing and Social Media
Welcome, and congratulations on your new market hub!
We are so thrilled to have you join our growing network of community online farmers markets. As soon as your Market Hub Landing Page becomes available, you will want to keep the potential customers that signed up engaged through Active Campaign. We recommend as soon as you have 15 signups or at most 2 weeks after your first sign up, you’ll want to send your first email. We have created templates so that you can easily adjust them to your personal message to your customers. Spreading the word about what your producers are offering is key to the growth and success of your market. Included in this package are some tools and tips to help support you as your market and your marketing efforts get underway.
>> You will need to have a Landing Page set up already, so if you don’t email [email protected] to get set up with your online tool for signing up your customers.
Step 1: Build your email list
Be sure to share your Landing Page with your existing mailing list and invite them to subscribe to your FarmDrop newsletter/email campaigns. Your goal is to get 50-100 people signed up through your Landing Page before your market opens. Encourage your fellow producers to share the news about FarmDrop by asking them to drop one of the below included banners into their newsletters and/or websites and hyperlinking to your market’s sign up page.
Keeping Your Producers Engaged:
- It is important to stay in touch with your producers to learn about what products they have available, how you can best support them as their Market Hub Manager (MHM), and to share with them data driven information about how to create the most successful marketplace.
Step 2: Set up your Instagram and Facebook Page
1. FACEBOOK PAGE
-Create a Facebook Page for your Market Hub using the name of your market (eg: Central Maine FarmDrop).
-Add the contact info, Market info, & a link to your market’s sign up page
-Invite your Facebook contacts to like your page & share it on your own profile as a post
2. INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT
-Create a new account getting as close to the name of your market as possible (eg, centralmainefarmdrop OR central_mainefarmdrop)
-Add one of the following descriptions to your profile
“Your food. Your farmers. Your community. Sign up link below”
“Online farmers market serving Hartford, Maine. Sign up link below.”
-Add #farmdropus to your description
-Add the link to your market info page
-Link your IG to your Facebook Page to easily share posts on both platforms
Step 3: Get Active on Social Media
Keep the energy high around your soon-to-open market by sharing info about FarmDrop and previews of products your shoppers will be able to find. We’ve created 3 posts and a suggested schedule to help you get started.
Week One: Announce your Market with the included branded market post. Add a caption encouraging people to sign up for Opening Day info & make sure your Landing Page is linked in bio
Week One/Two: Post one or two high quality images with short captions in your voice. Landscape shots or photos of produce/product that help establish the mood of your market are good ways to start.
Week Two/Three: Your Food Your Farmers Your Community. Add a caption in your voice about the community benefit to shopping with FarmDrop.
Week Four: Post one or two high quality images related to your market. You might also consider highlighting producer processes, farm tours, or product highlights in your IG/FB Stories
Week Four/Five: Why Shop FarmDrop Post > Let people know why FarmDrop is special! This informational post engages your customers and potential customers with the mission behind what we, and you, are doing.
You don’t need to post in this order or exactly on this schedule. We do recommend that you post in a way that feels sustainable for you. For example, only post 3 times in one week if you plan to post that much moving forward. 1-2 posts a week is a good place to start, especially if this is a new way of communicating for you.
Step 4: Keep your signed-up audience engaged before opening
It often takes several weeks between your first signed up customer and the opening of your market. To speed up the process and to garner as much support for your market before it opens, keep your customers engaged and ask for their help in building interest in your community.
Week Two/Three: Send the “Share With Friends” template to your mailing list from Active Campaign
Step 5: Ongoing Marketing Tips & Tools
Now that you have a few weeks under your belt of promoting & growing your market through your mailing list and social media, here are a few things to keep in mind.
- Gather input from your customers with the Survey template in your Active Campaign library
- Consider making a social media schedule – there are different tools for planning & creating social media posts – let us know what you are thinking and we can help you navigate this. It is always helpful to create 1 week of posts at a time as you started. You can even use a free scheduling service like Planoly to have them auto post for you.
- Make sure you follow all of your producers on social media and that they follow your market so you can easily cross promote for one another by tagging and sharing posts.
We hope you are going to love working with us, bringing a more accessible local food system to our communities across the US.