For operators
Marketing for farms that host visitors
Cellar doors, farm gates, farm stays, u-picks, paddock-to-plate dining and on-farm experiences. If people come onto your property and spend money, you are in the visitor economy, whether or not you would ever describe yourself that way.
Most of our agritourism clients call themselves farmers
That is not a small thing. It shapes where you look for help, what you think you need, and which conversations you never have. Tourism grants, regional tourism organisations, visitor centres, the state tourism campaigns — a lot of it is aimed at "tourism operators", and a grower who runs a cellar door on weekends does not read that word as meaning them.
So the marketing gets treated as a side project. The farm gets the attention, because the farm is the business. Meanwhile the part of the operation with the highest margin per visitor is the one nobody is actively working on.
What is actually different about marketing a farm business
- Your season is not the tourism season. Harvest, lambing, truffle season and school holidays do not line up, and a campaign calendar that ignores that is useless to you.
- You are usually selling a product and an experience at the same time — the wine and the cellar door, the truffles and the hunt, the produce and the farm gate.
- Your address is your problem. People need to find a property, on a road, often without a street number and often without reception.
- Weather and yield decide what you can offer, sometimes at a fortnight's notice.
- You already have a full-time job, and it is not this.
None of that is exotic. It just means the plan has to be built around a working farm rather than around a marketing calendar someone else drew up.
Where we start
Usually with whatever is closest to the money. For most farm businesses that is being findable — the Google Business Profile, the map pin, the opening hours that are actually correct — long before it is anything clever.
After that it depends on whether you are trying to fill a quiet weekday, sell more per visit, or build something that does not need you standing at the gate.
Proof
A grower who had no online presence at all
Deitos Winery grew grapes in Manjimup for years and sold the fruit to another producer, who bottled it under their own label. Once they launched their own brand and opened a cellar door, they had a product and a venue and almost nothing online.
We built their first website, set up wine and truffle sales and event bookings, and took over the Google Business Profile. In the first six months, of 870 searches that surfaced the business, 567 were for the generic term "winery" — most of the people finding them were not looking for them. They were looking for somewhere to go.
We work in the sector, not just for it
Andy Burns sits on the board of the Western Australia Agritourism Association, and SATM is a listed sponsor. The association’s website, its regular email newsletter, its social media and its branding are delivered by SATM under that sponsorship, and Andy wrote the organisation’s Strategic Plan.
He is also a speaker at international agritourism and ecotourism conferences, and SATM is based in Manjimup, in the middle of the Southern Forests growing region. The clients are neighbours.
Not sure any of this applies to you?
If you are a farmer who has ever wondered whether the cellar door, the farm stay or the farm gate could be doing more, that is the conversation. No charge, no pitch deck.