Why Jacksonville Farmers Should Use Online Marketing

 

farming in jacksonville, FL

 

Driving through the lush green of Jacksonville I see all types of farms from orange groves, lemon groves, grapes for wine, and farther south is the famous horse farms. How do all these different types of farms sell their product? Most sell directly to a grocery store chain in a wholesale fashion, but what if they sold directly to the consumer? Do they know their profit would increase almost ten fold? How can a Jacksonville farm start online marketing and what types of online marketing are there?

 

Seven Types of Online Marketing

 

As of 2020 there are 7 types of online marketing that a Florida Farm could take advantage of.

 

  1. Email Marketing
  2. Social Media Marketing
  3. Content Marketing
  4. Influencer Marketing
  5. Affiliate Marketing
  6. Paid Advertising (PPC)
  7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

 

email marketing

  1. Email Marketing

 

Email marketing is the first strategy we go over because in this day and age most Jacksonville farmers have an email address and understand how email works. Email marketing is the strategy of using email to send marketing materials or promotional email to new and existing customers. A lot of people don’t care for email marketing because a few spammers over the years having given email marketing a bad name, but email marketing is powerful. The return on email marketing has a return of 120 percent that is more than 4 times higher than any other type of online marketing. Most email marketers use an email capture on their website. They simply say for your email address you can get 10% of your next order. Then once they have the email address they will send follow up emails to sales they’re having or a new product that just went online. You see how powerful this can be?

 

social media marketing

  1. Social Media Marketing

 

Social media marketing for a farmer simply means using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to sell your products. You can either do organic which is free or use their paid version.

 

With organic social media marketing this usually only works if you have a well established and trusted brand. If you’re just starting out, I would suggest using paid traffic. If you have an established brand you can use your email marketing contacts to build a following and use your social media to launch your products or do promotional postings.

 

Paid social media marketing is pretty much the same as organic, but you pay for it. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram will put your promotional postings in front of consumers who most likely would be interested in your farm products.

 

content marketing for jacksonville farmers

  1. Content Marketing

 

If you like to write or make videos then content marketing is a great way to promote your Jacksonville, FL farm and your brand. The point of content marketing is to consistently produce and distribute great content. You can easily create a blog on WordPress or Blogger and attach it to your website where you post not self-promoting but really great articles within your niche. If you’re a Jacksonville horse farmer you might write an article titled, “How to buy a great horse,” or if you own a vineyard an article you might post would be, “7 ways to know if you bought a great wine.” Same goes with videos that you post on YouTube. Of course you always link back to your website and your brand so that the people that read the article or watch the video can click the link to your website and buy your products.

 

influencer marketing for farming

  1. Influencer Marketing

 

This is a form of marketing I’ve not done, but I know many that have had amazing success with it. An influencer can be a celebrity but the actual definition is someone who has a huge following on social media. You simply contact them and pay them to do a post promoting your product. It can be as cheap as $50 a post, but on average it goes between $130 to $260 a post.

 

jacksonville farming affiliate marketing

  1. Affiliate Marketing

 

Affiliate marketing or referral marketing is finding online marketers to sell your Jacksonville farming products. You can create an ad or a link that a marketer will put on their website(s) that will bring traffic directly to you. If they buy something from you, then you pay a commission to the marketer whose link they followed.

 

Google Adwords for Jacksonville

  1. Paid Advertising (PPC)

 

The leading PPC is of course Google Adwords. Billions go to Google every year from this revenue telling you it works. Of course you can do PPC on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook but we will keep this geared toward Google Adwords. With Google Adwords you bid on your keywords. The higher you’re willing to pay the higher your ad will be in the search results. So if you want to sell more orange juice because you own a Jacksonville Orange tree farm you can pay Google to rank on page 1 for “Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice,” and people will click your ad and go directly to your orange juice page on your website. The great thing about paid advertising is it’s targeted traffic. With the above example it’s people looking for fresh, squeezed orange juice, so the conversion rate and ROI is much higher than other forms of online advertising.

 

SEO Services

 

  1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

 

This is my favorite type of online marketing for Jacksonville farms. Why? It works the same way as paid advertising – with targeted traffic, but significantly cheaper. Jacksonville SEO is the simple process of optimizing a farmer’s website and all their content so that it ranks higher in the search results on search engines such Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

 

There are two types of SEO – on-page and off-page.

 

On-page SEO – You would want to focus on your Jacksonville farming website’s speed and how responsive is it? You would make sure your title tags are correct with the keywords you want to rank for, and that your site links out to high Domain Authority websites.

 

Off-page SEO – The basic way of understanding off-page is what it takes to rank your website outside of your website. This would include your branded social media and links to your website through social media posts. However, the largest portion of off-page is backlinking. If other websites link to your website this shows search engines that your website has valuable content and the people using the search engine should see your farming site if they’re looking for anything related to your type of farming.

 

This is a basic overview of how a farm in Jacksonville, Florida could get started in online marketing. They might try a few or all of the different types of marketing; however, they should at least do a couple.

 

Good Luck!!