Workshop: Use Market Research to Guide Farm Business Decisions

Marketing can help you decide what to grow or produce, choose where and how you want to sell it, differentiate yourself from other farmers, and make effective use of social media and other marketing tools. Learn the basics to doing your own direct marketing or supervising someone else. This series of 4 workshops is designed as a complete direct marketing class, but you can register for as many as you like. Sessions will include guest speakers, handouts, discussions and in-class exercises.

Session 1: Use Market Research to Guide Farm Business Decisions (3/20/2018)

If you want to grow your business, you need to sell more to your existing customers, sell to new customers, and/or expand the number of products or services you offer. Market research can help you generate new ideas and choose the best options. This session will show you how to use basic market research to assess market trends, understand your current or potential customers, and decide what products, prices and channels make sense for your farm. Participants will receive and learn to use a worksheet to profile the demographics, interests, and needs of your target customers. A guest speaker will discuss how to sell to wholesale and institutional markets.

Guest Speaker: Simca Horwitz, Mass. Farm to School Project

Find more info and register here

Instructors:

Myrna Greenfield, founder and “Top Egg” at Good Egg Marketing, provides expert marketing for good food and good causes. Good Egg helps businesses increase sales and build customer loyalty through brand development, sales and marketing strategies, websites, and social media. Greenfield is a frequent speaker, trainer and workshop presenter. She holds an MBA from the Simmons School of Management and lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Justin Chase, Farmer Training Program Manager at New Entry Sustainable Farming Project. Justin is also a twelfth-generation farmer on his family’s farm in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He was faculty at Northern Essex Community College where he taught business and advanced mathematics and he holds an MBA from Bentley University.

Funding for this Direct Market Education series was made possible by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service through Grant Agreement No. 16FMPPMA0047. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the USDA