Case Study – Greenslate Online Food Shop

Greenslate Community Farm is a ‘not for profit’ community business in Billinge, on the outskirts of Wigan, Greater Manchester. They run a Care Farm for adults with learning difficulties, a market garden, shop, cafe, and have a range of animals on site to engage and educate. 

Inspired by the International Transition Movement, their aim is to build a more sustainable and resilient local community.

Neil has worked with them on their marketing since 2017. 

Facebook posts regularly get over 100 shares and regularly reach 3-9k people within a couple of days of being posted. Greenslate doesn’t pay for any Facebook advertising, all the traffic is organic.

Coronavirus Pandemic

Following government advice, in March 2020, the farm, cafe, and care farm were all shut down for the safety of the staff, learners and public. This was a potential disaster for the farm. 

But, some staff felt the shut down offered an opportunity to provide a food delivery service for the local community; a new way of delivering part of the farm’s mission.

Many people in the local community were socially isolating to protect themselves and others from spreading the Coronavirus infection.

The online shop needed to be set up fast. For the initial launch, a food box with a range of basic foodstuffs was put together in three different sizes. 

To expand the range of offerings, Neil did a product photography shoot the following week and added extra products so customers could fill shopping baskets online with what they needed.

Social media

Greenslate has an amazing Facebook audience which has been built with frequent postings over the last few years. This was the obvious place to launch the online shop and continues to allow the promotion of new products as they become available.

Promotional posts usually consist of an image with a strong headline, followed by a short message and call to action. With all promotional content, the goal is to communicate the message instantly with little work needed by the reader.

To keep everything authentic, original images shot by Neil or those shot by staff were used whenever possible for the various campaigns. When this wasn’t possible, Neil sourced stock images or created vector illustrations to support the posts.

For the shop, product shots were shot with a simple setup which could be replicated by the staff as new products were added to the range available online.

The website

Neil originally set up e-commerce on the site back in 2017 with the intention of taking bookings for social events and children’s courses during school holidays.

To give the shopping experience that people are used to online, he bought the Barn2 Woocommerce Product Table plugin.

All along, the intention was to give the shop staff the ability to add new products to the site as they become available. Some staff were given access to the site as ‘shop managers’ in the website’s WordPress back-end. Neil created a step-by-step user guide for adding products and adjusting stock levels, together with photography guidelines.

Campaigns

The online food store is under constant development. With any retail operation, keeping customers engaged and aware of new products is never-ending. 

Over the weeks Neil has developed many ‘mini campaigns’ to promote different products and achieve focused goals. For example, the farm needed campaigns to recruit volunteer growers and drivers. These campaigns resulted in more volunteers than we could provide work for.

Because of the lockdown and the desire for many people to bake at home, flour and yeast had become a rare commodity. When stocks became available to the farm, social media posts quickly turned into a surge in orders.

Although the farm shop sells other people’s products with the emphasis on local, organic, ethical and sustainable items, it also has its own market garden. Farm grown fruit and veg is usually destined for the cafe.

Selling online opens up new revenue possibilities for the farm’s produce. Small batches of radish, for example, can be put on the site with a stock level of 10 bunches. The farm even sold off a small batch of surplus tomato plants.

The farm’s cafe kitchen continues to bake their popular homemade cakes and biscuits, small temptations that customers can add to their shopping baskets in increments of one item at a time.

At the time of writing this report, the shop has gone into profit and continues to be developed. There has been great customer engagement with lots of unsolicited messages of appreciation for the service and what the farm does in the community.

If you have a campaign you need help with or want me to suggest improvements for your digital marketing give me a call or email me now.