Jenny (00:29)
If your marketing starts when flowers are blooming, your season will probably always feel stressful and unpredictable. if you've ever hit spring feeling behind on sales or scrambling for customers or unsure if you planted the right amount and you're not sure if you're going to be able to even sell it, this episode is for you because today I'm walking through how to use winter.
to build a simple strategic marketing plan that creates demand even before your first STEM is cut.
And in case we haven't met, welcome back to the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. I'm Jenny and my mission is to help small scale flower farmers build wildly profitable and sustainable businesses. So let's dive into it.
Now winter is when your most profitable customers are made, even though you are not technically selling flowers yet. And if you're somebody who sells winter flowers, obviously just take this information and flip-flop it. Whatever your down season is out of the season, we need to make use of that time. We need to reframe winter as demand building season, not just downtime. And of course we need some downtime too, but.
Most farmers mentally check out of marketing in the winter time because it doesn't feel urgent and you're probably feeling a little burnt out from the season and you want to take it easy and you've got crop planning to do and all that other stuff. And I get that, but urgency is really important to start building now, building your marketing machine now, because quite frankly, there's just not enough time.
during the growing season for most of us flower farmers. Now, if you're somebody who has a big team and you have a marketing assistant or something like that, sure, of course you have some more time with your team during the season, but that's not the case for most people listening to this. And I just think that winter is such a great opportunity to just get like curled up in front of the Wood Star Ove and write your content and do your marketing plan for the winter and get the majority like the
bulk of that work and that strategy and just like thinking and execution out of the way before the busy season comes. And this is important because I think a lot of flower farmers kind of market sporadically when like when they get time, they post on social media and send out emails, but then when they get busy, they don't. so their marketing becomes really inconsistent. And it's true that demand is not created and just one social media post or email.
It's really created through repetition over time. So decide now winter is for warming, you know, not maybe like right out selling, but kind of building that engine before the season comes. So you don't necessarily need to make sales in winter if you can great, but it's more about like building expectation, keeping some touch points with your customers and getting ready.
to keep marketing consistently throughout the season, even when things get really, really busy. We wanna make sure we build that familiarity, that trust and anticipation to shorten buying decisions during the main season, and we can do all that now. So kind of how I do my marketing in the wintertime is, well, exactly what I just said. I try to do as much as possible in the wintertime.
So I really have to think about it that much during the rest of the season, because I have so many other things going on. And so the first thing that I do is I pre-plan a seasonal marketing calendar. And I just start very simply. I just kind of look at my whole season by the month and I plan each month by a specific theme. So I assign a theme to each month of the season. So most farmers kind of like,
post randomly and hope that it works, but having a strategy beats spontaneity every single time. And when you plan ahead, like that's all it takes to have a strategy is to literally just plan ahead a little bit instead of being reactive. Because random marketing really leads to inconsistent messaging, audience confusion. And when you have this sort of themed calendar, it reduces a lot of your decision fatigue around what you're going to say.
and it keeps your content, your marketing content aligned with your buyer's journey. I also think themes just, they really help me think more about like what's in season, what I'm selling, what I'm promoting, and it allows you to repeat messages in different ways without feeling repetitive. Like I think that every farm has their themes in their marketing.
You may have heard this called like content pillars before. So yours might be like, I'm just gonna name some random ideas that come to mind.
cut flower care education, flower seasonality education, β videos about flower ranging specific types of flowers, or like how to use local flowers to make your everyday more positive and happier, how to bring more joy into your life with flowers. Like those could be different themes that you sort of talk about in your marketing, and it all revolves around your messaging directed at your ideal customer avatar. And so I don't wanna get off.
too off topic here,
just starting with those themes so you can convey those content pillars and there's messages and over without saying the same exact thing over and over. Because customers need to hear something multiple times before it clicks and this planning can kind of support that. So here's what I do with my monthly marketing themes. I literally just start in January, go all the way through every month. So in January my theme is.
Winter farming education. So it basically just show like behind the scenes, like photos of vernunculus in the high tunnels would snow all around. I talk about how we grow spring flowers. A lot of people are really interested in this because they just have no idea that we literally plant flowers in the fall, take care of them all winter so they can have really beautiful spring flowers. So it's interesting. It educates them. It connects us to them. And it also builds anticipation for spring.
And give them something positive to think about during the dead of winter when it is just absolutely dark and cold and miserable outside. And then February is kind of more of the same, but I have some more like storytelling based content for like connection and trust building and edgy and engagement. And then in March, I start announcing our availability and build anticipation, have a big push for spring CSA sales this time of year.
And then in April, we start talking about how we are actively selling flowers. We talk about what's in season, specifically talking about how we force winter tulips, which we really don't do that much of anymore. Our early season flowers like anemones and ranunculus. And then in May, we do a lot of ranunculus-based education. In June, we do a lot of peony-based education. And so as you can see, we're putting these themes.
into each month based on like what's in season, what we're selling, what we're promoting, or just generally what's happening on the farm. But we're always tying it back to value for my customer. That's a really important point I want you to take away from this. So basically you just have a theme and all of your marketing is aligned with that theme. β Emails, posts, stories, promotions, it's all aligned.
β before I go any further, I just want to say like, you do not have to do your marketing like this. This is just how I do it and how I have found it to be organized and successful. β and generally like makes my brain hurt less by following this kind of framework. So then what I do next during the winter time to make the rest of the season, just so much easier is I take those themes and I translate them into my actual marketing content.
And I'm doing this in the dead of winter way before the season starts because marketing is hardest when you're tired, which is exactly when most people try to do it during the busy season when you're already harvesting and transplanting and seeding and weeding and selling and doing all the things. And it's, it's just really important because that in season marketing competes with all the stuff that you need to do around the farm and physical exhaustion.
And a lot of times mental exhaustion too, which is a part of it. But you can write your email newsletters and your social media posts or your whatever else you do for your marketing. You can plan all of that and do all of that ahead of time. And when you do that, consistency becomes automatic, which is so important. So I love to batch write things. I just kind of sit down and get into that like writing.
mode. Usually I try to get a little inspired to write all that kind of stuff and I just write months, sometimes like whole years of stuff at the same time, like in the same sitting on the same day or same couple of days. And I really like to work that way because I find I'm way more productive if I just hyper focus on one specific thing at a time. It really helps me get into the flow of creating. I eliminate all their distractions.
And I feel like it can be super productive that way as well. So you might want to experiment with sort of batch creating in that sort of manner. I just focus on a simple weekly email. And honestly, a lot of times we kind of just send out bi-weekly emails, but it kind of depends on the year and our whole marketing strategy. But whatever you do, if you do bi-weekly, monthly emails, whatever it is, just make sure you have a consistent schedule.
Because that's going to build trust faster than just like sporadic social media posts and emails going out. Um, I really would love it if you focused on email marketing. It is so, it is just the best. is the highest converting channel that most farmers under use. So the other day I sat down and I wrote pretty much every single email newsletter for 2026 in one sitting.
It sounds crazy, but I did it all in like four hours, basically. So this is what I do. I have a framework that I built for my email newsletters, and this is actually somewhat relatively new for me, but pretty much every email I write follows the same framework where we have first, just an opening line or a hook that kind of like grabs people's attention or gives value or, β generate some kind of interest. And then after that, there is, β
a story or some kind of value. So now moving into 2026, a lot of my email newsletters are story-based. I think that connection and authenticity in my email newsletters on a personal level is more important with my local flower customers more than ever. So I'm really leading with that connection and engagement through storytelling in my newsletters.
but I always tie it back to some sort of like lesson or point for them, whether that is, you know, a little cut flower care hint or education about the kind of flower that's in season, or I'll attach a video on how to arrange a certain kind of flower. It could really be anything, but I always make sure it is a value-based email that they're getting something positive out of. And sometimes that's education and sometimes that's a tutorial.
And sometimes it's as simple as a lesson learned from the farm or like a key takeaway about life that I learned from the farm that week that my customers can also take away from it. But it's always value-based. And so after that portion of the email, I always have a little sign off, like something like, I'm so grateful for you. Thanks for supporting the farm, Jenny. But then in the PS section, we basically have a call to action. This is where we.
invite them or ask them to do some kind of prompt. We want them to take some action after reading that email. So this depends on what's going on during that week or that month. So the call to action can either have like an invitation to come out and see us at the farmers market. And then we'll just have a few bullet points of like what's in season or what we're selling that week at the farmers market. Or it might be a blurb telling them to go sign up for the CSA.
Or it could even just be a reply to this email and let me know what you think about X, Y, and Z. It could just purely be an engagement call to action where we just want them to talk to us or tell us their favorite thing or their favorite flower or whatever. But we always are trying to have some sort of call to action in the PS statement of those emails. And the reason why we put them in the PS statement is because that is one of the most read areas.
of email newsletters and so we want them to see that information. So that's why that goes there. So like I said, it took me probably about four hours to write almost all of my email newsletters for 2026. And so I'm basically telling you my whole system here, which is such a hack, β because it's taken me like 10 years to work this out. β
I wish somebody had just told me to do exactly this, like 10 years ago. And, know, again, my process, you probably are going to do things differently. And I'm a little embarrassed to admit it took me a decade to work out this framework, but, β you know, I basically sat down after I looked at all the themes for each month and I took some newsletters from last year and basically just repurpose them. So it'll be the same exact information, the same value, but I'll just tweak it a little bit because honestly, a lot of my.
email, newsletter, subscribers probably won't remember that information from last year, or they need to be reminded of it. I find that most people need to be reminded more than they need to be taught. Yeah, like that's so true. I'm gonna say it again. Most people need to be reminded more than they need to be taught. So a lot of times we think that we are being annoying or being repetitive, but the thing is that...
Most people are not like studying us. They're not reading every single piece of marketing content we put out there. Chances are they're not even seeing it most of the time. And so we have to be really creative in saying the same messages over and over again in different ways so they can be reminded and inspired.
but basically giving them the same value in some different messages. So yeah, we'll tweak a lot of old email newsletters, but then I also wrote a lot of new ones, and I used to have a really hard time coming up with email newsletter content, β but I just kind of thought about what happened on the farm last year.
what's going to happen on the farm this year that's going to be cool and exciting and share it with my audience with a real story about the farm, but always making sure that we tie it back to some sort of value for them. And like I said, I used to really struggle with this because I wanted that email newsletter to just be super, super valuable for my customer. I wanted them to get so much value out of it when they opened it
And I wanted to make sure that it was information that they wanted to read and that they were really interested in about. And so I, I have focused a lot of my email newsletters on the past on like facts and value and education. But honestly, what I have found over the years is that so many of my local flower farm customers, they just want to feel connected to us, to the business, to me, to my family and to my farm.
They really want that real personal connection with a local business. And the best way for me to do that at this point is to do that through my email and through storytelling in my email and have a very connection based email newsletter. So that's what I'm doing now. So this is always evolving for me. Like I feel like my email newsletters used to be a lot more story based, then they kind of got more like education and fact based. And now I'm
swinging back to really doing a lot more of these storytelling and connection based emails. And I'm really excited to see where it goes in the future. β I know when I send out story based emails, people will come up to us at the farmer's market and they'll be like, I loved reading that story about your cows getting out and eating all of your yarrow or your piglets getting out and digging up that whole bed of Lysianthus and.
Now that I think about it, a lot of my stories come from troublemaker animals on the farm, but it's very entertaining. Like that stuff is entertaining for them. And that's what makes it different from just like a business sending them a promotional email. You know what I mean? They get a lot of value out of that. So, I can schedule all of these emails ahead of time in my email marketing software. So I can literally write all of my email newsletters.
in the winter, schedule them all to be sent out throughout the season and not have to worry about it. So this is actually what I do, but I don't just kind of hit schedule and then forget about it completely.
I have it in my calendar to just go in before each one is sent out, reread them, just like one quick glance over to make sure I'm not like missing anything or said anything I didn't mean to say. And then I just update the CTA or the call to action with the availability from week to week. So for example, I will write my emails and newsletter for like, you know, August 15th now in January. And then on August.
10th, I'll probably go into my email marketing software, bring that email up and reread it. And then at the call to action, I'll make sure it says like this week at market, we're bringing, you know, Dahlia's, Zinnia's, Lysianthus and Eucalyptus or whatever it is, because I don't know exactly what I'm gonna have every single week of the season now in January, but I can just plug that in that week and schedule it to send on whatever day I want.
And so that takes less than five minutes every single week during the season to do my email marketing. And I'm actually hoping to delegate that to a team member this year. So I won't really have to think about it at all. So we'll see what happens with that, which I hope it works out, which speaking of we're hiring. If any of you out there listening to this are experienced flower farmers, or you know, an experienced flower farmer who wants to earn
honestly probably more than you can running your own business without the stress of being a business owner. Like you can come and work for me and earn a steady paycheck. Go to trademarksflowers.com forward slash careers to apply. We are hiring a farm manager position. And if you could help me find the right person for that, I would love to talk to them. But anyways, from this email marketing process,
I can do the bulk of the work in the winter. It takes me five minutes a week or every other week during the season. And it just makes it so easy to be consistent. So for you to do this, just sit down and write a few emails in the winter time. Like I do all of them for pretty much the whole season. But maybe if you just do like the next six months or something and just start with something that you can actually accomplish. If writing 52 emails,
for the whole entire year feels really daunting and crazy, just cut it in half, decide to do bi-weekly. And then you have only 24 to write for the whole month or wait, it's more than 24. Apparently I can't do math today, but you know, and then if you just want to send one a month, if you just want to start with that, it's only 12 emails that you have to write. Write them based on education, behind the scenes stuff, seasonal updates, some soft sales nudges. You could do
Obviously a few that are mainly focused on sales. Of course we do that too. But whatever your ideal customer wants to know about and hear about, and if you're not sure, ask them. And if you're really not sure, just start with what I've been doing and think of stories of the farm and tie it back to some value for your customer. Which brings me kind of to my next and last point that I wanna talk about today is...
making sure that you create and schedule a simple weekly marketing rhythm. Like I keep saying throughout this episode, it's important for your marketing to be consistent. Consistency really matters. Marketing doesn't fail because it's complicated. It fails because it's inconsistent. And during the growing season, we were making so many decisions and we have so much going on. Decision fatigue can really kill your momentum.
but having a simple, repeatable rhythm really helps remove that resistance and makes it so you can execute this a lot easier. I'm always a big believer that small study actions outperform bursts of effort and your audience does not need perfection. It does not have to be perfect. They need presence. And the more you do this, the more practice you get with it, the more feedback you get, the more you reiterate and make changes, the better you're going to be at it.
And so you can realistically market your business in like an hour a week if you just decide exactly what you're gonna do ahead of the season and pre-write a bunch of your content so you can just grab things during the busy season and you don't have to think about it so much.
So your marketing rhythm could just be really simple, like one email per week or bi-weekly, three to five social media posts, maybe five reach outs or contacts per week if you're like selling to, I don't know, like florists or buyers or grocery stores or wholesale or anything like that. You know, just pick something that is repeatable and simple and something that you can actually execute every single week or, you know,
Just make sure it's something that is realistic for you to actually execute every single week. And you know, if you want to do more in the future, awesome, but just get one simple schedule down at first. So you can actually execute before you start adding on more and more. And this is so important. Like marketing should be the number one priority for most flower farm business owners. And the problem is you get caught up and swept into all these urgent things that need to happen, like seeding and transplanting and harvesting.
The marketing always gets pushed to the last thing in the priority list, even though it should be number one. So just think ahead what it's going to be in season. And like I just said, you could pre-write all of your email newsletters, but you can also do this with like social media stuff too. You can pre-write a ton of this stuff ahead of time and schedule it.
Like I know in May, I'm going to have a ton of ranunculus and anemones. So I can write social media posts using pictures from last year about anemones and ranunculus. I know in June, I'm going to be drowning in peonies. So I will use a bunch of pictures from last year and write a whole bunch of stuff about peonies. Like I know in August, I'm going to be drowning in Lysianthus. So I'm going to post a bunch of content about Lysianthus.
It's not that hard. You don't have to overthink it, right? And you know, if your season is different than mine or your customers are different from mine, just think about what's happening and cater that information to your customers. You know, and we use for social media, just another tip. We use a scheduler for that and highly recommend. There is a cost to it, but for me, it is so worth it.
to pay the monthly fee to be able to pre-schedule this stuff ahead of time instead of like reactively trying to put out social media posts during the season. It's so, so worth it. There's a bunch of social media like scheduler softwares out there. Like there's planable, plan-o-ly, later.com, a bunch of them out there. Highly, highly recommend. So for this one, just create a simple weekly marketing rhythm. Make sure you write it down and schedule it.
Like for me, it's one email per week, three to five social media posts and reach outs to our farmers market customers. so yours could be that simple as well. β it could be totally different from that. Just make sure you put in a system that is repeatable and you're able to execute it. So altogether, let's recap. If you want a profitable flower farming season, winter, like right now is where it really starts.
So I want you to reframe winter as a demand building season, like getting all the things done that you're not gonna have time for during the busy season, getting that done. And you can follow this framework if you want. Start by planning your marketing by theme for every month of the year. Write and schedule your emails or your social content or whatever it is that you do for your marketing ahead of time and stick to a simply weekly rhythm that you can actually execute.
and be consistent with. When you do this and when marketing is planned early, selling can feel calm. And calm selling is profitable selling. Like there's no need to be like rushing around and be like, my gosh, Mother's Day is next week. We have to put all these social posts together and emails and all this stuff. Like, trust me, I've been there and there is a better way. And predictable marketing creates predictable income.
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Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. Just a reminder that new episodes are published every single Monday. So I will see you next week. Same time, same place. Take care.
