6 bucks for THAT crap?
Thursday, June 19th, 2008So how do you like that, they remembered us! (Either that, or the mental kettle corn groove we dug into their minds.) We had a pretty busy day at the Framingham Farmers Market – 5 oils sold. We use jugs of corn oil as a measurement of how much we popped, since we always start with unopened containers. I guess sticking with this farmers market all last year is starting to pay off this year. (Note to anyone who is reading this and is in the kettle corn biz. There’s money to be made by building slow and steady at these smaller weekly events.)
We had done some online marketing this past week, and even though it didn’t impact our sales that much, it shows that it works and that it takes time. I had made this poster earlier in the week and we intended on finding all the bulletin boards within a 3 mile radius of this farmers market and slapping them up there. Craigslist.org has a section on local events, so I posted one there in the Massachusetts Metrowest section. I had tried sticking on into the FREE section, but they don’t allow “promotional” items. Eh, I tried.
Since we’re actually GIVING something away, I thought we should take a crack at sending an email to anyone on myspace.com who were local to the Framingham Farmers Market. Velma thought we were entering the world of “spam”, but I thought that it fell into the category of “news”, PLUS we were giving something tangible away for free, no strings attached. Who wouldn’t want to know about that?
So how do you find people on myspace.com who are only local to you? Simple. Go to Google and enter exactly this:
“female – framingham” site:myspace.com
(Show omitted results)Â This means I’m looking for any female who has a profile page that says that they’re from Framingham ONLY on the website myspace.com. Do the same thing for males and pick the town you want. Obviously you already need a page on myspace to send a message to someone on there. I think we found about 80 people, got 12 or so positive emails back from them and one person showed up and claimed a free sample bag. Foolishly she starting eating the bag there, compelling her to BUY a bag when she was done. Normally when marketing stuff, 1 percent return on a mailing is expected, 3 percent is good. It didn’t take us 100 “spams” to get a sale, and many people said that they’d be coming down at some point.
Speaking of sales – we were moved out from under our nice shady spot and were stuck at the end of the row of tents. I guess some DPW guy was obsessed with the new trees they had planted next to the road and they didn’t want us anywhere near them. OK fine. We were next to the frozen beef tent that sells high quality meats. Velma got the impression that they were getting annoyed that no one wanted to pay $6 a pound for high quality beef, yet MANY people were willing to shell out 6 bucks for a bag of our crap. (My words.) I guess I would be annoyed with mankind too.
