Pastured Poultry Marketing

I'm finally starting my pastured poultry business with a batch of 75 Cornish X that are in a brooder now, and will go in a Salatin-style movable chicken pen in a couple of weeks. I'm starting small (half of the chickens are already pre-sold to family), but I want to start marketing my excess chickens. We're planning to use local Facebook groups and Craigslist to start, along with a few ads in nearby coffee shops. Which is where I'm looking for help.

Does anyone have any sample advertisements they would be willing to share?

These birds will be GMO-free, humanely raised on pasture, with no antibiotics added. Are there any other things we should mention? (Chickens will not be certified organic).

Thanks!

I don't know how much this helps, but I'll give you what I've got. Last year we started putting informational tags on our birds that double as business cards. Our goal was to sort of mimic high-end spirits. As such, we came up with a list of features we wanted to highlight, and played around with the wording to express the important points while still keeping it concise. What we ended up with is this:

"At Providence Farm we raise only slow-growing heritage breeds of poultry for your table. Our birds are given free range of the pastures and woods, supplemented with non-GMO grains, and processed in small batches on our farm. The result is healthier, tastier, clearly superior poultry."

I think we succeeded in packing a lot into relatively few words, which means the (in your case potential) customer can understand what we're doing and why it's significant without having to read paragraphs. In our case, we just want to remind the customer why they bought our product in the first place, and to prepare them for what they're about to eat. And I think we're expressing somewhat more than just a few over-used bullet points like "pastured" and "non-GMO" that lose significance the more people see them.

That about sums it up. The tag is tied onto the neck of the bag, so when the customer removes it he or she is now holding a make-do business card with our logo and contact info. Maybe they just throw it away, but we've at least given them the option.

Thanks Wes. This was very helpful. My wife recently started doing something like this with her Etsy products, but for some reason I hadn't considered doing it for our chicken. It's a great idea, and I hope you don't mind if I copy some of your text since we're not exactly competing for business.

Are you printing these yourself, or did you order cards for a more professional look?

We drew up a rough sketch of how we wanted the cards to look, then took it to a local print shop. Formatting was included in their price. They were a bit more costly than ordering through Vistaprint, for example, and the cards are a little lighter than I'd like, but they do their job and I was able to support a local business to boot.

We use these cards to specify which breed of chicken is in the package, but they do double (and triple...) duty for ducks, guineas, poussin, geese, turkeys, quail...

Feel free to use whatever relevant text you'd like.

Jayden Thompson wrote:I'm finally starting my pastured poultry business with a batch of 75 Cornish X that are in a brooder now, and will go in a Salatin-style movable chicken pen in a couple of weeks.  I'm starting small (half of the chickens are already pre-sold to family), but I want to start marketing my excess chickens.  We're planning to use local Facebook groups and Craigslist to start, along with a few ads in nearby coffee shops.  Which is where I'm looking for help.

Does anyone have any sample advertisements they would be willing to share?

These birds will be GMO-free, humanely raised on pasture, with no antibiotics added.  Are there any other things we should mention?  (Chickens will not be certified organic).  

Thanks!

A little late to the party but how did using FB groups and coffee shops as marketing avenues work out for you? Are you still selling chickens that way or did you try something else?

Interesting idea.

I will note that at least in WA state, and I'd assume many others as well, you must have a permit to sell your poultry.  Even if it's just a few excess birds.  In WA there's a special permit for small scale farmers that is good for up to 1000 chickens per year.  The record keeping and other regulatory requirements are a lot less than for larger producers, and the license is cheaper.  But it's still quite a burden to comply with, and honestly for me it wouldn't make sense to get the license for a money making venture.  1000 chickens is only $20-30k in gross revenue, and likely just $5-15k in profits depending on how you feed them.  A lot of rules to worry about, and liability to incur, not to mention the work involved in raising and slaughtering 1000 chickens for that amount of upside potential.