The key to creating a successful farm diversification is farm marketing, but it can be hard to know where to start or what to talk about. This blog provides you with content ideas, and while we have focused on blog content, many of these could be adapted to social media posts as well.
Beekeeping can be an ideal farm diversification option for many types of farms, particularly for arable farms, vegetable farms and those who are heavily involved in ecological schemes. Maintaining honey bee colonies on a farm supports the pollination of crops while also contributing to wider ecological benefits. Better yet, you can turn beekeeping into an additional income stream through honey sales or by selling beekeeping equipment, courses or even bees. We have included blog ideas for both honey sales and beekeeping-related services.
Writing blogs for your honey business is one of the best ways to improve your online visibility and search engine optimisation. But coming up with ideas can be hard, so we have compiled a list of blog ideas to keep you going for the whole year and beyond. As a honey business, you can write a few different types of blogs, so we have broken our blog ideas into blog types.
Recipe blogs are an extremely effective farm marketing tool for any business that produces food or drink products. The demand for recipe content is huge and despite the massive number of blogs, articles and books that provide recipes, there is always a demand for more.
Use your personal recipe to make this feel personal and homely. Add in some top tips or advice for common mistakes to increase the length of your recipe and also keep users reading on. You can then do a shortened version for social media, including a reel of you pouring the honey into the recipe with a piece of trending audio.
By producing recipes using honey in new and different ways, you can increase demand from your customers for honey as they start to see new ways to use it. Most people will likely see honey as being something to put on toast or maybe in a dessert, but they may not consider all the ways honey can be used, from savoury recipes to an alternative to refined sugar.
For the blog, explain each of the ways in detail and add in a mini recipe or serving suggestion, then do a social media post version for each of the ideas and a bullet point style post with all the ideas. This would also work well as a Reel on Instagram or Facebook. For more information on Instagram Reels, check out this blog.
Try to ensure you have a balance of common or obvious recipe ideas and more unusual ideas: the common ones will gain larger search volumes – number of searches per month – but the more unusual ones will keep users coming back for more and will likely help sell more honey.
Think about using honey in savoury dishes: honey glazed pork for the BBQ, or honey on baked Camembert, etc. You can do more than 5; these are just suggestions. Create a list of ideas with mini recipes/serving suggestions, and if you find some of the recipes would make good stand-alone blogs, you can pull these out to write up at a later date; this is a great tool for creating more blog ideas as you write.
As above, these can also all work as social media posts and Reels. You could also ask for feedback from your followers or ask them for their recipe ideas in a poll-style post. This type of post is fantastic for increasing engagement on social media.
Educational blogs help to teach your customers about your business and products. The goal should be to create better, more educated customers who are able to advocate for your business when telling others about your business. For honey sales, this should focus on the process of making honey and the different types of honey.
You can explain how to use these products differently and why they store differently. Swap this for runny versus set honey if you prefer, or compare two different flavours of honey if you make flavoured honey, such as lavender honey.
You can also use educational blogs to highlight the value of your products and the differences between you and your competitors.
Use a title like this to explain why your products are different from supermarket honey and how eating the honey can benefit customers beyond just tasting good. The medicinal benefits of honey have had some more attention in recent years, so this is an ideal topic to capitalise on.
Consider educating your audience on other types of products as well, such as beeswax or honeycomb. This is a good way of upselling customers and making use of by-products from honey production.
You can include links in this blog to where to buy the beeswax or products you make with beeswax. If you collaborate with another artisan who uses your beeswax to make other products, then you may wish to also link through to their site or let them collaborate with you on this blog.
This blog title is an ideal way to educate customers about the plight of bees in the UK and their importance to the wider ecosystem. By giving customers practical advice on how they can help bees in their own gardens, you can also highlight the work you are doing on your farm to help support bees and other insects.
If you are also interested in providing beekeeping services, selling beekeeping equipment or offering courses, then you will need to consider this as part of your farm marketing. You need to consider who your ideal customers are and what their common questions are. Experienced beekeepers are likely to have different topics of interest and may use different language to newbie beekeepers.
This blog title is more focused on semi-experienced beekeepers who may simply want to expand their knowledge or confirm their previous knowledge. Talk about how to reduce the risk of swarming and what to do it if it should happen. You could also include advice on how to handle collecting swarms if called in by the public, as often happens when bee swarms appear in people’s homes.
This blog would be a good selling opportunity as you can highlight the pros and cons of different hive set-ups. While also recommending which ones you would use, include links to buy those items from you. This could be expanded into a wide series looking at each of the main pieces of beekeeping equipment. It would also translate well to social media posts.
This blog is focused on newbie beekeepers who may be worried about maintaining their hive correctly. It would be a good place to promote your beekeeping courses and any specific equipment such as bee feed or similar. This blog helps you to position yourself as an expert in your field, which adds further value to your services.
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 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 on your farm marketing and encourage you to complete sections of the blog like a checklist, making the process less painful.
