September 2024 Farm Marketing News
Today, we’re covering key changes from the FTC, new Instagram and Meta features, and a Q&A with the Grapevine staff. Dive in to ensure your farm’s marketing stays strong into the fall season!
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Optimize Your Photos to Boost Performance
Resizing your farm’s photos for your website and emails is more important than ever as customer engagement ramps up during peak season. Large, unoptimized images can slow down your site, reduce conversions, and even negatively affect your performance in Google search. Our newly updated guide on cropping and resizing photos covers:
How fast-loading images boost customer retention and sales
The impact of properly sized images on mobile and desktop layouts
Best practices for choosing the right file formats and dimensions
Our favorite free tool for cropping and compressing images without losing quality
Prepare your digital presence to handle increased traffic efficiently and learn more about resizing and optimizing your photos!
More Farm Marketing News + Tips
Here’s your quick digest of the latest marketing news!
Check out LFM's Innovative Sales Webinar Series.
Sign up for Local Food Marketplace’s (LFM) first webinar in the series “Innovative Sales: Running a Year-Round Customizable CSA,” that takes place on October 14 at 11am PT. If you can’t make it, you can still register and they’ll send you a recording.
The series will discuss how to improve and boost your sales, as well as growing your food business, with real-life examples and expert-run sessions. You can learn more about the series on their website.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cracks down on fake reviews, followers, and more.
The new rule will punish businesses that buy followers, write fake testimonials or reviews, and perform other deceptive marketing practices.
We know that integrity is at the core of our clients’ and Grapevine’s marketing efforts, but it’s crucial to review how you manage and display customer feedback, whether it’s on your social media, website, or other platforms. By staying vigilant, you can build genuine relationships with your customers and avoid any unwanted pitfalls.
You can now add up to 20 photos to Instagram carousels and add music to your Instagram profile.
Great! But more photos aren’t always better. Keep being picky about what images you use in your Instagram carousels. If you know what type of photos are performing best on your account, stick with those. If you aren’t sure, we recommend starting with photos with people smiling at the camera with eye contact and a pleasant background.
Try experimenting with music — it could be a fun way to add personality to your profile. You can choose a 30-second clip and it won’t autoplay when someone visits your page. To add music, log into your account and go to Edit Profile and select your song. The song will show up in your bio.
Meta is working on a Google Analytics integration.
Meta is slowly allowing more access to third-party attribution tools (like Google Analytics!) so you can better track the effectiveness of their ad campaigns on different platforms.
What does this mean for you? It’s not fully rolled out yet, but if you’re interested in digging into your ad data, like tracking incremental conversions or measuring campaigns against business objectives like lifetime value, this could be extremely valuable. Let us know if you’re interested in advanced Meta ad campaign analytics, we’re happy to help!
What We've Been Up To
We worked with Whitestone Mountain Orchard in Washington to make changes to their Shopify site, including adding a store locator, refreshing the home page and other pages, and updating custom-designed page templates so the orchard can easily maintain custom pages on their own.
We also created custom badges and buttons for their product pages to make it easy for the orchard to assign specific language when they become out of stock, but will be back in stock at a later date. This feature is useful for farms that sell seasonal products, as well as farm websites that sell bulk meat or deposit/pre-sale products.
"Since your refresh of our website, our online sales increased by 300% over the previous year, without much effort on our part. We shipped orders to 48 of 50 states and have received inquiries from Australia, Belize, Brazil and Canada! Thank you!"
— Claire Lichtenfels, Whitestone Mountain Orchard
Want to Work With Us?
There’s still some space in our calendar for website and marketing consultations for the fall. We recommend booking as soon as you can — our waitlist peaks during winter months. We’re happy to help with marketing strategies, email/SMS, advertising, graphic design, Google, websites, and more.
To get started, you can download our latest pricing guide, which also includes a link to schedule a call.
Q&A With the Grapevine Team
If you could only eat one type of cuisine for the rest of your life, what would it be?
(Pictured above) Puerto Rican food all the way. It always conjures up all the memories of my grandmas, who taught me how to cook, and what other cuisine uses plantains 5 billion different ways?! — Gabi
I love Middle Eastern food—especially Yemeni and Lebanese cuisine. It’s a good balance of salads, veggie-heavy dishes, and delicious grilled and stewed meat. I would eat Yemeni bread and foul from Yemen Cafe in Hamtramck, Michigan every day! — Allyson
This is such a tough question, but I think I have to go with Italian. I’m a big fan of making the most out of simple, everyday ingredients (and I would be seriously devastated to take caprese and carbonara out of my diet). Plus this way I get to keep pizza, pasta, focaccia, and gelato! – Jacy
Middle Eastern! I desperately miss Meditrina Cafe from when I lived in Indiana, but regularly make homemade falafel, lamb meatballs, and tabbouleh. — Sarah
I love Indian food! I’m a huge fan of big flavors and I love how much variety there is within Indian cuisine. I will also never pass up on rice! –– Brooklyn
I choose death. This is a really tough question, Honestly, the most tolerable solution would probably just be California cuisine. Local produce, prepared simply. — Anna
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