How to Prioritise Marketing When Your Farm Has More Than One Diversification

One of the signs that a farm diversification has become established is that the business often stops being simple.

What started as one extra income stream can gradually become a farm shop, café, events, accommodation, meat boxes, workshops or another combination of activities. That growth is positive, but it creates a marketing problem I see regularly: everything starts to feel equally important.

The farm shop needs footfall. The accommodation has some dates to fill. Christmas orders need planning. There is a new event to launch. One product line has good margins but low awareness. Another brings in plenty of revenue but takes a huge amount of staff time.

The temptation is to try to promote all of it, all of the time.

That usually creates more work without creating more clarity.

A good farm diversification marketing strategy should help you decide what deserves attention now, what can wait and what may not need more marketing at all.

Start with the business objective, not the marketing channel

When marketing feels busy, it is easy to begin with the activity.

Should we post more on Facebook?

Should we send an email?

Should we run an advert?

Do we need another blog?

I would start somewhere else.

Ask: what does the business most need marketing to achieve over the next three months?

That might be:

• Filling a specific block of accommodation dates;
• Increasing repeat visits to the farm shop;
• Building demand for Christmas or another seasonal period;
• Growing sales of a higher-margin product;
• Launching a new diversification without distracting from an established one;
• Increasing awareness of an underused service;
• Or simply creating a steadier flow of customers so planning becomes easier.
• Once the commercial priority is clear, the marketing decisions become much easier.

Not every diversification deserves equal marketing attention

One of the most important jobs in farm diversification marketing is prioritisation.

A diversification may deserve more marketing attention because it is profitable, strategically important or currently underused. But turnover alone is not enough to make that decision.

I would look at five things.

1. Commercial value

How much useful profit does this part of the business create, not simply turnover?

2. Capacity

If marketing worked extremely well, could you actually serve the additional demand? Filling every table in the café is only helpful if the kitchen and team can cope.

3. Timing

Is there an important booking, buying or seasonal window approaching? A glamping business may need to build demand well before the dates it wants to fill.

4. Evidence of demand

Is this an established offer that customers already value, or are you still testing whether the market wants it?

5. Strategic role

Does this diversification support where you want the wider farm business to go? One enterprise may be relatively small now but strategically important because it creates repeat visits, supports the next generation or feeds customers into another part of the business.

That gives you a much stronger basis for allocating marketing time than simply promoting whichever area has gone quiet this week.

Revenue is not the only thing that makes a diversification valuable

This is where marketing and wider business strategy need to meet.

Imagine a farm shop has a busy product line that generates good sales but has a relatively low margin and lots of handling time. Another product sells less frequently but has a healthier margin, is made on the farm and strengthens the farm’s point of difference.

If marketing resources are limited, should both receive the same attention?

Probably not.

The same principle applies to services and experiences.

A fully booked activity might look successful, but if it needs so much staff time that it prevents the team from doing more profitable work, increasing demand may not be the right objective.

Marketing cannot fix an operational problem by creating more of it.

Before deciding what you want to sell more of, make sure selling more would genuinely improve the business.

Do not make the customer understand the whole farm before they can buy

Another issue appears when a diversified farm has several audiences.

The family booking a half-term activity may not be the same customer as the couple booking a weekend stay. The person buying premium beef may have different priorities from somebody visiting the café. A wholesale buyer may need completely different information again.

Internally, all of these activities belong to the same farm business.

Externally, the customer does not necessarily need to understand every part of it.

This is where some farm businesses accidentally make their marketing too complicated. One social media post, one website page or one email tries to speak to everybody at once.

The result is often a lot of information but no particularly strong reason for any one customer to act.

Your farm can absolutely have one overall brand while still giving different customers different messages, routes and calls to action.

Use one priority campaign rather than five competing messages

For most businesses, I would rather see one well-planned priority campaign than five half-finished ones.

Choose one clear objective for a defined period and build the marketing around it.

For example, if the priority is increasing shoulder-season accommodation bookings, you might focus on:

• The customer most likely to travel at that time;
• The reasons that period is attractive;
• The questions or objections stopping them from booking;
• The website page they should land on;
• The email audience most likely to respond;
• The social content that supports the same message;
• And the proof that gives them confidence to book.
• Other parts of the business do not disappear. They simply move into maintenance mode while the priority campaign receives more attention.

That is much easier to manage and much easier to measure.

Build your marketing around a rolling 90-day priority

Farm businesses change too quickly for a rigid annual marketing plan to dictate every activity, but working week to week is usually too reactive.

A rolling 90-day view is often a useful middle ground.

At the start of each period, ask:

1. What is the most important commercial objective now?
2. Which customer matters most for that objective?
3. What offer or part of the business are we prioritising?
4. What needs to happen before the customer is ready to buy?
5. What can we deliberately do less of during this period?

Then review and reset.

The exact answer may change with the weather, the farming calendar, staffing, customer demand or a new opportunity. That is not a failure of strategy. Good strategy creates direction while leaving room to adapt.

When everything feels important, the problem may be strategic rather than promotional

If you genuinely cannot decide which diversification, customer or objective deserves priority, that is useful information in itself.

It usually means the business needs a wider strategic decision before it needs another campaign.

Several revenue streams may need comparing. Customer groups may need separating. Capacity or margins may need reviewing. The role of each diversification within the wider farm may need to be clearer.

That is why understanding the farm comes before the marketing.

For a business with one clearly defined issue, our Farm Marketing Action Plan can help identify the immediate priorities and practical next steps. Where several diversifications, audiences or revenue streams need to be weighed against each other, a deeper marketing strategy is usually more appropriate.

Either way, the goal is the same: stop trying to market everything equally and put your effort where it can make the most useful difference to the business.