Ray-Monde Deux CSA - Facebook Marketing

Ray-Monde Deux farm
Sunbury, VIC, 3429
Website: www.ray-mondedeux.com
Social : @raymondedeux
John and Tristia Lakey Ray-Monde Deux farm regeneratively, producing ryeland lamb, mutton, salers beef, boer goat and Pinot Noir. 

Who would have thought that a simple and effective way to let eaters know that you had a good product to sell was by using facebook buy swap and sell sites.  Typically these sites help communities redistribute unwanted chattels, couches and cars etc.  We have trialled it in the past with our meat packs with mixed success and a fair bit of trolling in return.  
Once we committed to starting our CSA in May, 2018 we looked at a simple advertising campaign on social media to purchase “views” on instagram and facebook.  We post photos regularly on these sites but had not targeted a message to “action” viewers to act on our posts.  That changed with expenditure of ~$600 , we asked Social media to place our ads in front people who met some of the following criteria ;within 50km from our address, interested in farming, aged 20 to 60 and initially female.  We hoped this group would be most interested in buying farm produce.
We considerably increased our followers but were recruiting eaters too slowly.  
We switched our focus to local Buy Swap and Sell (BSS)sites. Our ad stated up front that :if you want cheap meat stop reading”, that we farmed ethically with land for revegetation & wildlife, as well as information about our livestock and farming methods with an invitation to visit and look at our farm. Interest exploded.  I was fielding dozens of enquiries per hour and the pressure on our CSA sign up page was enough to slow our website.  We wondered if we had been hacked.
To date we have generated over 12600 visits to our sign up page!  This has produced a sign up rate of about 0.5%.  About ~20% of sign ups have not responded to confirmation messages and dropped out of the CSA.  However we found enough people to sell out of lamb for 2018 and are well on our way to meet our budget for beef sales.
Facebook BSS introduced our CSA to 1000s of people, many of the active sign ups opted to collect from us on the farm.  In the past buyers not being able to collect from us had been a sticking point for sales.  We have set aside a weekend per month for the CSA with collections on Saturday and deliveries on Sundays.
Patience is required to nurse enquiries
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