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Farm Marketing Week – June 2026
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Where Do I Start With Farm Marketing When I Have No Customers and No Idea What I’m Doing?
If you’re a new farmer wondering where to begin with marketing, this episode walks through the exact starting point Charlotte has used with thousands of farmers across the U.S. and 15 countries. No theory – just the four foundational steps in the order they actually work.
Where should a new farmer start with marketing?
Start by writing down every person you know who might be interested in what you sell. That list is the seed of your email list, and your email list is what builds a profitable farm.
Most new farmers think they need a logo, a brand, a Facebook page, or a fancy website before they can start. They don’t. The first move is identifying the people in your existing life who eat eggs, buy flowers, or care about pasture-raised meat — and that almost always starts with mom, sister, neighbor, cousin. Every farmer starts from zero. That list is your starting point.
Should farmers build a website before using social media?
Yes – your website should come before social media because Facebook and Instagram are designed to keep people scrolling, not to help you make money.
Social media algorithms show your posts to a small fraction of your followers (often less than 5%), and you don’t own that audience. A website works for you 24/7 and gets found by new customers searching Google. Social media should funnel people to your website, not replace it.
Why is email marketing better than social media for farms?
Email marketing outperforms social media by thousands of times because subscribers have given you permission to reach them directly, with no algorithm in the way.
When someone is on your email list, they’ve said yes to hearing from you. There’s no platform deciding whether your message gets seen. Email is also where people make purchasing decisions — social media is where they scroll. You also own your email list; you don’t own your Facebook following.
What is the correct order to set up farm marketing?
The four foundational steps, in order: (1) write your list of people who might be interested, (2) identify your brand by interviewing customers, (3) build a website designed to sell, (4) email your list consistently.
Skipping ahead to social media or paid ads before this foundation is in place is the most common reason farm marketing doesn’t work. Build the foundation; everything else feeds into it.
What are the stages of farm business growth?
Charlotte teaches eight stages every farm moves through: Seed, Sprout, Roots, Bloom, Harvest, Orchard, Estate, and Legacy.
Where you are determines what work matters most. Seed-stage farmers ($0 in sales) need to decide it’s a business and pick one focus product. Sprout farmers ($1K–$10K) need consistency — one weekly email, one sales channel, one anchor product for 90 days. The most expensive mistake is a Sprout-stage farmer trying to solve a Harvest-stage problem.
How can farmers learn marketing without making expensive mistakes?
The fastest way is to follow a proven, sequenced path rather than piecing things together from free YouTube videos and conflicting advice.
Charlotte’s Profitable Farmer Marketing program enrolls twice a year, in June and October, and teaches the exact sequence in this episode with weekly coaching, a private community, and (new for June 2026) a done-for-you marketing plan built privately for full-pay students.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Farmer website template (Squarespace): charlottemsmith.com/website
- Free email marketing course for farmers: charlottemsmith.com/free-email-course
- The Profitable Farmer Marketing program — opens June 2026, welcome workshop is Tuesday, June 23rd. Sign up at charlottemsmith.com/mastery
FAQ:
Q: How many people should be on my starting list?
Ten people is fine. Two hundred is fine. The number doesn’t matter — what matters is that you start one and add to it consistently.
Q: Do I need a logo before I launch my farm business?
No. A logo is not a brand, and you can launch without one. Your brand is who you help and how you help them — that comes from customer interviews, not a designer.
Q: How long does it take to build a profitable farm using this approach?
Most students inside the Profitable Farmer Marketing program make their investment back within 90 days. Some do it in two weeks. The timeline depends on how consistently you do the foundational work.
Q: Can I just use Facebook instead of a website?
No. Facebook controls who sees your posts, you don’t own your following, and the platform isn’t designed to convert visitors into buyers. A website does all three.
Q: What if I’m too rural for online marketing to work?
Distance isn’t the obstacle — relationship is the opportunity. Charlotte’s clients regularly have customers drive 60–90 minutes past cheaper options to buy from them, because their brand is clear.
Connect with Charlotte
Sign up for Farm Marketing Week at charlottemsmith.com/masterclass.
Subscribe and Review
Subscribe to The Profitable Mindset Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And consider leaving a review. Your reviews help other farmers find this work.
Click HERE and Let’s Meet!
Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer Marketing Coaching Program can break you out of marketing misery.
A question I get asked a lot is where do I start with farm marketing when I have no customers or no
idea what I’m doing? So I have a lot of people who might be brand new, but also I have farmers who
come to me who’ve been farming for five or 10 or 15 or 20 or 35 years and say,
we just aren’t making the sales that we should, or we’ve never made money or we’ve never paid
ourselves on the farm. And we don’t know what to do with marketing. Where do we start? So this
episode is for you. If you’re brand new to relationship-based marketing, which is what works in
today’s world. And either you’ve just started your farm or maybe you’ve been at it a while or for
decades, but you’ve never done any formal marketing or formal marketing training and you just don’t
know what works, today is going to help you. And it’s the start of a four-part series.
Now it won’t go completely in order because I have a very special episode coming up.
with a couple of my clients sharing their successes that they’re having when they applied this kind
of marketing. So we’ll do four episodes on it, interspersed with where you get to meet some of my
clients coming up. I always love sharing those. And I hope you’re doing amazing. I just want to
give you a little update. I know a lot of my clients raise their hand for coaching right now
because they’re going through droughts. And so we’ve had to… shift some things in their plans.
And they are so grateful to have the support of a coach, mentor,
and a community where they can solve those problems. How it’s showing for us, showing up for us
here in Oregon is our, everything’s about a month ahead. Like we have.
peonies blooming three weeks before Mother’s Day when we’re lucky to get one or two by Mother’s Day
and everything has been early and I don’t know how that’s going to look for summer because we just
had such an unusually warm winter and we also didn’t get the the rain that we’re known for here in
a rainforest in the Pacific Northwest. So who knows what that’s going to look like for us. So I
hope you’re doing okay. We have, my daughter has been away at college since last August and she
comes home next week. too. And so that’s going to be fun having her back home or interesting,
who knows, she’s lived away on her own for nine months. So I’m sure she’s has a whole new set of
expectations of what it’s like to live on her own. So but At the same time, I’m really looking
forward to having her back. So let’s dive in. Today, I’m going to walk you through what works in
farm marketing, where to start. And again, what I teach is not theory. It is proven over and over
on repeat with the thousands of farmers that I’ve coached. Over the last decade,
across every state in the United States, 15 different countries, these are the steps that work in
the order they work too. So we’re going to dive into this and it’s when you implement them.
If you just listen to the episode, but you don’t do anything, it won’t work. So listen to it and
then you’ve got to take action and start implementing. So just know that it works when you do.
So the very first thing, where to start? It sounds simple and it may surprise you because it’s so
simple. But when people come to me and they say, I have nothing, I have no customer email list,
no website, where do I start? I always say you start right now.
The very first thing you do is grab a piece of paper and a pen or open a Google Doc if you want to
write it on, type it out. But grab a piece of paper and start writing down.
Every single person you know that might be interested in buying from you.
Now, it doesn’t matter what. they’ll buy from you. Like I support my kids no matter what they’re
selling. Cookies, candy, flowers, milk, meat, anything. I’m always going to support my kids,
my family, my parents. We’re always supporting each other. And that tends to be how people buy.
So start with writing down your friends and family, just the names. That’s step one.
And yes, a lot of time, the first person on that list is your mom or your sister or your daughter
or a neighbor. That is completely normal. Every single one of us starts our email list from zero.
Every single farmer I’ve met, including me, we started from zero. And I say this because a lot of
farmers will beat themselves up and say, well, my list is not very big. It’s kind of useless. It’s
only 120 people or it’s only 16 people or it’s only seven people.
That’s wonderful. You got to celebrate that. Otherwise, that mindset, that kind of mindset will
just drag you down. But everybody starts at zero. So if you have one person on there,
you’re ahead of anyone else who hasn’t started yet. So just know that.
And the reason this matters, the reason we got to have someone is we got to have someone to talk to
and to figure out our brand. You can’t build a, and I don’t mean this are customers that have
already bought from you, but these are people, if you don’t have any customers yet,
this is everyone you know. These are just people around you. You can’t build a farm business in a
vacuum. You got to have people to talk with so that you can.
clarify what your brand is. So before you have actual customers to talk to,
that list of people you know is your starting point. It’s the seed of your email list and your
email list is everything. You’ve heard me talk about that a lot, how it’s the foundation of
everything. So if you’re listening right now and you have zero customers,
this is your homework before you do anything else. Write down that list of all the people you know.
Now, if you have customers you know, start writing them down and then get their emails. Chances
are, if you only have ever text them, I’ll have people say, well, I text all of them, but I don’t
have their emails. Just send them a text and grab their email. Just say, hey, I’m working on a
marketing project on our farm that’ll help me serve. You better.
Could I get your email and get them on your list? And you’ll learn in The Profitable Farmer how to
start and set that up, but also to make it really enticing to them. So they aren’t going to say no.
They’re going to love the invite. to share their email to be on your list. So there’s a way to
learn to do that. We’ll talk about that in a second. So, and then inside the profitable farmer,
you learn step-by-step how to turn that into a profitable email list. But to start with,
you got to write down these names and it might be three people or five people or 10 people or 20.
All right. And then once you’ve done that, if you don’t have customers, it’s your list of family
and friends. If you do have customers, it’s your customers’ names and emails. and your family and
friends, then just grab a free email marketing software. There’s so many of them. Grab any of them.
I use and prefer and recommend kit.com. Love that one.
But MailChimp, any of them work, just don’t use the one that’s given to you by your website,
okay? That is not going to build a foundation that is profitable. Yes,
it’s a free email list, but it’s not going to help you in a way you need to set up your email list.
So grab one of those free standalone email marketing software providers and just Google that if you
don’t know what it is. I give everyone a link to that along with what we’re going to dive into next
is website. All right. And that is the second step. of where you start is you got to have a website
before social media. So a lot of farmers start and they think, okay, I got my farm. Now I got to
get set up on Instagram and Facebook because lots of times it’s free. And they think, can I just
use that as a Facebook page? And I understand it feels easy to just jump on there.
You’re already on social media probably. So it seems… to just jump on there and grab a business
page for free. You’ve already got a phone. You know how to use the various social media platforms.
And then setting up a website sounds intimidating and expensive and technical. So it’s very,
very tempting to just go with social media account as in lieu of a website.
But here’s the truth. Facebook and Instagram are not designed to help you make money. They are
designed to prevent you from making money unless you pay a lot of money in ads. And ads are not
going to make you money for a number of years until you invest.
I’ve invested so much money in learning how to do Facebook ads that make me money. And that was my
tuition. I figure all the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars I spent over the years to
finally learn how to get a… ad profitable was the tuition I paid. So you’re not going to be able
to do that from the start. Ads will not work from the start if you have not learned how to find
customers without ads and how to make money without ads. So that’s why we start not with ads on
Instagram or Facebook, not with just business pages on there in lieu of a website, but your email
list. and a website. Social media is designed to keep people from seeing you.
They’re designed to make money for Facebook and Instagram, not for you. And the algorithm on both
those platforms is specifically set up to prevent your followers from seeing your posts if you’re
trying to sell something or encourage them to do anything that would lead toward you making money.
You’re actually penalized for that. So that’s why we want to start with a website and you own it.
Your website is not run by somebody else trying to prevent people from even landing on it.
So if you post on social media, only a small fraction of your followers,
like maybe less than 5% will actually see it.
So that is not a foundation for a profitable farm and that’s why we don’t start there. Now that’s
okay if you’re already there, just leave it and don’t spend a minute longer on there until you get
your foundation of your website built. So a website, it’ll work for you around the clock.
When a busy mom decides she wants her family to start eating healthier and you’re out in the barn
or in bed and she wants real food from a local farm, she’s going to be Googling it. And if you’re
not around, she can land on your website and it’s set up to engage with her and it’s set up to
introduce you. in a way that she wants to buy from you. And yes, this is even if you’re a small
town, even if you’re 60 miles from the nearest town or city, your website is how people who don’t
know you yet can find you. And I teach you how to do that. Just putting a website out there, people
will not find you. You have to know how to get people to find your website.
That’s what we… what we teach you. And then from there, you turn that stranger landing on your
website into a customer. And now this is really important. It’s not just any website.
It is a website set up in a way that’s designed to sell and website designers.
Don’t set them up that way. They don’t know how to do it. They aren’t marketers. So if you hired
someone to design and set up your website and you’re not making money, that’s normal because they
aren’t marketers. So I have step-by-step tutorials that are provided free along with our website
template to our farmers inside the Profitable Farmer. And you can use those free tutorials.
to make sure that your current website, if you already have one, but it’s not making you a profit,
you can learn how to set that up in a way that works. So if your website is not making money,
it’s not because websites don’t work. It’s because there’s a skill gap. You just haven’t learned
the skill of setting it up in a way that makes money. So a lot of farmers, and it’s not just
pretty, or not just that it has to be pretty. A lot of farmers have websites that look very pretty,
but aren’t making them any money. There’s a difference and we’ll talk more about what makes a
website actually work in future episodes here. But the point right now is got to have a website
first, email list and website. That’s your foundation. The combination of the two is your
foundation. Then if you want to use social media, you can. That’s a tool that you will then use to
funnel people to your website and your email list. Social media is not the foundation.
So I had a… 10 year dream of designing a template,
a website template specific to farmers. And it took me 10 years to save the money to hire the
designer to do it. So I created a Squarespace website template specifically for farmers set up in a
way following the story brand method that makes you money with the step-by-step tutorial videos.
It’s free for students inside the profitable farmer, or if you aren’t in there, and you want to
purchase it separately, you can go get that template at charlottemsmith.com forward slash website,
and you’ll get the Squarespace template and the tutorial videos. All right.
So now that you’ve got your list of names and you’re working on a website, again, the question that
I get from new and very experienced farmers is where do I start? List of names, your website,
then what? Now you got to build your email list because your email list is how you make money in
today’s world. And you might think immediately, well, does anyone even read emails anymore?
Nobody reads emails. But the answer is yes, when they are written right.
If nobody’s reading your emails. It’s okay. You just haven’t learned the skill of writing an email
that entices people to read. They have to be compelling. They have to be enticing. And that is a
learned skill. You don’t need an English degree or anything. You can learn how to write.
like you sound, like you talk in a way that works in today’s world. So just know this,
that when your emails are written right, email marketing, following the path I teach,
when you implement it, it’s not even close to anything else in terms of how much money it will make
you and your farm. It outperforms social media by a factor of thousands.
It’s almost 4,000 times more profitable than social media. or billboards or newspaper ads or
magazine ads or TV ads or local flyers. It is 4,000 times more profitable than anything else.
I have lots of farmers in my program who’ve spent money on TV ads and newspapers and billboards and
flyers and all the things that used to work in the past. But once they learned how to do email
marketing properly, they never went back because email marketing works so much better than any
other type of marketing all put together even. And here’s why. When someone’s on your email list,
They’ve said, yes, they’ve opted in to hear from you. You’re not buying people’s names or emails
that you don’t know. You’re learning how to compel people that are around you to want to hear from
you. You will learn. module one in the profitable farmer, when you learn how to communicate your
clear brand, how you help them, they want to hear from you and they will sign up for your email
list because you’ve set it in a way that compels them to want to. So you’re not fighting any social
media algorithms or anything like that. You don’t have to pay for ads. You don’t pay for emails.
You send an email to the people on your list. It lands in their inbox. We show you how to make sure
it does that. And then you email them about things they actually want to hear about in their words,
about their problems, their goals. They’ll open it. They’ll read it. And a certain percentage of
them will buy from you 3,600 times more than they ever will on social media.
Okay. And just know too that if you’ve tried… marketing before and it didn’t work,
that’s not a sign that email marketing doesn’t work. It’s a sign that you have a skill gap. You
just haven’t learned the skill of email marketing and that’s okay. None of us were ever taught how
to do a successful and profitable email marketing that feels good to us and good to our customers.
It’s a learned skill. I had to learn it. I didn’t know. any of this when I started my farm.
I learned it in the first few years and it was fascinating to me. I loved it and it worked.
It was amazing. And that’s what the farmers in my program learned too. The feedback they get is
great. They feel good about marketing when they learn to write in a way that compels people to open
it and then come out and find you at your farm store or the farmer’s market or order online to buy
from you. Those are people that… wait to support you. And these are learnable skills,
no matter how young or old you are. And they’re skills you’ve got to learn if you want to get to a
place where you can pay yourself on the farm and have money left over at the end of the year. And
we’ll talk about that in future episodes too. And if you want my free training on email marketing,
it is going to be huge. It’ll give you so much help.
a big leg up on getting your email foundation in place, you can get that free training.
It’s at charlottemsmith.com forward slash free hyphen email hyphen course.
All right. That is a very thorough training. I give you,
you know, my best performing subject lines. You’re going to get all sorts of information there on
how to set up your email marketing foundation in there too. And that’s all for free. All right.
So let me recap the foundation. Here’s what we talked about. Step one, write down everyone you know
who might be interested in buying from you. This is your starting point. It might be 10 people.
It might be 200 if you already have people buying from you. Doesn’t matter. Just start it. Step
two, I’m going to do a whole episode on identifying your brand because it’s the most important
thing you’ll ever do for your farm marketing after getting your foundation set up. So your brand is
not logo or colors. Your brand is who you help and how you help them.
And I give you step-by-step how to do this in module one inside the Profitable Farmer.
You figure this out by asking your customers a series of questions that reveal to you very quickly
why they buy your products, what problem they’re solving by buying your products.
It’s amazing how clear your brand becomes, even if you just sit down and ask one customer the
questions I offer. And then step three, get your website set up in a way that sells.
Can’t just be a pretty website. It’s got to be set up in a way that works in today’s world to turn
visitors into buyers. And step four, make sure you start your email list and grow it.
And we will keep talking about how we do that in the episodes going forward,
but you’ll want to communicate with everyone on it consistently, at least once every week or two.
And this right here that I just went through, that’s the foundation. Everything else, social media
or farmer’s markets or word of mouth. All of that feeds into the foundation, but it’s not the
foundation. Without these four things in place, none of those things will work to build you a
profitable farm. All right, I want to introduce one more idea before I wrap up here because it’s
going to come up throughout the year. Over the last, say,
13 years of coaching farmers, thousands of calls, thousands of hours,
hundreds of launches, dozens, well, no, hundreds of farms growing from we raise it for ourselves
all the way to millions of dollars in sales, I noticed something. Every farm gets stuck on the same
things at the same stage. And you’re all struggling with the same problems at the stages you go
through, which is why the community in The Profitable Farmer is so valuable because you will be
surrounded by people who are one step ahead of you helping you out, and then you’ll see people who
are right behind you and you can give them a leg up. You’re all going through these stages at the
same time. And when you have mentors in the group who are in front of you, have moved through
stages two, three, four, and five, perhaps, they help you move through them faster. Every farm gets
stuck on the same things at the same stage, and every farm graduates to the next stage by doing the
same one thing. It’s a repeatable, scalable process. So I’ve been tracking that and documenting it
for years, and I’ve just recently named the eight stages a farm moves through.
Stage one is seed, and then there’s sprout, roots, bloom,
harvest, orchard, estate and legacy. And each one of those stages includes different problems
holding you back, but they’re the same problems for every farmer in that stage. And so where you
are right now determines what work matters most and what you should be doing. You should be doing
different work depending on what stage you’re at. If you’re at the seed stage, meaning you haven’t
sold anything yet, your job is identity. You got to decide this is a business if you want to start
paying yourself. So have that conversation with your spouse maybe. Maybe you pick the one product
you’re going to focus on. Marketing, fancy stuff, none of that matters yet. Or maybe you’re at the
sprout stage. And I’m just going through the first few stages today. The sprout stage means you’ve
made a few sales, but you’re less than 10,000 a year. Your job is consistency. You got to get a
solid lead magnet up there. That’s module two in the profitable farmer. You got to work your way to
a least every two week email. You got to have one sales channel.
You got to do that for 90 days straight before adding anything else. That’s going to get you to the
next level. And then the next level is roots. And I call that for the farmers that are around 10
,000 to 25,000 a year. Your job is to have your first real sales launch and a hard pricing reset.
Most farmers who are in the stage I call roots are about 40% underpriced and don’t know it.
So you’re going to become aware of this at this level. I will continue weaving in these stages as
we go. But the point I want you to take away today is don’t compare yourself to a farmer two stages
ahead. I see that all the time. Farmers get really frustrated that they’re at this level and
someone else is at that level. And little do they know that that farmer is in stage six,
orchard, and they’re in stage three, roots, and they’re comparing apples to oranges.
So don’t compare yourself to someone at another stage because they’ve got different problems to
solve. And I have all these problems written down. They’re all documented and we help our farmers
in the profitable farmer work from one stage to the next. And one more thing I want to say before I
wrap up this episode is something that I’m so passionate about.
You were not born knowing how to do this. Nobody was. And I share this with you because I have so
many farmers beating themselves up because their marketing isn’t working or they’re not making
money or they haven’t yet paid themselves or they’re losing money. It’s okay.
You got to stop beating yourself up. We don’t learn. I mean, we aren’t born knowing how to do this.
We don’t learn it in school. I didn’t know any of this. I had to learn it and I made a lot of
expensive mistakes before I figured it out. And then I spent years refining it and testing it and
coaching thousands of farmers through it until I know exactly what works and I could repeat it.
I created frameworks that now help you move through these things faster than I did or faster than
my clients 10 years ago moved through it. So the farmers who try to piece this together from like
random free YouTube videos or free podcasts and take the advice of friends and family or cheap one
-off courses that they cobble together from other people, they spend years and a lot of money
making mistakes that are completely avoidable if you learn it. So just know that,
that there is a clear step-by-step path that has already been proven to work.
And it’s not theory, it’s proven. Real farmers selling their products,
building profitable farms. So that’s what we do inside the Profitable Farmer Marketing Program. I
want to mention it’s opening only once more for the next six months. It’s opening in June on,
let’s see, the 15th of June. And registration will be open that week only.
And then we will close registration down until the following October.
There’s a very special reason we’re doing that because I’m doing a project only for the people who
join in that round. I am not just teaching you to do marketing.
on your own, but using my marketing training that I’ve created, all the courses, all the tools,
all the coaching calls I built over the last 13 years, I am doing a project this time where I take
your specific farm, your brand, what you want to sell, and we are building you an entire year of
marketing assets customized to your farm. All right. That is going to be included in the
registration in June. And that’s why we’re closing it down until October. So we can make sure that
we give everyone who joins the attention they need, because it’s going to take hours for us to
create that for you. I’m testing this with a few farmers right now in the program. It brings us to
tears, both me and the farmer, when we see the final result, something that used to take them a
year to create. We now create for them in a few days a complete 12-month marketing plan specific
to your farm. I’m still in shock at how this is working, how great it’s working. And it brings
tears to my eyes every time I do this for a farmer. The marketing plan you get,
it’s set up in the way I teach, but it’s specific to you and your farm. It’s not a cookie cutter
plan. So I’ll weave more about that over the next few episodes too. And if June is,
you know, not… You can’t join in June. No problem. October will be here later. But if you’ve been
listening to me for a while and you keep saying, oh, I’ll do this next time or when things slow
down, I want to gently encourage you that the longer you wait to learn how to make money from your
farm, the more money you lose, the deeper in the hole you get.
So every… you start over with no email list or no foundation,
or you don’t have a website set up in a way that sells, you don’t get that back. So I just want you
to know that the door is going to be open in June,
and this might be the time you’ve been waiting for. So either way,
I want you to walk away from this podcast knowing that there is a path. It’s not mystery.
It’s laid out. You can learn it. Your life is never going to calm down.
And I feel like a lot of farmers think that I’ll just wait till things calm down. Well,
farming is never going to calm down. We’re always going to have things and then we’re going to have
family things. It’s all built in. Farming is a complex lifestyle.
And so waiting till things calm down doesn’t work. My marketing program is built in a way that…
you calm things down, but works with a normal farm schedule, which is very busy for most people.
So thank you for being here today. And I can’t wait to keep helping you learn how to set up your
foundation of marketing no matter where you are with these next few episodes answering lots of
questions I get all the time. And that’s about it. I hope you have an amazing week and I’ll see you
in the next episode.
