Sustainable Ag Marketing: Four Resources on Engaging Food Bloggers

Engaging food bloggers to write about your products, services, farm and market, has become a cost effective and efficient marketing tool to create an online presence without having to become a blogger, or web master, yourself. Think about those anonymous restaurant reviews in your local newspaper. How much more influential are they than even a paid ad talking about yourself. The only difference is that a blog's readership likely reaches well beyond your locale, and with a very targeted and interested (i.e. engaged) audience, it can be very effective in influencing consumers, lots and lots of consumers. The topic has popped up in several venues over the past few months. Here are a few that I've run across: 

• It was the cover article in the Oct 2011 Produce Business magazine; 
• I talked about it at the 2012 Atlantic Coastal Ag Conference in January. My comments are summarized in the Proceedings, which I've copied below the 'Read More' link below;
• We were honored to have a guest food blogger, Katie Parla, join us in AC and she posted her own thoughts on her Parla Food blog;
• and just today, produce marketing consultant Heidi McIntyre, summarized a session that she moderated at the Southeast Produce Council’s 2012 Annual Conference on her blog Adventures in Produce.

Savvy marketing is the key to success in the world of small business, including farming. Making friends with some bloggers covering the food (and farming and tourism too) scene in NJ may open a world of possibilities.

Rick VanVranken

THE IMPACT OF FOOD BLOGGERS ON MARKETING YOUR PRODUCTS

Richard W. VanVranken

Agricultural Agent

Rutgers Cooperative Extension – Atlantic County

6260 Old Harding Hwy.

Mays Landing, NJ 08330

The concept of using any and all methods to promote and sell products devised by Jay Conrad Levinson continues to evolve since he wrote his classic book Guerrilla Marketing – Secrets for Making Big Profits from your Small Business in 1984. Many authors and marketing consultants have added to the ideas that Levinson fashioned, including our own Bob “Matty” Matarazzo who adapted the model to farm direct marketing in his own book, Marketing for Success: Creative Marketing Tools for the Agricultural Industry (1996).

Today, entrepreneurs have all the tools described by Levinson and Matarazzo, as well as all the new tools available via the internet and the World Wide Web. And beyond static web pages and email, the new interactive tools of Social Media open tremendous possibilities for reaching out to new customers, communicating with regular clientele, and gaining almost instant feedback about the business and product offerings.

One of Matty’s most effective ‘tricks of the trade’ was to develop a mailing list of newspaper editors and reporters whom he kept supplied with regular updates via press releases. Like many of these savvy marketing techniques, it costs very little, if anything, to reach consumers via the internet, except time. When it got to be more than he could handle along with managing the farm production, a farm market and a winery, he hired someone to take on the responsibility to keep those reporters supplied with news about those business enterprises.

The same is as true today about using Social Media as it is to maintain contact via press releases. It’s great if you have time to tell your story via a blog, on FaceBook or Twitter, but what if you just don’t have the time, the wherewithal, or the urge to start typing about your business, are there options? You can hire a web marketer to try to tell your story, or you might consider sending your news to an established food, travel or news blogger.

Just like the restaurant critique by a local food writer, it’s a more credible story if bloggers who have nothing to do with your business write about you and spread the word to their thousands of followers? So in addition to the traditional media types that you might contact about a news event, consider inviting a blogger to your farm to help you tell your story? An internet search for food/farm/travel blogs about your town/state will turn up a surprising list that you can add to your media (e-)mailing list. The following lists, mostly from the Blogroll on the Eating in South Jersey blog (www.eatinginsjersey.com - We're not food critics; we're food enthusiasts) will help get you started.


Food Lovers

1 Wine Dude
22nd & Philly
A Tale of Two Spoons
All I Eat Food
Amiable Life
Basil Bee
Bathtub Brewery
Beer-Stained Letter
bridges, burgers & beer
Caviar & Codfish
Chew Jersey
Collingswood Foodies
CookAppeal
Cybele Connor – Food Geek
Down-Home South Jersey
Dine with Pat
EthnicNJ
Family, Friends and Food
Food Coma
foodaphilia
French Fry Diary
Garden State On A Plate
Gluten Free Philly
House Hubbie’s Home Cookin’
JerseyBites
Jersey Foodies
Jersey Girl Cooks
Jersey Girl in the Kitchen
Jerseygator’s Blog
jerzEATS
La Phemme Phoodie
Ladyberd’s Kitchen
Life of Spice
Light Fare
Messy and Picky
New Jersey Nick
NJ Epicurean
NJ Wines Uncorked
Off The Broiler
Partners In Wine Club
Philly Foodie
Random Cravings
SecondHelpings
Simply Beer
SoJerz Phood Blog
South Jersey Foodie

South Jersey Locavore
South Jersey Wine & Dine
Spoon & Shutter< Stacey Snacks
Sweet Life Bakery
Tara Nurin
Taste As You Go
TheGritsnCheeseDish!
Tiny Kitchen Creations
Uwishunu
Wing Quest

Other Jersey Blogs

a lovely shore breeze…
A Mom Writing
All Things Gwen
Another Delco Guy in South Jersey
Down the Shore with Jen
NJ Mommy Poppins
New Jersey Moms Blog
SableMinded
SoapBoxville
Tales of the New Jersey Shore
the cuteness of curiosity
Where is the line between North & South Jersey
You Don’t Know Jersey
NJ Wild
Wild New Jersey