Making your website the hub for your farm marketing
A spectacular display of cut-your-own flowers at Parlee Farms in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts.
"We just keep growing"
Parlee Farms in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts offers pick-your-own fruit (including strawberries, cherries, blueberries, peaches, apples and pumpkins) and cut-your-own flowers, along with a farmstand, bakery, ice cream stand, animal petting area, and a food trailer for lunch. Founded in 1987, both their acreage and their on-farm offerings truly live up to the farm’s tagline, “We just keep growing.”
The most important thing you can do for your marketing
Co-owner Ellen Parlee and her daughter, Anne, take care of the marketing for the farm. “A good website is the most important thing you can do for your marketing,” Ellen says. “Your website should be your hub and social media are the tenacles that go off of it.”
Parlee Farms updates their site daily during the season, using “search engine optimization (SEO)” principles to help many of their pages rank on page 1 of Google search results.
For example, their website has a section on their home page titled “Today’s Farm News” where Ellen can easily plug in PYO conditions or any timely information. Google tends to reward sites that update their content frequently.
“Make your home page easy to update,” Ellen advises. “Our site is in WordPress. If you can create a Word document, you can update a WordPress site.”
Get expert help
Ellen Parlee works with a local digital marketing agency that hosts and monitors the website, writes blog posts, and helps them find the right SEO keywords. Ellen says. “My husband Mark and I are too busy running the farm to take care of all the marketing. It’s really paid off.”
Ellen and Anne also handle their social media accounts (primarily Instagram and Facebook), devoting a half-hour a day to update them with current picking conditions and offerings. “We’ve hired photographers and videographers to get us content for social media, which has been incredibly valuable,” Ellen says.
Ellen also writes their email newsletter, which goes out once or twice a week during their 20-week season. Recipients of email newsletter hear about special offerings before everyone else. “I link all of our posts and questions back to our website, so we get lots of traffic, which helps our Google ranking,” she says.
Their SEO agency sends Google Analytics reports to the Parlees each month, showing how their site is doing compared to the same period in previous years. During the off season, Ellen reviews the reports and meets with the agency to plan any changes needed for the next year.
Building on a solid foundation
Over the years, Parlee Farms has steadily added new products, services, and experiences that keep customers coming back for more. It’s also helped them achieve media coverage from many outlets. For example, the editors of Yankee magazine named Parlee “The Best PYO Fruit Farm in Massachusetts.”
This, in turn, attracts more people to the Parlee Farm website and to the farm, enabling them to “just keep growing.”