Your Best Farm Customer Is Not Always The One Who Spends The Most

When businesses talk about their ideal customer, the conversation often becomes very demographic very quickly.

How old are they? Where do they live? What do they earn? Are they a family, a couple or a business buyer?

Those things can be useful, but for an established farm or rural business I think there is a more important question to ask first:

Which customers actually make the business better?

Your biggest-spending customer is not automatically your best customer. A customer can generate plenty of revenue while taking up a disproportionate amount of staff time, buying low-margin products, only purchasing when there is a discount or creating operational headaches every time they order.

Another customer may spend slightly less in one transaction but buy regularly, choose your higher-margin products, recommend you to other people and fit neatly with the way the business operates.

From a marketing point of view, those two customers should not necessarily receive the same level of attention.

Start by defining what valuable means to your farm business

The most useful customer is the one who supports the kind of business you are trying to build.

That means looking beyond the initial sale.

I would normally consider:

– revenue;

– gross margin;

– repeat purchasing;

– customer lifetime value;

– cost and time to serve;

– likelihood of referral;

– seasonality;

– operational fit;

– and strategic value to the wider business.

Some of those are easy to measure. Others require judgement.

For example, a regular farm shop customer who spends £35 every week may ultimately be more valuable than somebody who makes one £250 purchase at Christmas and never returns.

A glamping guest who books directly, stays during a quieter period and returns every year may be more attractive than a higher-value booking through a platform that charges commission and only fills a date you could have sold easily anyway.

A wholesale customer may place large orders, but if the margin is thin and every order requires extra administration, it may not be the customer group you want your marketing to prioritise.

The point is not that one customer is good and another is bad.

It is that different customers create different kinds of value.

Look at margin, not just sales

Turnover is often the easiest number to see, which is why it tends to dominate decisions.

But marketing should not automatically be used to grow the highest-turnover customer group.

Imagine you sell several products through your farm shop. One category sells extremely well but has low margins because most of the value goes to the supplier. Another category has lower overall sales but is made on the farm and leaves a much healthier margin.

If you can attract more customers who value the second category, the business may benefit more even if total footfall does not change dramatically.

This is also why discounts need to be considered carefully. A customer who only buys when prices are reduced may make the sales figures look good during a promotion while contributing relatively little profit.

Useful marketing decisions begin with understanding which sales you actually want more of.

Factor in how easy the customer is to serve

Operational fit is one of the most overlooked parts of customer segmentation.

Every business has constraints.

Staffing. Delivery routes. Check-in days. Production capacity. Parking. Kitchen covers. Stock availability. Time.

Your ideal customer should fit reasonably well with those realities.

For example, if a meat-box business has an efficient delivery route covering a particular area, attracting more customers in that area may be more valuable than generating scattered orders across the country.

If an accommodation business has a recurring midweek gap, a customer who can travel outside weekends might be strategically valuable.

If a farm café already has queues on Saturday lunchtime, spending heavily to attract even more people at that exact time may simply create poorer service.

More demand is not always better demand.

Good marketing should help create demand that the business can serve profitably and well.

Repeat customers deserve serious attention

Many farm diversification businesses have a natural advantage when it comes to repeat business.

Customers can return to the farm shop, reorder meat boxes, rebook accommodation, attend another event, buy seasonal products or recommend the business to somebody else.

That means the value of the customer relationship can continue long after the first purchase.

When reviewing your customer groups, ask:

– How often could this person realistically buy?

– Is there a natural next purchase?

– Do they need reminding to return?

– Could email marketing or a loyalty scheme help?

– Are there other parts of the farm business that would genuinely interest them?

A good customer journey should make the next step easy rather than treating every sale as a completely new beginning.

Use your existing data before inventing a customer persona

You may already have a lot of the information you need.

Look at your accounts, booking system, ecommerce platform, email database, customer feedback and even the knowledge sitting in the heads of the people who serve customers every day.

Questions worth asking include:

– Which customers return most often?

– Which products do they buy?

– What is the average spend?

– Which sales have the strongest margins?

– Where do the easiest customers come from?

– What do your best customers say they value?

– Which customers create the most referrals?

– Are there buying patterns around location, timing or type of order?

You do not need perfect data before you can make a better decision.

Even a small amount of evidence can be more useful than building a beautifully detailed persona based mainly on assumptions.

Segment customers by motivation as well as demographics

Two customers can look almost identical on paper and buy for completely different reasons.

Take a farm shop customer.

One may care primarily about provenance and supporting local farming.

Another may care about exceptional quality.

Another may value convenience and the ability to buy everything for a meal in one place.

Another may visit because the farm shop is part of a wider leisure experience.

Those motivations affect the messages that will resonate.

The same applies to rural B2B customers. Two businesses of a similar size may have completely different priorities: price, reliability, specialist knowledge, speed, flexibility or long-term support.

Understanding why somebody chooses you is often more useful than simply knowing their age and postcode.

Choose a priority customer without excluding everybody else

Focusing your marketing does not mean refusing to serve anyone outside your ideal group.

It means deciding who the marketing is principally designed to attract.

That customer should influence:

– the messages on your website;

– the proof and testimonials you feature;

– the offers you create;

– the channels you prioritise;

– the content you produce;

– the timing of campaigns;

– and the experience you build around the sale.

When you try to make every message relevant to everyone, it usually becomes bland enough to mean very little to anyone.

The right customer makes growth easier

For established farm businesses, customer segmentation should be a commercial decision, not just a marketing exercise.

The strongest customer group is normally the one that combines useful revenue with healthy margin, repeat potential, good operational fit and a genuine reason to value what makes your business different.

That is the kind of customer you can build sustainable marketing around.

Our free Farm Marketing Strategy Workbook can help you start working through your audience and business priorities yourself. If you have an established diversification and would like an objective view of where the immediate marketing opportunities lie, the Farm Marketing Action Plan is another useful starting point.

The important thing is to stop asking only, ‘Who could buy from us?’ and start asking, ‘Which customers are we actually trying to build the business around?’