Finding Fans on Facebook: How Dan & Debbie's Creamery Utilizes Social Media for Their Farm
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we chat with Josie Rozum of Dan & Debbie's Creamery. We dive into the importance of social media and how to utilize platforms like Facebook to better engage with followers. Dan & Debbie's Creamery is a family dairy farm located in Ely, Iowa that provides farm fresh, exceptionally-made dairy products, while adding value to sustainability, innovation and animal welfare.
www.dananddebbies.com
www.barn2door.com/resources
-
[00:00:00]
Rory Loughran: Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. I'm Rory, your host for today's episode. We've got a great conversation for you today with one of our market development experts and a member of our Farm Advisor Network, Josie Rozum of Dan & Debbie's Creamery located Ely, Iowa.
Welcome Josie, it's great to have you cuz it's been a little while since you've been on the podcast with us. Could you start by introducing yourself and your Farm and what you guys produce?
Josie Rozum: Yeah it's great to be back here. My name's Josie Rozum with Dan & Debbie's Creamery and my family and I started dairy farming 25 years ago. My parents [00:01:00] started a small farm in Ely, Iowa and five years ago, we opened a Creamery where we take all of the milk from our family farm over to the Creamery and turn it into wholesome dairy products. Although the last five years have gone by really fast, we're so excited to be here and so glad that we started this journey.
Rory Loughran: I guess this is a little off the cuff, but 25 years, so what kind of inspired your parents to start the dairy? That's a big undertaking, did they have background in agriculture or dairy or what kind of inspired that?
Josie Rozum: My mom grew up on a farm. My dad was a city boy, and she still can't quite figure out why he wanted to get into farming. You don't see that first generation farmer very often and early on in their courtship, he got bit by the farming bug when he was helping out at my mom's farm, and he just knew that this was something that he wanted to do for the rest of his life. And I think all of us kids kind of got bit by that same bug because we have a love and passion for agriculture like you wouldn't believe.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, that's [00:02:00] really cool to hear. It's definitely not a common way to start up, especially in dairy, I feel like. And now that's right, cuz all of the kids now work at the dairy and at the Creamery, correct?
Josie Rozum: Very close to all. So I'm one of six kids. So grew up with a really big family and four out of six of us actually are involved full time. So that in itself is very unique to have that many kids come back.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, that's awesome, that's really cool. You guys signed up with Barn2Door kind of early on in 2020. What were some of the primary reasons you guys chose to use Barn2Door at the time?
Josie Rozum: You know, when we first started the Creamery, we knew home delivery would be something that we wanted to look into. We just love that nostalgic milk man, where they deliver the milk right to your doorstep. There's just something that I think consumers really love about that, and it just kinda, it feels like simpler times when you have a milk man delivering your milk. And so that was something that we really wanted to get to. I think the pandemic is really what pushed us [00:03:00] to speed forward with this, because so many people were doing home deliveries. But I struggled for about eight months finding some sort of a platform or software that could manage home delivery that was affordable and made things simple because I knew this was gonna be a huge undertaking and I didn't have a lot of time to give to it.
So if we were gonna do it, we just had to find a software that was gonna help us manage it. And after looking through three or four different softwares, I came across Barn2Door and it didn't take long after a couple of meetings and kind of a demo of it that I decided that this was a perfect fit for us.
Rory Loughran: Mm-hm, and what kind of, mainly in terms of just the delivery fulfillments kind of fitting that, were you guys doing delivery already? Like, were you able to kind of see how it would pair with what you guys were doing?
Josie Rozum: We offered wholesale delivery. So we partner with a lot of grocery stores and restaurants. So I have a background and knowledge into how delivery works and even with our [00:04:00] 50 wholesale partners, it's a lot to manage. So I knew if we were gonna take on home delivery, we're talking about tripling, quadrupling our customer base.
We needed something that was going to be easy to use and easy for our customers to use. I didn't wanna have to handle questions and phone calls all the time of, "hey, can you help me fix my order", and this and that. So, we were kind of looking at it from the backend perspective, but then also what's gonna be easiest on our customers.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. So then eventually you sign up with Barn2Door. How did that initial setup go and what was kind of like the "getting started" like?
Josie Rozum: You know, I was so nervous starting out because, first of all, it was just a brand new thing to our business and just juggling everything else that was going on, I was a little hesitant to even move forward with it, but I have to say the transition was seamless and I've never felt like I had somebody so willing to answer my questions early on, than my account rep from Barn2Door. They were just [00:05:00] always there to help smooth over the process. Any problems I ran into, I felt like they were resolved almost instantly. So setting up, getting trained on it, it was all super easy and seamless for us.
Rory Loughran: That's really great to hear and that's definitely what those folks are there for to kind of help you through that process, cuz it, it is a lot. And when you're managing a farm on the other side of things, you know that usually the software setup isn't always your first priority, so it's nice to have that help. So then after you were working with Barn2Door as a customer for a while, you actually kind of joined the team as a Farm Advisor. Could you talk about what you kind of do in this role and what some of your favorite aspects of that are.
Josie Rozum: You know, I think my favorite role as a Barn2Door Advisor is just being able to help other farmers. I completely understand all of the struggles that they're going through, how hard it is to manage the business side of your business when your passion might be, you know, getting your hands dirty in the fields or taking care of the animals.
When you want to sell [00:06:00] direct to consumer, you have to be able to balance both because you're in charge of selling all of your products. And I think being an advisor to other farmers is so rewarding to me because I get to help them see that there is benefit and value into marketing your products.
And it doesn't have to be a ton of time that you devote to it, but you do have to, you know, put one foot in front of the other and try to move forward to, to tell your story.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. And I think you make a great point too, like about you wanting to help farmers, but I think farmers want to hear from you too, you know? It's one thing for Barn2Door to, to say things, but it's even better when, you know, we can have someone like you be able to speak to how you've made managing your online store work with your life, like with your family, your farm, everything else that comes with that.
So it's really great to be able to have you guys speak to those. Well, in this episode of the podcast, we're gonna be discussing some of your strategies in social media that are kind of unique to Dan & Debbie's [00:07:00] Creamery specifically around Facebook. But maybe to start out, let's kind of ease into it, I guess, with your approach to social media.
What is kind of your goal with your social media pages?
Josie Rozum: Well, I think like many small farms, our marketing budget is as close to zero as you can get. I mean, we just don't have a lot of money to devote and time is also a thing. So social media has been just a great platform, because it's free. We can still, you know, put out information and I think my strategy behind everything we do social media is really just about getting our story out there and how we do things.
I don't have a very complex, rigorous, you know, marketing strategy if you will. I keep it pretty simple and I think consumers like it, and I think, you know, honestly it works for us and I think most farmers just have to do as much as they can with what works for them in their operation.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. Consistency is obviously [00:08:00] very key on social media and so what is kind of your approach to that and maybe what would be your advice for farmers that are like, "I'm too busy for this, I don't have time to at least kind of keep a consistent flow of focus content on social media"?
Josie Rozum: I think first and foremost, like it's so imperative that you do something on social media, whatever it is, whatever it may be. It might vary from farm to farm, but you have to start doing something and you have to keep the momentum going. If you just post one sporadically every so often, you're not gonna gain the momentum and the traction that you want in creating your brand and getting, you know, awareness of what you're doing out there.
And so one piece of advice that I would give to farmers, whether you're starting off or whether you already have a Facebook page or a marketing strategy is just dedicate a small amount of time every single week to doing social media. It doesn't have to be a very long amount of time. Facebook in fact has come up with some really great planning tools to where you can schedule your [00:09:00] posts in advance. I find that to be extremely helpful. So even when we're in our busiest week of the year, I sit down on a Monday morning and I will just knock out all of my posts for the week. Now it does require you to be a little bit more proactive. You've gotta start stockpiling photos and content, but the easiest content that I can recommend is: what are you doing today? Tell your followers what you're doing today, because I think that's such an interesting thing for consumers, whether farmers wanna believe it or not, they want to know what their farmer's doing and it's very simple and easy to do.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, it's really cool. And a lot of times the Dan & Debbie's Instagram account, you guys will post just a video of one of the staff in the Creamery, because you guys sell ice cream and all your dairy products right out of the Creamery storefront. So that's, it's kind of a cool opportunity to get to showcase that, but then you'll just have an employee kind of saying what everybody's doing that day.
And it's really cool to hear, you know, especially when they [00:10:00] say something like, "oh, the operations team is doing some research and development on new ice cream flavors or something like that. And that's really fun content to get to share with your audience and even maybe starts to build some anticipation for the ice cream to come.
What are some of the other examples of types of content that you guys are posting on social media? Cuz I think that's a question people get a lot is they're like, "oh, what do I post? I feel like I don't have anything to say or anything that people will find interesting." So what are some other examples of those things?
Josie Rozum: Yeah. So, like I said, I think the biggest thing is: what are you doing today? Whether it's a picture of you in the field harvesting something, whether it's a picture of a broken down tractor, because we've all had broken down tractors. People want like real, authentic, what's happening now things. So I think that's the, probably the easiest thing.
I also think some other really great pieces of content are historical pieces of your business. So how did you get to where you are today? It didn't just happen overnight. There's actually probably a lot of really interesting stories that can be told. And if you can [00:11:00] pull little, you know, snippets from that story and share that, I think that's great. And it's fun to show throwback photos of how far you've come. I think those are other really great content pieces.
Another area that we try to focus on in our social media is the education piece. So what can we do to educate consumers on how things happen on our dairy farm, how things happen in the Creamery. You're not gonna find large processors and then manufacturers sharing those inside scoops on what's going on. So if you can kind of give them little teasers and share, like "here's what we do on a day to day basis", and educate them on how our food is grown and produced, I think that's really interesting.
And then the last thing that I think is really simple, it's just something that's entertaining, whether it's a cow sticking her tongue out or your kids on the farm in the dirt, because we all have dirty kids on the farm, that's stuff that people connect with and they feel like, "gosh, I've got a real family that I'm [00:12:00] supporting by buying these products."
I think that's really important and those are things that we try to do when we're coming up with content.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, that's really cool, and I think something that you said there about the educational piece is it's almost like serves a dual purpose. One because it's fun for people to get to learn about the dairy and the dairy cows and the processes that you guys are using to create your ice cream and milk and stuff, but it also kind of helps to build some trust and provide that transparency that you noted there that you don't really get if you're buying from a big dairy at the grocery store or something like that. People get to see the practices and see how it's made and know that you guys are raising your cows sustainably and those types of methods, which is really cool.
Do you kind of make a point to have different content on your Facebook versus your Instagram, or do you try and send the same things to both? What's kind of your approach to the different social media platforms?
Josie Rozum: So I think during the busiest times of the year, when we don't have a lot of time to segment both out, we just share the same thing. So Instagram is [00:13:00] much more photograph heavy. So you wanna put really like beautiful photos and things of things happening, where Facebook you can tell more of a story.
So those would be better suited for, you know, the time of year where you're not quite as busy, but if you just wanna move forward and get content out there, which is primarily the most important, I would just get it out on both because there are some people that prefer Instagram that find information that way, and there are some people that find Facebook more appealing.
So just getting information out is the most important thing that you can do. If I've got a lot of photos, I utilize Instagram a lot more, maybe more frequently. If I've got a longer story that I wanna share, I lean back into Facebook. People are willing to read more I think on Facebook than they are on Instagram.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. That's really great advice there too. So one of the things that we really wanted to dive into today, is that Dan & Debbie's utilizes a, is it a private Facebook group?
Josie Rozum: [00:14:00] It's a private Facebook group that anybody can join. We just have to approve them.
Yep.
Rory Loughran: But you use this to communicate with customers. Could you maybe start by explaining what that Facebook group is for people that might not even know what a Facebook group is, and then how you use that for your Creamery customers?
Josie Rozum: Sure, when we first started our home delivery, we had already had a retail store. So we have a little farm store where we sell local goods, including our products. And I was really struggling because as we brought on home delivery, I wanted a way to just bombard those customers with things that we were offering, new products, new delivery zones, etc. But I didn't wanna overwhelm our current Facebook page because we have a lot of people from all over the United States that follow our Facebook page, but home delivery isn't an option for them.
So to bombard their pages with stuff that is kind of a torture for them, like they can't get this anyway, I wanted a way to just segment customers that were interested [00:15:00] in home delivery that were current customers and I came across Facebook groups and kind of did some research and it just seemed like it was the perfect fit for me to be able to segment some of those people through social media, as opposed to email marketing, because the statistics of how often people are on social media every day is mind blowing and I just need reach them.
I have to, of course, encourage all of our current customers to join, but then also anybody that's interested or they just don't care if they're bombarded by our stuff and they wanna join and hear it. That's kind of how it came to be and how I started utilizing Facebook groups.
So I have my Dan & Debbie's Creamery Facebook page, and then I have my Dan & Debbie's home delivery Facebook group.
Rory Loughran: Awesome. Yeah that's a really key distinction and probably a little bit more work for you there just getting all those people kind of transitioned over that. Could you maybe talk about how that went and how many people are in that Facebook group at this [00:16:00] point?
Josie Rozum: Yeah. So we have over 500 people in the Facebook group right now. Not all of them are current home delivery customers. There's a good portion that just wanna know when new zip codes become available. And then there's people, like I mentioned before, that really just love following us and wanna know everything that we're doing.
But it really has not been that difficult to get people to join because, the truth is, if they're home delivery customers, they wanna know that information they wanna know about new products and they realize they might not catch every single post that we post on our regular page. So every once in a while, I would say maybe once every other month, I kind of do a call on our main Facebook page saying, "hey, any home delivery customers that wanna join this group or any potential customers that are interested in knowing more, you know, go and like this group."
And it's been about a year since I created it and we're at 500. So I think it's a great way for [00:17:00] me to at least reach a segmented group through social media.
Rory Loughran: Mm-hm, definitely. I'm curious if you, do you think having this separate group to communicate directly with delivery customers and also kind of give you a reason to repeatedly point out like, "hey, we have delivery. If you want to know what's going on with delivery, join this Facebook group." Do you feel like that has contributed to people signing up whether for subscriptions or just ordering direct delivery orders from you guys?
Josie Rozum: Yeah, I definitely see the group helping in just increasing our orders overall, but I think it allows us to do a better job, and when I say us, I mean our team at the Creamery, to do a better job of communicating with customers. Some content that I might post on our home delivery group would be if there's a delivery delay.
So if something happened to our truck that morning, I don't have to bombard our 10,000 followers on Facebook, I can just focus on the 500 home delivery customers. If I have a new product that's [00:18:00] only available for home delivery and not in our store, I can go ahead and push it that way. If we wanna run just a segment and deal for home delivery customers, but not our customers in the store, we can hit those target audiences.
And then what I do in our home delivery group a lot is post recipes. So you guys are buying our products, here's how you use them. And I don't get overly complicated with recipes, it's usually whatever I'm cooking at home. I might just snap a pick and I've gotta feed the kids, so I might as well take a picture and make it beneficial to, you know, our customers as well.
So those are just a few ways that I utilize that.
Rory Loughran: Do you have any kind of prioritization for that content that goes into the delivery group and then what kind of comes to mind first? Do you usually think, "oh, I'd wanna post this on Facebook and then, oh, I could also put this in the delivery group", or like which one kind of comes first for you at this point?
Josie Rozum: Right now, I would say our main goal is probably our general Facebook page. However, Facebook has [00:19:00] grown tremendously over the last few years and even few months to where, when you're using the Facebook planner tool to schedule out your post, you can actually check a box that applies it to, if you want the same post to go to your home delivery group, you can have that.
So it's one post it's just hitting multiple people and that's really cool. And one other point Rory, I should make that I love about the groups is, it notifies every member of the group when a post has been made. So they're getting a notification on their smartphone or on their computer, whatever, that so and so posted in Dan & Debbie's home delivery, which I think is really cool because they won't get that on our other page.
So it does alert each person that's in there. And that's really helpful when you wanna get something your point across or get a post out there.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, one of the things I know we always talk about with email marketing is that it's typically a more effective tool than a lot of [00:20:00] just general posting on social media, because it is a more direct line of communication. You know, Instagram or Facebook can change their algorithm and you might not be showing up as much in front of people. Whereas with an email you're going straight to their inbox, but with the Facebook group, like you're saying you get that notification and obviously all 500 or so of these people that are in the group have already expressed a more vested interest in hearing directly from you.
So you're kind of just making it easier form by doing this group. I was wondering if you could maybe speak to that and how that has been able to provide a more direct line of communication. If you've seen kind of an increase in engagement using this group?
Josie Rozum: Yeah, I definitely think our ratio of followers are more engaged in the Facebook group than they are in our regular Facebook when you talk about total followers. I will say that's one area that I would really like to work on in the Facebook group. My dream for this group would be for these customers, this group of customers, our [00:21:00] home delivery customers that are utilizing this service, they can communicate with one another and share recipes and it be less of me spitting out information, and more about us sharing as like this community supporting this business and local products and stuff. So I'm by no means an expert in this. I know what works well, I see the value in it. All home delivery people that are in that group, they're really interested. Like they had to specifically seek this out. And so I see just that they're overall more interested in the topics.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. And I like what you said there about kind of turning that into a community, because that certainly is something that people can form a community around is your farm and your products. And, you know, maybe the goal obviously being that hopefully someday you're not the one always posting the recipes in there, but people are using your products and saying, "look what I made with the milk from Dan & Debbie's Creamery or my dessert from this ice cream that I got from there" and stuff like that. That's a really cool outcome to be [00:22:00] striving for.
Josie Rozum: Yeah, absolutely.
Rory Loughran: So far, obviously this is something you're continually working on and you've got goals in mind for, but if you were to break it down to like two or three things, what would you say have been some of the major outcomes of managing this Facebook group?
Josie Rozum: I think the biggest outcome is just offering really good customer service to those customers. It's sometimes hard to find proper ways to communicate with different people. And this has been a tool where we can give delivery updates. We can offer information about new products that's in a very popular way. Social media is, you know, not going anywhere anytime soon. And we're meeting our customers where they're at.
Text message would be another thing, but then you're talking about super increased costs and expenses. Email marketing we still utilize for home delivery customers, but we've just found that when we need to get a post out there really quick, it takes no time at all to hop on the group, post [00:23:00] something, let them know what's going on. So increased communication and just delivering a good customer experience, I think is one thing that we've gotten out of it too, is just letting them know what we have to offer. I think that's the best way that we can do that. When we have a new product that we're offering, we put it on that group and we let them know what's happening and it's funny because as soon as I post a new product that we have, I usually start seeing the notifications coming in that we've made some sales.
So that's a quick and easy way. I know it's working.
Rory Loughran: That's what you wanna see, that's awesome. I'm kind of curious, you know, social media can kind of be a little bit of the Wild West. Are there any things that if a farmer's listening to this and they're like, "oh, I should try this out", are there any things you would tell them to be wary of, or maybe some mistakes they could avoid?
Josie Rozum: Oh, gosh, I've probably made every mistake in the book. I think, you know, sometimes you feel like you have to have this grand plan [00:24:00] in marketing and there is a time and a place where you should, but when time is limited, you just gotta get to it. Don't worry about having so much of a plan. Just make a, an hour a week, set yourself an hour a week, whatever time it works for you and schedule that post because the biggest mistake I think you can make is giving it a little bit of a try, but not going all in. I know early on, it was so easy for me to be like, "oh, get to social media tomorrow", but then you would see over the course of that week sales trickle down and it's like, "gosh, I gotta keep letting people know about what we're doing."
I feel like if you give it the time it needs, give it a couple of months, you're gonna see the return really fast. But you can't give up, you gotta keep just doing it and letting people know what you're doing, how you're doing it differently, and what you have to offer them. And I think everybody's gonna be successful if they can do that.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. Anything organic on social media takes time and [00:25:00] persistence. Nothing tends to happen overnight as fast as everything moves in that world. It's kind of funny how that works. I guess then my last question for you would be, cuz I know you are managing this group, the regular Facebook page, the Instagram, and as you mentioned, email marketing as well, and I know that can become a lot of different channels for farmers to manage.
So what would maybe be some advice you have to keep all of those things kind of in balance and not get overwhelmed or too sucked into one thing, but keeping them all kind of going and communicating with your customers?
Josie Rozum: Yeah, I think just setting some parameters for yourself. Example: I wanna post one time a day, every day of the week. It doesn't mean that you have to dedicate every single day to that. It just means set some time aside on Monday or Sunday, or whenever it makes sense for you and knock out those scheduled posts for the week. Commit to one newsletter a month and mark it on your calendar and just knock it out each month.
But the biggest disservice that you can do to [00:26:00] yourself and to your business is to set those parameters and then just let it fall to the wayside because you're just gonna get pushed further back. You really gotta stick with it and the returns will pay off over time. We've definitely seen that, you know, just by sharing our story, what we're doing, what we stand for, what's important to us, over five years we now have 10,000 plus followers on Facebook and it's all been very organic. We don't, you know, do a ton of "like our page! Like our page!" It's just, you know, our customers and our followers sharing and then other people interested in our story.
So, just stick with a really tangible plan and you can do it. It really doesn't have to take much time and I, I do think that, especially if you don't have this skill set or if marketing isn't your thing, start very basic. Don't set yourself up for failure. Start basic, and then I think you'll find like, "oh, I got a hundred likes on this post. I'm gonna do it again tomorrow." So, you'll get [00:27:00] some confidence as you continue going.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. And I like what you said there about that organic growth too, because ultimately it, it is slower. But you're building a following of stronger followers, I guess, really. People that are actually invested in you and your story and want to be there and that will actually like and share and maybe go to your store and purchase things. So it's ultimately, as we keep saying, it's slower, but it's better.
Josie Rozum: Yeah, exactly.
Rory Loughran: Awesome. Well I guess also then just to wrap things up, what's kind of next for Dan & Debbie's? Are there any new products coming across for the summertime or anything exciting on the horizon there?
Josie Rozum: We always have new ice cream flavors coming up. I think I've probably shared that my mom is our kind of our ice cream flavor guru. She comes up with the best flavors. In fact, we just harvested a ton of rhubarb for our famous strawberry rhubarb pie ice cream, which is phenomenal, but mozzarella cheese is on the docket next, and we're gonna experiment with that over the summer when we have time. But always coming [00:28:00] up with new things, trying to, you know, keep consumers happy and give them something new to look forward to.
Rory Loughran: That's really exciting. I gotta find my way over to Iowa.
Josie Rozum: You're welcome anytime.
Rory Loughran: That's great. I wanted to extend my thanks to Josie for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barn2Door, we're humbled to support thousands of farmers across the country, including farmers like Josie who implement sustainable agricultural practices and support their local community.
If you would like to ask Josie any questions directly, you can meet her and other Farm Advisors in Barn2Door Connect. To learn more and register to attend, you can go to barn2door.com/connect. Sessions occur weekly. For more information on Dan & Debbie's Creamery, you can visit dananddebbies.com and to learn more about Barn2Door, including access to numerous free resources and best practices for your Farm, you can go to barn2door.com/resources.
Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next week.
[00:29:00]