 Lori Netherow with Buckeye Valley Beef and today I'm going to talk to you all a little bit about marketing project that we took on for our SAIR grant and I'll even introduce to you if you're not familiar with the SAIR grant a little bit about what it is and how to apply yourself if you find interest in this topic. So we're going to go through a little bit about who Buckeye Valley Beef is, our North Central SAIR grant in the process to apply the study that we got our funding for, the findings of our study, the lessons that we learned, and then what you can do in your individual operations or at your family homesteads to implement some of the strategies that we talk about today. So as I mentioned, I'm with Buckeye Valley Beef and Buckeye Valley Beef is an agricultural cooperative that Ohio's Extension Office helped us create back in 2016. One of our members had an idea to collaborate with other small farms so that we can provide a year-long product to customers instead of just you know once a year or a couple times a year and that maybe we can even out be a resource to larger operations like restaurants and grocery stores. We do provide our beef to some local butcher shops. We've collaborated with some restaurants including one in Columbus and so I'm excited about what the future holds for the cooperative. And here is a short introductory video that we had created for our co-op to give you a better idea of who we are. Buckeye Valley Beef was started in 2016 by a few local farmers here in southern Ohio. We wanted to find a way to sustain our living on the farm as well as provide a product which we thought was as a high quality to consumers. The owners of Parish's family about forming a cooperative is a way to provide a consistent product year-round and the only way that we can do that is together. We feel like we have a great product that stands out because we're taking those core values that our parents and grandparents taught us and trying to perfect them to adapt to today's food market. One way we're able to adapt to today's food market is through direct marketing which allows us to connect with each customer and build relationship. Our dream of Buckeye Valley Beef is to not only grow our individual operations but to grow the cooperative in a way that strengthens our local food community. So as I mentioned we are an agricultural cooperative and you know as with any business venture a cooperative doesn't come with any shortfallings. We have minimal working capital because most of the money that we make in the cooperative goes back to the farmers. We take a small fee from each of the cattle sold to pay for advertising costs working things like supplies and shipping, utilities, any of those types of things. So we don't have a whole lot of money to waste on anything and when we first started nobody knew who we were and we didn't know how to get our name out there so we wanted to find what was most productive for small farms and cooperatives and as you'll find if you start doing research in this area you won't see a lot of research done by small operations and small family farms or agricultural cooperatives because there's just not a lot of us. So we wanted to look into what advertising methods worked for our types of businesses. You know we're different than you know a carpet outlet or a Walmart McDonald's. We may not work the same way or attract customers in the same manner so we wanted to do an experiment and find out what works so that going forward we can make sure that our very limited resources are put to good use and that was the point of this grant proposal that we submitted to North Central Sare. And I see a comment about the video. One of the things that's outside of the scope of this presentation but one of the things we've also learned since the implementation of this grant is that video advertising, YouTube and those types of outlets are another great resource and with the invention of TikTok now to reach out to or building a customer base. Maybe somebody else can do a Sare grant to look into that. So the North Central Sare grant was actually presented to us by one of the South Center members for Ohio Extension and they had mentioned that there was a grant process out there that that gives money to farmers and ranchers who are looking to do research and education on sustainable agricultural products and so one of the areas that you can research in is marketing and that's the area that we chose to go and we are a group so we went for the grant that's up to 27,000 but if you're an individual operation you can apply for up to 9,000 or a team of two is 18 and that data may be a little different this year that was taken from the 2021 information so it may increase each year when you go to check it out just looked into that. They fund about 50 projects a year and I will tell you this was not our first attempt. We applied the previous year before we were actually accepted and we went through the peer review process and took their notes seriously and then we revamped our proposal the following year and that's when we were awarded the grant and the timeline they do a call for proposals in August and by early December the proposals are due and by February they've made their decision and in the spring you can start your projects and receive funding for those projects and then this was a two-year project for us so we got some money up front to start the project and then as we continued forward and submitted progress reports we continued to receive more funds and then at the end a reimbursement so you know think about those things if you're interested or if you have an idea yourself they welcome any and all types of research or educational proposals so look into their website to get more information so our funded grant project like I have mentioned is to look at advertising channels for small family farms or agricultural cooperatives and we introduced four advertising methods we did bill boards radio ads social media and google ads and as we get to those slides I'll talk to you a little bit about why we chose those methods and then we measured the impact that those advertising methods had on our sales our customer reach and our self-reported exposure and then we share the information with you all so here's the timeline that we have so we started off with google ads and we did that from April to June of 2019 and then we wanted a break between each implementation so that we could account for any lagging sales that might be attributed to a previous implementation so we took a break in june in July we reset accounted for any lingering sales and then collected baseline data for august and then in august we implemented our billboard display until october took a break in november reset and you know created or gathered our baseline data and then in december we did our facebook ads up until march and as you'll see from march of 2020 to june of 2020 we started the pandemic so um some of that data may be a little skewed in terms of covid-19 um impacting our sales growth but we also will talk a little bit about why we think that might be a perfect natural experiment for us and then in april we implemented radio advertisements so google ads we chose google ads because we've been to prior trainings we went to the beef 509 course at ohio state university and one of the beef checkoff members that does their marketing there talked about how they've kind of drifted a little bit away from facebook advertisements to more youtube and google ads instead of you know social media we thought that was interesting because it seems like a lot of small businesses focus a lot on their social media accounts making sure that they've got a public image out there so that people see them and know who they are uh so we also hadn't really worked with google ads much we did a little bit and it did seem to have an impact on our sales so we decided why not throw that in there and see if we can compare contrast the two advertising methods so we have a budget of 3200 dollars approximately um and if you're not familiar with google ads we weren't we there are two types uh and they're there may be more now but when we did our google ad campaign there were two types there's display advertisements which are those that pop up on your newsfeed when you're scrolling through or if you're on a blog and you see advertising on the side of it those are display ads and they're there they're created from the the cash from your computer um looking at prior browsing history things that might interest you so let's say I am on a food blog you're going to see advertisements for like Hello Fresh or those types of companies that are targeting people who are foodies and then there are search campaigns which are the campaigns that we actually did and that's when you're bidding on keywords for um your opportunity to pull up at the top of the list on google so let's say you get on google and you type in local beef near me that is um keywords that people are bidding for and if you are at the top of that list if you have a high bid you're at the top of the list on google and people will find you when they type that in so we used two search campaigns we targeted our small bundles and then our direct to door deliveries and then the other we used to target our bulk beef sales so if you implemented these you just kind of look at what it is that you're trying to sell to the customer and maybe do a search campaign for each individual type product so each month that we did this we would reevaluate and adjust our keywords almost always you have to do this because nobody unless you're an expert have a degree in marketing and even then I still don't think you get it right the first time around get your words right at first we we talk about our product in a more professional we use more professional terminology whereas our customers may not so you know we might search for beef shares or um I'm not even sure what else to say for that piece but our customers will search like whole cow for sale um or you know you might be searching for cars for sale but your uh you salesman would think that you're searching for you know more specific terminology for that so you might need to readjust your your words that you're targeting to match what your customer is actually using and we kind of listened when we went to our we had craft shows that we would have our product at for sampling to customers and we would listen to the words that our customers were using to describe our product and use that to figure out what types of wording we would need to to bid on on google and then we used google analytics to track the progress and it's a beast in and of itself and it took a lot of time for us to learn how to use both google ads and google analytics so our google ad results were not like we'd hoped them to be this is our first advertising method we were extremely excited to get started and then we looked at our data and we had 15 customers self report exposure to the google ads so not a whole lot we had um about $4,800 in sales attributed to those customers which is a 50 return on investment um you know it's not horrible but it's not what we had hoped when it it takes us a lot to get the $3,700 that we invested to you know only return 50% to us so we weren't we weren't very excited about those results and and also all the time that we had to put in to get those results so that was our first implementation so we reset we gathered our new baseline data and then we went about doing billboard displays and the reason we chose those is because we had actually done yard signs prior to this and we had them in various customers yards any time somebody bought from us we'd asked them if they wanted to put a yard sign in their in their yard and it works for some types of companies you have black top companies ripping companies you know house clean companies they utilize those yard signs and and they work but do it does it work for an agricultural based company and does it work on a large scale we didn't know so we wanted to test this out and see how it would work for us um we chose Lamar companies because it's a big advertising billboard company out here in our area in Cincinnati and they were great to work with they helped us to design this billboard we're farmers we're not marketing gurus so we are you know graphic design artists we we were not able to do this on our own so they were able to do this for us and we had a general idea of where we wanted to put our billboard but we weren't confident and so they had their marketing experts look at our data and then and kind of solidify for us where it needed to be placed so we ultimately decided to put our billboard above a major artery highway in Loveland, Ohio which was a good area for us because it targeted a lot of the people who are kind of already starting to hear about Bucca Valley beef and buy from us so we had a six thousand dollar budget and prior to our proposal to get this grant we looked into all of these advertising methods and kind of looked at how much money did we realistically need for each of these I would have um severely underestimated the amount of money we needed for a billboard prior to doing research on how much they cost um this was one billboard um and it was six thousand dollars so a very expensive advertising method but if it works it works so and it wasn't our most expensive advertising method that we used in this in this grant and we also used our order form to track self exposure to the billboard because it's not really something that's easily trackable other than asking the customer if they could tell us where they heard about us so that's the method that we used to track we also did use Google analytics for this type of method to see if there was any increase in website traffic to from the Loveland area and there was so that was that was nice to see but can we convert those website traffic people to sales that was the question so um when we finished our three month period of time we had no customers self-report exposure to our billboard advertisement and so that was a big disappointment but after COVID-19 hit we did have four more orders that were placed and they did select billboard as the method that in which they heard about us and so we were able to eventually attribute 3,700 in sales to our billboard advertisement which was still a negative 37 percent return on investment so if you ask me our billboard advertisement was the worst method of before that we implemented but there are other other areas that you can look at for billboard advertisement and we'll talk about that towards the end of the presentation so we took a month break and we reset and we gathered our baseline data and then we implemented our Facebook ads now this is an area that we had used for advertisement prior to our implementation of the Sarah Grant we would play around with the boosted posts because you can add a dollar or two or five here and there and see how it worked and we did notice the traffic to our post increased and then the sales would often increase around those times so we attributed this to a smaller budget because we didn't need a whole lot to make this work and also we wanted to look at it from a perspective of how much would we realistically use if we were doing this without any kind of grant funding and we have some teachers that are in our cooperative so they're very organized and they helped us create a 12 week timeline for our posts which I highly recommend if you're going to use social media as a means to advertise to have a plan in place maybe once a month sit down write out a calendar of ideas on what you're going to talk about this month so that your posts kind of tell a story and in all aspects of your business are highlighted for the customer to get to know you again we used Google analytics to track our progress once you learn that beast it is so helpful and so many ways to kind of look at what your customers are doing when they get to your website and and tracking sale progress so it was helpful for us to learn how to use that and then we also used our order form to track self reported exposure so at the end of the day we had 78 customers self report exposure to our Facebook posts and they attributed to 66,000 in sales for us which is a 10,900 return on investment which we were flabbergasted by because as I mentioned previously they had some marketing experts had decided that their companies were going to kind of stray away from Facebook advertising and go towards other means and this worked fantastic for us so it's one of the few advertising methods that we studied that we still implement on a daily basis and then finally radio ads so we chose radio ads because we have a local radio company out here C103 I don't know if anybody on the call is from southwest Ohio but we have advertised periodically on the radio company at local games, football or baseball or basketball games and we had some success with that so we wanted to look at it from a larger scale and we took a big risk with this one because the amount of money that we had to put towards this ad or towards this marketing piece was quite a lot especially for a small farm and so $14,000 is nothing to sneeze at when you've got a small agricultural business that you're trying to get off the ground we did some good little hard look at our data and our customer base and we decided that NPR was the best place for us to advertise on we looked at 700 WLW and 105 and several others and NPR had similar demographics to us we reached out to all these companies got budgets from each of them and then we also they will also provide you with a customer demographic that tends to listen to their their radio station and then we compared it to ours to see which was the best fit it again we're not marketing experts so we were very appreciative when NPR said that they would create our 22nd ad for us and they use their own required language we approved it and then we were on our way we had 22 slots per week where the customer would hear our name over and over again and we had 348 slots in total now if you are listening closely at the beginning of the presentation you heard that our radio ads happened during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and so we are aware that our data could be skewed from that but we also believe that COVID-19 was a great natural experiment because our our experiment was to see what advertising methods brought in the most amount of customers but COVID-19 might have been the reason that the customer bought but we they heard about us somehow or another and then when they were forced to buy they reached out to us and then we were able to capture very quickly the advertising method in which they heard about us from so if you had to force all of your customers or potential customers out there to buy from you all at once so that you could capture the best mechanism to reach out to them COVID-19 did that for us so we had 30 customers self-report exposure to the radio ads which attributed to 27,000 in sales and that was an 85 percent return on investment so for a marketing advertising method that cost so much up front we were able to bring that money back in and then some so you know maybe if later down the road as your companies get a little bigger you might look into doing something like this NPR told us we were not the first company that was associated with agriculture that used them and we they have several that do it on a yearly basis so something to look into for your individual operations so here is a summary snapshot of what I've talked to you about so far and as you can see Facebook was our most successful implementation followed by radio and then Google ads and then billboard but I did want to mention some other notable findings at the bottom of the page you're going to see that 153 of our customers during the time that we asked for self-reported exposure said that word of mouth was how they heard about us or through a Google search both of those things can only occur if you have brand awareness with your customers and where did they get that brand awareness well we may not know for certain on the word of mouth or the Google search recipients that that marked those on their order form but I can tell you that these were the only four advertising methods that we were utilizing during this time period so those can also be attributed in some fashion to one of the four implementations that have been previously discussed and it also goes to show that although we captured 101,000 in sales from our our marketing advertisements we continued to capture twice that amount or three times that amount later down the road because those customers then told their aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers about us and then we built our database so marketing is not an area that you should take for granted in your businesses because it's extremely important to the success of your company and building brand awareness so for those of you on the call who are more visual here is a visual aid for you to kind of illustrate the areas that have the most impact on our sales all right so the part that you're here for the lessons learned from our study and then what can I do for you so as I've mentioned and as you might have been able to tell our findings surprised us we had been told that Google ads was the way of the future and for us it was not and it was very difficult for us to navigate and we feel like the only way for us to maybe gotten better results is if we had hired somebody who is familiar with this type of advertisement and let's be honest most of us don't have the working capital to pay somebody to come in and do that for us so it's just not practical for our business and then bill boards was also not profitable it was the only one that we lost money on and we were disappointed in that but we weren't surprised we kind of thought that would be the least effective of the four advertising methods now some future studies if any of you on a call want to take on your own marketing grant proposal could reevaluate brand recognition by maybe placing several billboards in a targeted area and kind of infiltrate the area with your name to see if that has any different effects and then Facebook was very profitable to us that surprised us as we mentioned because we weren't expecting to get results that we got given the advice we'd received and then our broadcast media advertisements was also surprisingly effective for us especially with the amount of money that's needed up front to to do this so looking forward from our study we recognize our data might be skewed from COVID-19 and that maybe one of you ambitious folks on the call might be interested in taking on your own marketing Sarah Grant to try and replicate our findings so we can make sure that everybody else out there can trust that the data that we we received from our product project is valid and reliable like I mentioned COVID-19 was a beautiful natural experiment for us because it forced people to buy during the end of our project and we were able to capture those sales and then brand recognition word of mouth and Google search engine optimization is very important if you've never heard of Google SEOs before I highly recommend that you look into them it's out of the scope of this project although I can answer questions for you towards the end if you have any but it's extremely important for your customers to be able to find you when they need you and so building brand awareness and word of mouth and having good SEOs can do that for you so your next steps we highly recommend that if you don't already have one that you create a website we use the Wix.com to do that and it's very user-friendly we have no marketing or IT backgrounds and we were able to do that ourselves and a very cost-effective if I remember correctly it's about $300 a year so extremely cost-effective I also worked with Ohio South Centers and they created a video to the public on different advertising or different websites that people use so you could look for that information out there some people use Shopify and other types of website WordPress those types of things but Wix was worked for us the other thing that we recommend is that you create a business page and such as Google being and Yahoo you just go to like my Google business and set up your profile that's what you use when you go and you search Kroger uptown to see when their hours are that is the Google page that they've created somebody maintains so make sure you set one up for your own business because people rely on that to know how to call you how to get your website to see pictures and reviews of your business so make sure you're going to all those popular search engines and creating that I took a class on my Google business and didn't realize how important it was to your your business but people look at that for reviews and the more you post on it the higher you get on Google's list for when they search your company name so when we first started out if you search for Buckeye Valley beef hardly anything came up but now if you search for us we've got a couple pages worth of data that point back to our website from various newspaper or magazine articles that have wrote things on us that bring back the customer to our website my Google business also helps you with that and there's courses out there that you can take on how to utilize that the most in the most effective manner we also started a blog and the reason for that is that we want to keep traffic going to our website as much as possible it refreshes our page and and you know let's Google know that we're still present and people still want to know who we are and again it helps with your search engine optimization make sure you keep a strong social media presence this is the hardest for us because it takes the most amount of time you have to go in and think about taking and illustrating all of the things you're doing when you're outside in the rain it's you know 20 degrees out and you're in your muck boots and you're feeding the cattle you don't think about pulling your cell phone out and taking a video of what you're doing but it's important to the customers to see what you're doing and how you're doing it and keeping that transparency with them so it's the hardest for us but it's the most effective and so this study kind of helps solidify that and and make us a little bit less disgruntled when we have to go out and take videos of the work that we're doing and then use those boosted Facebook posts those are the the easiest advertising method I think to step into and the most cost effective and then as you get a little bit more comfortable with that you may transition into radio advertisements which cost a bit more money but we're still successful successful for us but start small do we have any questions I've allowed ample time and we can you know talk about anything and everything that you guys have interest in Facebook's okay so Donnie it looks like you said that somebody had told you that um LinkedIn to use LinkedIn instead of Facebook that you know people who use Facebook successfully um you know any of the social media profiles work we are a little bit older so we we went for the Facebook platform but there's also Twitter there's also YouTube there's also Instagram um LinkedIn um I haven't heard a whole lot about that in terms of like your businesses because it's more of people who are professionally networking um but you there's no harm in trying but YouTube is also a very successful area to utilize and there's a lot of successful businesses that have very strong Instagram profiles um but Facebook was the um and and also you need to utilize them the platform that your customer base is using so for us we had a lot of families um that you know came to us for their meets um and so Facebook was the most beneficial platform for us um but if you are you know trying if you have a small coffee shop and you're targeting maybe college students or um high school students or you know younger inner city folks you may look into Instagram um or Twitter one of those mechanisms might be more successful for you how often did you use your Facebook ads we or how long did they run to um we did um three posts a week that we boosted but we posted every day for 12 weeks so it was uh $600 in total so first off I want to say thank you for this presentation the the topic is very interesting and very much needed and the research methods and everything was great I really enjoyed your presentation the visual so thank you for a job well done um so I do have and I don't know if those are like questions that you can answer whether you were able to capture that in the study um I was wondering if there were any type of demographic differences in terms of where people were finding things out uh if you were able to capture that be be it like Facebook or Billboard like whether any type of demographic characteristics that was different in terms of um what type of um advertisement was capturing people's attention and another thing that I was wondering and that might be difficult to capture was how long did it take for people to reach out um based on exposure so how long must they have been exposed uh to the ad before they decide oh I've been seeing this for a few times like I want to reach out and I don't know if that's something that maybe anecdotally you may have had a conversation with a customer about well I've been seeing this and it may be after the second or third time I decided to reach out or whatever yeah um so demographically we um we didn't capture as much of that as we wish we had um looking back we probably would have a little bit um would have captured that differently but Google Analytics was also helpful in getting the demographics from the customers who um reached out in certain advertising methods but not in all of them um now we were able to talk with our customers when they would come and kind of just you know hey we heard that you heard about us through the billboard or through you know Google ads um you know tell us a little bit more about that and then when we were out and about prior to the pandemic um with the um craft shows and such where we were meeting with customers on the face to face basis um they would say hey I saw your billboard ad you know I didn't buy back then but um I keep here in your name or I keep seeing your name on the here in your name on the radio and um when I needed to buy meat the stores were low um I reached out and that was very um that was nice for us and and it took them a little while um like I said with the billboard advertisements they didn't buy during that time period when we analyzed it but later um after we finished out our our experiment so our experiment lasted for two years we were able to capture some lingering sales later down the road um that had said that they heard about us um but they were forced to buy because of the pandemic um so did that enter your question yeah I did thank you you're welcome how many members are in my cooperative and how do you meet and how often and describe how you function as a co-op group so we have four farm families currently um we have about 300 head of cattle that we push through the cooperative so about nine every two weeks go out um to customers um I think last year we finished out with a um about 750,000 in sales um so um it's it's growing each year we continue to get bigger and bigger I think the first year we had like 150,000 in sales so that tells you over a you know six year time period um how much we've grown um we are starting to look into adding additional members to our cooperatives um we were able to service all of our customers with our current farms and the number of cattle that we had on our farms but we are quickly approaching our limit um but one of the benefits to a cooperative is that you can be a small footprint so um you we have lots of small farms in our area um but service larger populations of people so if you have 10 small farms that come together to provide a product for the population of people you don't need these massive feedlots um you can have small farms that have um cattle that are um well taken care of providing for our customers um and on a consistent and reliable basis so um that was that's what works for our co-op um and we meet monthly um we have a slack chat and a um boxer chat that we you know talk about things on the daily basis when we all get time because several of us have off the farm jobs um but we we meet on a monthly basis to take care of our business um decisions did you vary your facebook posts and if so did you notice any narratives that performed best um we did so we started off talking a little bit about who we were um and then we would talk we would kind of go gravitate towards the educational piece on you know how we grind feed and how we move cattle and how we birth cattle and um you know what we feed our cattle and why um and then you know we would go into what kind of products did we have available and um those types of areas so um we didn't have anything we the videos seemed to be the most um effective on social media for us um that video that we created it was um extremely popular on our facebook um and anything even the ones that we filmed on our own iPhones um seemed to grab our customer's attention so videos were very um uh effective for us um and anytime that we talked about our products and um what what how you can like the 10 different ways to cook a steak or um five different crock pot recipes those types of things those were very um effective for us nobody else does i've got one more quick one could you go back over the um class that you took about google or or whatever that class was it told you about your pages i missed that and uh this has been super helpful by the way i'm gonna i'm working with you cut out at the end but um at the beginning you asked what class um we took to help us with google ads is that correct yeah that's right sorry i would just say thank you okay um so i had um i used linkedin learning it was it was called linda at the time um but now i think it's called linkedin learning and they have um lots of courses out there on google analytics as well as google ads um to teach myself how to do it um and then i think you can use courses r a i think they have some marketing um classes out there on on google analytics and um google ads as well but linda dot com which is now linkedin learning um is my go to for that um so uh i would definitely take advantage of that when you can and also look into your local chambers um oftentimes they have classes on marketing strategies um we do in brown county so i'd say a lot of counties in ohio probably do as well um our ad cap helps us with that and offers classes on you know my google business or facebook or social media advertising so look into those as well because um they're very helpful get on their new their newsletter um and um you never know when something's going to pop up i'll get something you know once a week and they'll have some training on there that might be interesting to me and oftentimes are virtual now so um i can hop in on my lunch break or from anywhere um to learn a little bit about the topic that they're talking about oh that's fantastic thank you so much you're welcome and if any of you are interested in in a cooperative yourself um i know there are some people who would ask questions about how we function um ohio state university south centers is a great resource for that we didn't know where to start and we reached out and they were able to help us to even create our articles of incorporation and our bylaws um they taught us how to do our financial planning um and what types of um you know stuff that we've to provide to the irs on a yearly basis um and they were able to um points in the direction of cpas that can help us make sure that we're staying um on task with the irs as well so um utilize them because uh they are a great resource oh ohio state university south centers um so north south um they have their own website i believe uh so look that up