Business Objective

The beginning of a marketing plan, comments and thoughts greatly appreciated:

Fundamental Entity: SIMBY Agritours

Core Competence: building working relationships with a variety of farmers and producers.

Goal: To engage at least 200 people on fun, interactive tours that highlight Michigan's local food economy and promote small, local producers of food and agricultural products.

Time Frame: in 2010, with hopes to double that in 2011.

Search Engine Optimization

One of tonight's many emails to my partner, on marketing. SEO is a field in itself, but it might give us some insight into this whole fundamental entity thing.

hey lauren,
cool - i'm actually going to make a lot of suggestions for the home page... the thing to keep in mind is called "search engine optimization" Basically, thinking about the words that people would search for if they are looking for us, and making sure to use them a lot, first thing, on the homepage.

Some search phrases for us might be:
Michigan Agritourism
Michigan Agritours
Michigan Farm tours
farm tours
sustainable farm tours
local food tour
family farm tour

anything else? I'll think about it a little more - what would people type into google if they're looking for what we offer?

Fundamental Entity

I spent a good chunk of Thursday and Friday at Lauren's house talking about where to go with the business, and about this grant we're writing to USDA to get started. I think both of us were torn between doing all the things that really need to be done right away (scheduling, planning and promoting tours, as well as kicking out this grant), and were having trouble focusing on the "big picture," so to speak. Still, if we want to be effective at writing this grant we need to have a clear statement of what our business is, so we tried...

When initially described, the fundamental entity seemed like the simplest question to answer. We are a tiny company. The entity is SIMBY Agritours (also talked about names, more on that later). BUT, we have several different types of trips we'd like to offer that could (should?) be marketed differently:

- Family & Individual farm tours (mostly recreational and fun, some learning, more expensive, nicer accommodations, more choices, more food - focused on connecting farmers with community of food-interested urban folks.)

- School and group tours (mostly educational, also fun - focused on changing attitudes)

- Adventure/Bike tours (mostly fun, 18-30 crowd, longer hike and bike tours, beer, food, tent camping - focused on exposure to Michigan's food system)

thinking about grant objectives, the family and school tours are totally different. the family tours could increase sales for specific farmers as families visit them at the farmer's market or join their CSA, the school ones more about changing attitudes in general and may not lead to documentable sales. The adventure tours seem too "out there" to include in the grant, but are, i feel, an important niche.

so: am I getting the idea behind fundamental entity? Can we still market all three without diluting our brand? Or should we brand them all separately (which seems silly) but each has a different target market and goal. hmmm.