This month's farm marketing news includes a straightforward explanation of new email rules, plus Shopify updates, and more. Plus, meet our newest marketing consultant, Brooklyn!

Whether you’re launching your first online store or considering a platform shift, think through your needs before you invest precious time and money into a farm website platform.

We spoke to Erika Knight, who manages the administration of the USDA Value-Added Producer Grant for the state of Oregon. She is responsible for the entire grant cycle, from publicizing the grant to working with grantees.

If you know it’s important and are dedicating time to learn social media, it can be hard to know what needs to be in a post to make it successful. Here are some simple tips!

Learn effective strategies that will help you avoid email marketing pitfalls, land in more inboxes, and ultimately drive more sales and growth for your farm business.

Especially for small and local businesses like farms, SMS (text message) marketing is a highly effective way to reach your customers.

When designing your emails, design can work in your favor, making emails engaging and easy to read, or the complete opposite: make your message hard to get across and possibly leading to potential clients hitting the unsubscribe button. Let’s avoid that!

Grapevine Marketing Consultant Anna Larsen chatted with Caleb Trainor of Winterspring Farm, a small regenerative veggie farm located in rural Southeast Wisconsin, about his experience applying for and utilizing the Value-Added Producer Grant from USDA.

Whether you’re working with a grant writing consultant or taking a DIY approach, Grapevine Local Food Marketing is here to help with a letter of support and quick guide to marketing prices. We also offer customized support, including a mini marketing plan or comprehensive strategic marketing plan.

Now that you’re more familiar with the two USDA grants that can help you with your farm marketing from Part 1, let’s get into a couple success stories!

Every year the USDA provides millions in grants to support local and regional agriculture. Applying for a grant may sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. We’re here to help demystify the process!

Capturing the media’s attention is no easy feat, but a well-written and strategically distributed press release can help. But first, be sure what you plan to promote is newsworthy.

Stock photos often get a bad rap for being cheesy and inauthentic, but the right ones can take your farm’s e-commerce store to the level while staying true to your brand identity.

When done correctly, email marketing is an incredibly powerful tool that allows you to connect directly with customers as often as you’d like. In this post, we’ll cover how to know if your emails are performing well — and what to do if they’re not!

A logo is your brand’s cover letter: it’s meant to visually communicate your unique identity. But what makes a farm logo great? Answer our 8 questions to find out!

When we say “optimize,” we are referring primarily to the process of compressing file size enough so that it loads quickly, but not so much that it doesn’t look crisp. We also consider visual consistency.

Here are our top tips to leverage Drip to build your subscriber list, boost farm revenue, and more.

If you feel like you’re taking the same photos over and over, check out our tips below to freshen up your camera roll and give you a few more options next time you need photos for marketing. Plus, scroll to the end for a few technical tips!

In the age of email newsletters, social media, and online ordering, digital photos have become a must-have asset for small farms in marketing directly to consumers. Having a beautiful library of high-resolution, professional photos is infinitely valuable.

Here are some ideas and examples to set you on your way to easily composing your own shareable farm videos.