Ag Coop Marketing Training

Promoting Your Business Within a Shared Collective

COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY

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Q&A: Who knows what a communications strategy is?

Who has a marketing plan?

Holistic, foundational technique that supports your marketing efforts by creating an overarching approach

that is in tune with your business identity — referred to as your brand.

• Document (napkin, post-it notes, big poster on the wall, 1 page, many pages…) that organizes the business’s approach towards outreach.

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What is a Communications Strategy?

• It is the larger vision of all you do. It is expectations, memories, stories and relationships. It creates a feeling and a shape.

• It is not a label, nor a logo. It is only partially signified by visual representation.

• Craft the story then make a successful visual signifier for it.

• Know your core values as a business — do this inside of strategic planning work. They should echo throughout all your brand expressions, or marketing efforts.

Q&A: What is a Brand?

The brand is the soul of your business identity and how you tell your story, in words and images across all mediums and media, expressing

the inner core of who you are as a business.

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The Word “BRAND”

• Without strategy you risk investing money and time in disconnected, one-off marketing efforts, with unclear results.

• Your end goal is always sales, but marketing is never a 1:1 ratio of Dollar Spent: Dollar Made. More often a long-term investment for sales growth and brand exposure.

• Position yourself in the collective Marketplace with a thoughtful and grounded representation of who you are as a business (brand).

• Communications Strategy and Marketing Plan ideally part of overall strategic planning, mission, and core values discovery.

Step 1. Strategic Plan >> 2. Communications Strategy >> 3. Marketing Plan >> 4. Various marketing initiatives, including Coop Marketplace

• Marketplace is not to be not a cure-all for your sales and marketing issues, nor the only sales channel you participate in.

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Why do I need a Communications Strategy?

Market Overview +

Target Audience +

Competitive Landscape +

Competitive Advantage - or - Your Value Proposition

See Marketing Tool handout: template for writing communications strategy & marketing plan

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Communications Strategy =

The larger context in which your business exists, in brief terms

• Research and define/describe fiber, textile and clothing/accessories trends to understand the bigger picture. What’s happening culturally? In retail and fashion? In technology or innovation? In legislation and policy? In environmental awareness?

• HOW? Talk to people: reach out to other business owners, consumers (friends & family), suppliers, purchasers, producers, supply chain vendors, mill operators, professors, researchers, market and event managers, writers, non-profit organizations. Craft a simple guide of 5 brief questions.

• Plus some old fashioned research: online and print articles.

• Describe a market niche — what opportunities exist in the market (demand) that currently aren’t being met by providers & producers (supply)?

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Market Overview

From Fibershed’s Woven in Kentucky report, part of Kentucky Cloth Project. Pages 13 on landscape assessment; 20 & 23-24 on market opportunities http://www.fibershed.com/programs/fiber-systems-research/hemp/kentucky-cloth-project/

Research Technique & Market Niche

“Most information that was gathered on plant-based growth is from informal interviews that were conducted with farmers, entrepreneurs, university staff, and staff in state agricultural programs.”

“Some farmers said that they sell in a variety of places in order to tap into different markets. For example, one farmer sells at the farmers’ market in the summers, online on Etsy…It was notable that no respondents indicated that they sold directly to retail apparel stores. This perhaps indicates a trend for smaller-scale producers to sell more directly to buyers, where industrial producers might be more likely to contract with retail markets.”

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Market Overview Example

Potential customers for each of your products & services and their unique characteristics

• Create a profile picture of each audience type: who they are, where they live/work, age, socio-demographic characteristics, what they do for a living and for leisure, what they like and don’t like, how they make purchase decisions, how often they shop for fiber materials, clothes, meat, etc.

• Use what you’ve learned from your market research to understand who is most likely to buy your products.

• Target Audiences are for all products that buy via all sales channels, not just for the Marketplace.

• DEEP INQUIRY! Ask questions of your potential sales outlets to get a grasp on the nuances of spending habits of customers. Include who you already know to be your customers.

• Example: a farmers market customer in a city may have a different demographic/need/buying pattern than your neighbor in a rural community, or an online shopper in a different state.

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Target Audience

A small but thoughtful cross-section view of the relevant local and non-local competition

• Who else should you compare yourself to?

• Explore businesses offering similar products/services to target audiences both within the region and outside of it.

• List at least 2-3 inside your region within the same industry, and 1-2 outside your region but relevant to your work.

• Explore businesses outside of fiber/textile sector in other industries that perhaps compete for your audience’s attention. I.e.,how else your potential customers may spend their money.

• List 1-2 examples from outside your industry.

Q&A: Examples of regional competitor-colleagues? Outside of region? Examples of outside of industry businesses (how else

consumers could spend their money if not on your goods)?!10

Competitive Landscape

The advantages you have that separate you from colleague-competitors and make your offerings a superior alternative

• Detail the differentiating factors in narrative form.

Why should someone use/buy your products & services? What are your key selling points? Why are you different and special?

Your core values as a business.

• Describe the distinct, unique and individual features of your products and services that complement — and fill — the whole you’ve observed in the Market Overview: your “market niche.”

• Create short phrases, sound bites, that capture all distinguishing features. This is your competitive advantage, or Value Proposition: the distinct value you propose your offerings carry in the marketplace. Permanently housed in Creative Brief.

• To use in across all marketing initiatives: conversations, folded into website text, event brochures, social media, product descriptions, etc.

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Your Value Proposition

How do I prioritize this work?

• Seasonality: slow, off-seasons that are ripe for reflection

• Moments when you are not at home in daily grind, if possible.Take a mini business retreat for creative thinking time!

• 1-2 hours per week on dedicated “admin” days

• 5-10 hours on market overview and competitive landscape research and outreach

• 2-3 hours on crafting target audience profiles

• 2-4 hours writing Communications Strategy narrative, depending on swiftness.

• Even without writing a plan, your observations will feed you and become part of your overall approach. Anything will help to become proactive rather than reactive in your decisions around marketing.

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Time Management

MARKETING PLAN

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• Brand identity: logo/icon

• Physical Aesthetic: booth set-up, decor, signage, props, styling (on farm shop, farmers markets, etc.)

• Photo & Video

• Print materials

• Advertising

• Product tags and packaging

• Radio & media

• Online: Web, Email & Blog

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Marketing Plan Basics

Describes all marketing initiatives across various mediums, and the thinking behind their selection

• Third party e-commerce: COOP MARKETPLACE

• Community involvement & guerilla marketing; sponsorship of other organizations/businesses/community events

• Social Media

• Special events & demonstrations

• Educational & speaking opportunities

• Outside PR

• Outline each marketing initiative and its details. Each should reflect your deep strategy work; otherwise you risk spending aimless money.

• Think through what it takes to implement each initiative in terms of people, money, time, and relationships; its short and long term impact; which audience it targets; the sales channel each will help promote (direct-to-consumer, retail, wholesale) and the potential value of return on each.

• Think through all initiatives, or a selection, before deciding to move forward on any single initiative. Create a good mix of initiatives instead of banking on just the easiest one, each one designed for your specific target audiences (ie. potential customers)

• Accompanied by basic budget for each initiative and timeline/delegation.

• Instructions for writing a plan in Marketing Tool handout. In-depth instructional on marketing plan creation in future Producer Program business trainings. Time Management: 8-10 hours.

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Marketing Plan Basics

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Marketing Plan Basics

Coop Marketplace must be considered as one of many initiatives in your plan. Not to be relied on as your sales and marketing savior.

Only appeals to some of your target audiences… so do not stop sales & marketing in other initiatives/channels!

POWER OF A COLLECTIVE BRAND

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The brand is the soul of your business identity and how you tell your story, in words and images across all mediums and media, expressing the

inner core of who you are as a business. It is the larger vision of all you do. It creates a feeling and a shape.

Your brand = your identity rooted in the foundation of your core values and your mission = outside perception of your quality

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Defining your BRAND

YOUR VERY SPECIAL UNIQUE

COMPANY

• Creative Brief is the “guidebook” that you use to describe your brand to help you make detailed marketing decisions.

• 1-2 page summary document that illuminates and describes your brand identity, and your strategy for communicating it.

• Communications Strategy overlap: doesn’t need extra time to research but rather time to reflect and rephrase.

• You can send directly to creatives as an introduction to your business to aid them throughout their design process.

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What is a Creative Brief?

Includes:

• Mission

• Core Values

• Brand Promise

• Big Picture Business Goal

• Products & Services

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Creative Brief

• Target Audiences

• Competitors & Colleagues List

• Value Proposition: Your Competitive Advantage

• Personality, Tone, Messaging

• Inspiration

3-4 hours to write, split up over a few days of thinking ,reflection and writing. See Creative Brief Marketing Tool handout for instructions.

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Concentric Rings of Identity in Marketplace Ecosystem

“No whole…can be managed without looking inward to the lesser wholes that combine to form it, and outward

to the greater wholes of which it is a member.”

Your brand exists independently and as a reflection of each of the identities within the Marketplace collective context. Use the intersection of these identities

to craft powerful and effective marketing….and eventually drive sales.

• Mission: Fibershed develops regional and regenerative fiber systems on behalf of independent working producers, by expanding opportunities to implement carbon farming, forming catalytic foundations to rebuild regional manufacturing, and through connecting end-users to farms and ranches through public education.

• Vision: We envision the emergence of an international system of regional textile communities that enliven connection and ownership of ‘soil-to-soil’ textile processes.

• Value Proposition: Material culture can restore ecosystems and regenerate right livelihoods when we start with soil and rebuild relationships.

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Your Brand in Context: Fibershed

• Target Audiences: Fashion & textiles (especially: design schools, sustainable/slow/circular fashion brands & advocates, wearers, makers, mills); Climate (advocates/organizers, media, students); Ag (rangeland, land managers, producers, food systems); Local (place-based connectivity, Northern CA community + affiliates)

• Goals & Objectives: To organize and develop essential economic and social connections between rural and urban communities to advance the vital role that soil-to-soil fiber systems play in generating lasting prosperity with positive effects for our regional economies, global climate, and the health & diversity of our ecosystems

• Voice & Tone: Supportive, meeting people where they are, thought provoking, intersectional, modern heritage, small is beautiful, holism, inspiring, challenging assumptions, welcoming, unlikely partnerships, exploratory, age diverse, systems thinking, community-centered, verdant 

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Your Brand in Context: Fibershed

• Mission: To provide stability and lasting prosperity for independent producers who own and operate farms and ranches; and for those who create goods from locally grown materials within our Northern California Fibershed through the Fibershed Marketplace, cooperative marketing, value added production, and education. The Coop will promote the use and production of regionally grown materials, and support our community to enhance and restore our soil, water, and the health of the biosphere.

• Vision: Healthier farm and artisan incomes, more just reward for those who steward land and flocks and create goods from healthier materials; profits shared among and enriching many, rather than a few.

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Your Brand in Context: Coop & Marketplace

• Value Proposition: Purchasing anything is a vote— buying traceable (back to farm) products from regional communities is a vote for keeping independent family owned businesses alive and on the land; it is a vote to retain bucolic working landscapes; and it is a vote to restore those landscapes in the case of purchasing a Climate Beneficial verified good.

• Target Audiences: Fibershed followers; Urban/suburban folks who want an easier, more consistent way to find the locally made, natural products; Local/slow food and wine followers; High income consumers who make very careful, limited spending on special items wanting finished, stylish garments, and mindful housewares and accessories; Middle income consumers who value homemade handcrafted or artisanal goods; Makers (knitters, sewists); Artisans, crafters, and livestock producers; Philanthropists supporting local and new economy endeavors.

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Your Brand in Context: Coop & Marketplace

• Goals & Objectives: To increase farmer and rancher access to markets and customers, thereby increasing right livelihood; to remove barriers to market access in our Coop community. To find ways to improve farmer and artisan income, and then deliver those things that we can, to reduce the labor required of those who have the least to spare.

• Voice & Tone: Rural boosterism, praise, encouragement, building each other up, supportive, moral, just, fair, holistic, systemic change, clear and plain language, accessible, better together, down to earth, possible, pragmatic hope

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Your Brand in Context: Coop & Marketplace

• Value Proposition: Know your colleagues! Do due diligence/market research to understand their value propositions. Find similarities to attach onto and promote and differences to illuminate in product differentiation.

• Target Audiences: Partially shared in marketplace setting. This is a good thing!

• Goals & Objectives: Shared! Sales of product; consumer awareness of your shared values, practice, and philosophy.

• Voice & Tone: Varied, with some overlap in language choices.

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Your Brand in Context: Colleague Sellers

YOU • Value Proposition: Your unique competitive advantage, explored in your

communications strategy. Your core values on display.

• Target Audiences: Know who you want to sell to. Find overlap with those of Fibershed, Coop, and other sellers.

• Goals & Objectives: Shared! Sales of product; consumer awareness of shared values, practice, and philosophy.

• Voice & Tone: From your creative brief. Some overlap with organizations and colleague sellers in language choices.

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Your Brand in Context

YOUR VERY

SPECIAL UNIQUE

COMPANY

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Interweaving Collective & Individual Brand Identities

“A rising tide will lift all boats in the harbor.”

Your business and work is better amplified within this greater context

• Recognize the financial benefits: Startup and maintenance costs are covered and economies of scale in a group site. Major savings on marketing investments, capital (one-time) and operational (annual).

• Recognize the promotional benefits: Mutual need for consumer education; the burden to educate is spread out amongst individual businesses and the organizations when you “advertise” together as a single sales location, resource, and brand.

• Recognize the greater whole: Share messaging, visual aesthetic, tone. Exploit the brand similarities between you and the identities in the Marketplace environment — Fibershed, Coop and colleague sellers. (Note words in red slides 22-23)

Illuminate the overlap of your brand (learnings from strategic thinking work) with the collective identities when creating your marketing initiatives. Promote and describe (read: market) your choices, methods, practices, skills, impact, and shared value propositions to help create a broader customer base (read: customers! sales!).

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Interweaving Collective & Individual Brand Identities

• Knowing how and where else potential customers shop and for what: more of that old fashioned research.

Q&A: Who buys your product? Who do you speak with when they stop by your booth? What do they tell you they need,

what questions do they ask?

• Are online e-commerce customers the same as your potential customers for all other marketing initiatives? For all products? Why or why not? Explore in your strategic planning work.

• Get to know the basic culture of online shopping: slow fashion in the face of expectations of convenience and speed.

• Not all products need to be sold via the Marketplace. You may post only certain products based on the shared target audiences and value propositions of the collective.

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Marketing to Shared Target Audiences Online

Dual duty of both Coop Marketplace and YOU to FIRST understand your audience and THEN appeal to them with your product offerings.

Q&A/whiteboard: create some profiles of online e-commerce customers,

a.k.a. target audiences, for the Marketplace

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Marketing to Shared Target Audiences Online

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SUCCESS!

Example of interwoven brands & shared target audiences: ETSY.com

vendor concentration in a single outlet = less dispersion in the marketplace; less expense for vendors

= convenient solution for shoppers = momentum for attracting more customers for a budding industry

• Invert the definition of competition and consider competitors as colleagues first and foremost.

• WHY? Business begets more business. Basic market economics tell us that competition creates higher demand by the consumer.

• You are individually and collectively trying to change the landscape of the fiber economy. In an unestablished sector, you need each other!

• The fuller the Marketplace is with options, the more robust and dynamic it can be (read: sales! customers!). Need for both diversity and density in products for the Marketplace to feel attractive.

• Create an inclusive community: no place for fear-based feelings of competition if you want to raise up the community. Remember you are a part of a whole: you co-define each other.

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Competition as Collaboration

• Standard of etiquette: you are members of a cooperative first and foremost, colleague business owners second, competitors producing similar products in a limited market third. All a matter of perspective and attitude.

• Take ownership of your participation, show accountability, show up! Be active and participatory: you get out of it what you put into it.

Discussion/Raise your Hand (5-10 min): What feels scary about this concept?

Disarming? Confusing? Is it convincing? Why not?

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Competition as Collaboration

MARKETING TACTICS for the Marketplace

• Shared marketing tactics help to attract the shared audiences: amplification of the effects!

• In addition to loose overlaps in voice & tone, you can use a shared language: claims, terminology, phrases, memes, and a common lexicon to promote your regenerative, regional, soil-to-soil textile economy and reinforce brand messaging for all in the collective.

• Where? Across all marketing initiatives: web copy, product labels, product description, social media, brochures, your conversational “pitch”, etc.

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Marketing Tactics: Shared Language

• Moral, just, equitable, right livelihood, fair

• Mutual benefit, better together, the real deal, non-corporate, do the right thing

• Farm direct, traceable, regenerative agriculture, soil health

• Small batch, special, rare breed, heritage, one-of-a-kind

• Land-centric, place-based, climate positive, climate beneficial

• Rural economy, rural health, rural justice, rural-urban relationships

• Geographic justice, geographic wealth redistribution, local economy, local money, keep money local, slow money

• Community investment, profit sharing, member owned, member run, cooperative

• Craft, artisan, handmade, natural dyes, local clothes

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Marketing Tactics: Shared Language

• Soil to soil, regenerative agriculture , CA grown, soil restoration, know your farmer

• Carbon farming, climate beneficial, climate beneficial wool, climate beneficial transitional, change climate change

• Grow your clothes, local wool, fashion revolution, made in the usa, slow fashion movement, sustainable fashion, eco fashion, field to fashion, circular fashion, american manufacturing, community supported cloth, regenerative fiber

• Natural dyes, local color, plant palette, botanic blue

• Landscape management, land stewardship, preservation, conservation, fire ecology, working lands management, resilient systems, ecosystem restoration

• Value-added products, conscious consumer, artisan, craft, handmade, community, hand processing, time-honored tradition, place-based production, value chain

Q&A: Who uses these words already & how frequently?!39

Marketing Tactics: Shared Language

Marketing initiatives take maintenance, just like farm chores

• Get to understand how customers react by reading reports. Know the patterns of your sales and customers. Review full order history in your dashboard. Export to excel for easier analysis.

• Don’t be intimidated by language you don’t understand. This is a new medium, get familiar with it; attack it as you would any other new skill you want to acquire for your work.

• Ask questions, ask for help, be involved. Tool is only as good as you make it: the more involved you are in its development, the better it can serve YOU.

• Pay attention to the quarterly reports generated from Marketplace (individual and collective for the overall site). Take time to analyze and then utilize for your product mix and marketing decisions. A preview:

• Total Marketplace sales for the quarter (across all vendors and all items) • Price spread (median product price, high and low points • Popular types/categories of items • Search terms people use on the site • Referral, link, User ID and shopping path tracking via Google analytics

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Marketing Tactics: E-Commerce Analytics & Reporting

Q&A: How many of you think customer service is a part of what you do? Should it be?

Request, facilitate, and absorb customer feedback: remember you are providing a service. Some suggestions:

• Standard email follow-up to all customers.

• Respond to requests within 48 hours.

• Expect to hit some snafus! Don’t take it out on your customer, it’s not his or her fault.

• Package and ship with a careful attention to detail, aesthetic, and your unique brand. E-commerce is a personal and lifestyle shopping experience. Doesn’t have to mean expensive, but thoughtful.

• Make sure your product listed is available and your catalog never remains empty.

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Marketing Tactics: Customer Service

• Develop an attractive and diverse product mix that caters to customer needs. Most retail consumers like variety. Display abundance. Do not dump product unwanted in other marketing or sales channels here.

• Browse the site frequently to be up to date on its contents. Monitor fellow sellers, know their offerings. Keep your eye out for products not yet posted by other sellers, or compliments you can offer.

• Find a niche: create both parallels and differentiating factors for your products in context of the Marketplace.

• There is an advantage to having multiple products in the exact same category: simultaneous variety and density of products helps create customer momentum.

• Can also help to attract attention by press and the broader community, as it will feel less “boutique elitist/obscure” and more “mainstream” of a shopping experience.

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Product Differentiation

• Plan for seasonal changes of merchandise and catalogue updates. Compliment the in-person sales events you participate in by promoting different but similar offerings online.

• Don’t compete with yourself: price should take the sales channel (online) and production costs into consideration. Give up some potential margin in order to not cannibalize sales from your own other direct-to-consumer sales channels.

• Remember that people may find products via multiple paths: menu navigation to merchant catalogue -OR- products; search mechanism; filters. Be sure to describe and label your products with as many relevant distinguishing features as possible.

• Focus on product specifics using shared language while gently distinguishing yourself from colleague sellers. Point out what’s unique.

• Cater to your customers: using reporting and customer feedback, tweak your product mix according to customer purchasing and browsing patterns.

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Product Differentiation

• Social media is an excellent place for expressing overlaps in concentric rings of identities (Fibershed, Coop and colleague sellers) via shared language, content themes, hashtags, etc.

• Marketing Tool handout: basic social media guidelines for co-branded collective environment. Includes:

• Vital details: handle names / feed URLs, hashtags, mentions, references, tags, influencers across all platforms for Fibershed and Coop

• General good practices, etiquette, voice, content ideas, timing, management, cross-promotion methods.

• How to utilize shared language within social media

• Photography protocol: see online tutorials

• Future options for in-depth social media technical assistance being considered. Be in touch to let us know the level of education you need and want. Stay tuned!

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Social Media Cross-Promotion

THANKS Y’ALL

See you in 2019