Shoppers’ love for farmers markets with all their visual abundance, local idiosyncrasies, and cauldron of humanity is a marketing dream. More humbling is the typical marketing budget of any farmers market. This chapter provides cheap tools and shopper research to help target your marketing efforts.  

Know Your Farmers Market Shopper
Provides an overview of what we know about core farmers market shopper motivations, demographics, and attributes.

Working with the Print Media
Like robins and bluebirds, features about farmers markets herald in the spring.  How can you proactively reach out to the local media and keep them reporting throughout your market season?

Tips for Your Farmers Markets Website
Make sure your website is as effective as it can be so that shoppers, vendors, and sponsor can easily find the information they need. A few simple tweaks may make a big difference.

Social Media for Your Farmers Markets
Learn the basics and how to get started with social media drawing from Emily Crawford’s presentation at the WSFMA conference.

Farmers Market Graphics – free for markets and vendors to use!
A grant from the WSDA Specialty Block Grant Program helped the Washington Farmers Market Action Team work with a communications firm to create three graphics targeted at core farmers market shoppers. Graphics can be downloaded for free.

Farmers Market Listings in Washington
Do you every wonder how people find farmers markets? See the most common farmers market lists in Washington. Is your market listed? Is the information up to date?

Vendor Displays

• The Art & Science of Farmers’ Market Display by Mary Peabody of UVM (2009)
• Sell More! Farmers Market Vendor Booth Guide from WSU
• Farmers Market Challenge course put on by Michael Kilpatrick. “He’s taking inexperienced farmers market vendors who are putting stuff flat on one table with no cloth or signage, and teaching them how to rework that into an experience their customers love, with HUGE increases in sales, all by using vertical stacking, hot corners, good signage, and good questions to customers. Really great stuff.” – Jennifer K., Miles Away Farm.