Writing blogs for your website is one of the best and easiest ways to improve your online visibility for your lamb meat box business. But we know coming up with ideas for your blog content can be tricky: it’s always harder to see what is interesting to your customers when you are the one doing it every day.
If you run another farm diversification business, check out this blog for more ideas.
Why is blogging so useful for your lamb meat box business?
One of the best things you can do to improve the visibility of your website yourself is to create targeted blog content that is SEO friendly. To make blogs SEO friendly, you need to cover topics that resonate with your ideal client and match how they search for your solution or business online. You can use guesswork to do this, but we would always recommend having keyword analysis completed to have a clearer picture of the topics and phrases you should be focusing on. You will also need to make sure you understand how to upload blogs to your website and check the SEO settings while doing this. For WordPress sites, Yoast is a very easy way to make sure you have checked off all the SEO tasks during the upload process.
You will notice many of the blog titles suggested in this blog and many on our website have numbers in them. This is for a good reason. Statistically, people are far more likely to click on a blog that is in a list format or has a number in the title. In fact, depending on your industry, it is up to 7 times more likely that someone will click on the blog if it has a number in the title.
The choice of number is also important. Human psychology means we are more likely to engage/notice some numbers over others. Prime numbers such as 3, 5, and 7 are top of this list, but 10 also ranks well, as do odd multiples of 7, such as 21 and 35. For most blog content, I would try to stick to 3, 5, 7, or 10 as any more than that and it can become too long or the quality of the content will drop which has a negative impact on SEO ranking.
Using numbers can also be helpful if you are not a keen or confident blog writer, as it can help to focus your thoughts and encourage you to complete sections of the blog like a checklist, making the process less painful. For example:
5 top tips for cooking the perfect lamb roast
As a lamb meat box business, you sell directly to consumers. Blogs can make an especially large impact on direct-to-consumer businesses, particularly recipe blogs for food producers. They are one of the easiest blogs to write and tend to be very well received by customers.
We often find that farmers, and often farmers’ wives, will have a store of fantastic seasonal recipes that they have used for many years. You can draw on these to create blog content. Recipes help to directly sell your produce by linking the recipe to a buy- ingredients option, but they can also be used to encourage customers to try ingredients they are unsure about. We find this particularly useful for meat producers who want to get a better carcass balance, as they can use recipes to teach their customers how to cook with less common cuts of meat or with offal. Blog ideas could be:
What are lamb sweetbreads, and how do you cook them?
Or
Farmer’s favourite lamb and kidney pie
Or
Lamb koftas with tzatziki and Greek salad
You can use blogs to educate your customers on your products. This has two main benefits: firstly, it manages customer expectations, which means you are less likely to have unhappy customers. Secondly, it can help to reduce fears around purchases or encourage customers to try something new.
A blog that manages expectations should relate to a frequently asked question or information about how your product is delivered/packaged. For example:
5 things to know about our lamb meat boxes
This could include information about how the meat is butchered, what the box will include, how the box is packaged and how it is delivered.
A blog that reduces purchase fears could relate to educating customers on unusual meat cuts or providing guidance on frequent customer concerns. For example:
What is the difference between lamb, hogget and mutton?
This blog should include top tips, the benefits of eating offal or nose-to-tail, and some recipe ideas that could be linked to other recipe-style blogs as we mentioned above.
Education is one of the key benefits of blogging for your lamb meat box business. The number of programmes on TV about farming right now should tell you what a huge appetite the public has for education on the farming industry and particularly individual farmers. However, we also know that there is a huge disconnect between the general public and their food, so we have to remember that education is the key. One aspect of this is to educate people on how to make better food choices, or at least to make more informed food choices. Examples of blogs that fit this idea include:
What does it mean to be RSPCA Approved?
Or
How to check if your lamb is from the UK?
The other aspect of education that is important is about management methods. People broadly understand the difference between barn-kept, free-range and organic. This is mostly due to the huge campaigns surrounding egg production in the mid 2000s. But people have less concept of how this translates to other types of food production. And they are almost clueless on the differences between management practices that are better or worse from an environmental standpoint. Blog ideas could include:
How can sheep farming benefit rewilding?
Or
Why we chose to produce [insert breed], a native/rare breed
For more farm marketing tips for your meat box business, check out this blog.
