“Do we really need a website? Isn’t Facebook enough?”

This question, not uncommon among small, family-run businesses (especially in rural areas), was the catalyst to a chain reaction that eventually led to the complete transformation of a local market bakery.

How did it happen? What did they do? Should small businesses invest in their online presence? All these questions and more will be answered shortly; but first—some background.

The origin story

When I was a small, home-schooled child, I made jewelry with my sister while we listened to our mom read out loud to us. 

Because we did a lot of reading, I ended up with a lot of jewelry. Not wanting to waste an opportunity to embrace and channel my inner entrepreneur, I started selling that jewelry at a local farmers market.

Here’s a look at my Very Official Cost Of Goods Analysis (available today thanks to the fact that I’ve never thrown a notebook away, ever):

However, not wanting to let her children upstage her, my mother decided to start baking and selling fresh artisan bread at our booth, too. Thus, Bukovina Old World Micro-Bakery was born.   

Although our jewelry operation officially flatlined shortly thereafter, her farmers market bread endeavor has grown consistently over the years—so much so that she’s now known around town as “The Bread Lady.”  

However, after being featured in this segment on PBS due to the amazingly growth-filled summer of 2017, we realized as a family that we had a really great thing going. Unfortunately, due to the very nature of being a market bakery, sales were mostly limited to the fair-weather months (of which Minnesota has very few). There were a few special orders here and there, but it was nothing substantial or consistent enough to make a living on.

We knew we needed to do something—but what?

Easy—a bread subscription! What better way to keep the lovely people of Willmar, Minnesota stocked with fresh artisanal bread all winter long?

That answer, though simple enough, changed my life forever. 

We had a great product (it was proven), we had baking systems in place (hey, 5 kids ages 10-16 plus myself—that’s quite a system), but we had one issue:  

We had no idea how to “get the word out”, allow people to sign up, and get them on a recurring plan.  

This is where that first question comes into play: “Do we really need a website?”

Many small family businesses are familiar with the delicate balance between wanting to be relevant in the ever-changing world of technology, yet not even having enough time to get daily tasks done—where are they supposed to get the time to teach themselves the finer points of The Internet?

This is where I come into the story (at least for this small family business). After deciding to create a bread subscription (which may or may not have been my decision in the first place—the jury’s still out on that one), we decided that a website was absolutely necessary.

If the whole point of creating a subscription is to create recurring revenue so you don’t have to think about it, you have to have a way of turning the whole “not thinking about it” part into reality. If you’re manually writing up sales tickets for each person each week, that’s not quite automated. 

However, as I highlighted before—small businesses often struggle to come up with time to do it themselves, or resources to hire someone else to do it. I was the perfect solution—I had time, a willingness to learn, and Alison (a kick-butt mentor lady that started me out with the basics of web design, marketing, and framing a business).

Thus, The Weekly Loaf, our very own artisan bread subscription, was born.

The actual process of building out the website itself was obviously a tremendous learning experience. From never even hearing the term “CSS” before in my life, to creating a fully-functional subscription site, it was quite the journey. 

But along with that came the actual framing of the bread subscription itself. Going from only baking for a farmers market and packaging orders placed via Facebook comment, we now had to figure out a way to structure this into something scale-able beyond Facebook commenting. 

Deciding how much to charge to make it profitable, how to get the product to customers now that there was no longer the farmers market as a central location, how to incentivize people to purchase additional loaves to their one weekly loaf, how to organize the orders that were now coming in through the website as opposed to Facebook—these are just a few examples of decisions that we worked through together to reach the finished product.

I helped structure this whole project from the bottom up. When we officially went live with the site and invited our community of bread-lovers to sign up for the program, I literally sat on the floor and cried as person after person successfully navigated the website and signed up. 

Watching notification after notification roll in (okay, it was like 12 that first week, but it was still significant) was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I’d never had such ownership in such a directly-income-related project before, and it was life-changing. 

Since then we’ve tweaked it, added, taken away, and changed things as we’ve changed. But what remains constant is the fact that my mom’s part-time summer side hustle is now a year-round endeavor that generates consistent income for the business (and our family), and it continues to grow as we speak. 

All this to say:

If you are a small business that is still debating the value of investing into a digital presence, I cannot stress enough how big of a game changer that will be for you. (In contrast, if you’re a large business considering hiring me and are reading this to see what kind of value I can add to your company, wow—I’m impressed you made it this far.)

Back to the small businesses, though. If it feels like too big of a hurdle to overcome on your own, I implore you to reach out to someone who can give you some sage advice. (Might I recommend these talented folks, for starters.)

When we didn’t know where to start with the bread subscription, we reached out to Alison because we knew she had experienced tremendous success using digital (“nontraditional”) marketing techniques with her brick and mortar store, and had also branched into online subscription-based business models. She would know what we didn’t know.

What I learned about marketing

She shared that while marketing is about relationships to an extent, there are still established principles to follow for best results. 

Concepts like creating a strong email database, because that only goes up in value for your business. Or using available technology to create and leverage features like landing pages, email campaigns, and targeted ads to work to the benefit of your business. 

What stuck with me was the idea that marketing is like the perfect marriage of art and science. While it does include a very important creative component (making your content beautiful, entertaining, and enjoyable to consume), it also must have a strong structure behind it to make it quantifiable, profitable, and repeatable. 

All these concepts I’d always assumed were too big picture for our little operation were actually 100% implementable even at our market bakery stage. Developing lists of interested people, a framework to engage and nurture their interest, and then a plan to wow them after the sale—that was all applicable and doable.

Things didn’t just stop at the bread subscription, though. 

Using the same strategies, we were able to take our online community along for the ride as we went through the process of launching our next endeavor—a mobile wood-fired pizza oven. 

Simple things like using Facebook Live to give people a behind-the-scenes taste of what we were working on was an amazing way to engage with our community and generate interest around what we were building. 

By using targeted Facebook ads to only spend our dollars advertising to people who care about getting weekly fresh bread in their lives, we’ve been saved from blindly throwing money into the wind and hoping something sticks. 

Our mobile pizza endeavor has now traveled up to two and a half hours away from where we’re based, with more interest popping up at seemingly every event. The potential for using targeted ads to generate opportunity in those areas is practically endless. 

Where are they now?

My parents’ vision for our farm is not only to bring delicious food to people — in addition to that, it’s to cultivate a space where people can come and reconnect to a way of life (and a way of eating!) that’s gradually disappearing from our culture. 

The community that we’ve built through the food extends much deeper than the food itself. Because of this, it’s not uncommon to have groups of people out for a day of genuinely fun, breathe-some-fresh-air-and-get-your-hands-dirty kind of work — in exchange for some wood-fired pizza or fresh sourdough pancakes, of course.

Despite the fact that we have a very relational focus here, that doesn’t negate the effectiveness of intentional marketing efforts. Rather, using these techniques in a very conversational way is a means of drawing in people who we’d never be able to reach otherwise. 

Embracing the concept of digital marketing and everything that it entails has truly transformed how we manage the farm, the business, and life in general. How can it transform yours?

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