How to Pick a Fruitful Marketing Strategy: Three Juicy Takeaways from Walmart’s “Picked by Farmers" Campaign

Recently, Walmart has launched a series of video spots they call “Picked by Farmers, Guaranteed by Us,” featuring the farmers who grow and supply their produce. Each of these vignettes focuses on one individual farmer and one specific variety of fruit or vegetable. Additionally, each spot is centered around one of three themes: the personal story of the farmer and his experience working with Walmart (“Growers’ Stories”), helpful tips for how to select, store and prepare a particular type of produce (“Tips from the Farm”) or Walmart’s money-back guarantee. At first glance, these spots seem rather simplistic. There’s no trendy music, no rail-thin models indulging in the products, no Hollywood-worthy camera tricks or special effects. After all, we’re not selling iPads or BMWs here. But delve below the surface, and you’ll discover true marketing genius at work. Let’s look at the three core principles that make this campaign powerfully effective and how you can apply the same concepts to your own marketing strategy:

1. Serve before you sell.

Of course, these spots are designed to sell produce. As Walmart continues to take a bigger bite out of the grocery market with the aggressive expansion of its “Neighborhood Market” and “Walmart Express” concept stores throughout the country, they need to make sure that consumers think of them as their go-to destination not only for tires and diapers but also for tomatoes and dairy products. However, in the “Tips from the Farm” series, Walmart eschews using an overt sales message in favor of providing valuable, relevant information to their customers to help them make better buying decisions. For shoppers, there’s nothing more frustrating than spending their hard-earned dollars on fresh fruits and vegetables only to get home and find that their watermelon has no taste or their tomatoes have a mushy texture. With this understanding in mind, Walmart offers helpful tips on how to select, store and use these items to help their customers make the most of their grocery budgets (Don’t wash your strawberries until you’re ready to use them! Don’t put your tomatoes in the refrigerator! Pick an avocado with a firmness similar to the palm of your hand!). And who better to give this advice than the farmers who have dedicated their lives to understanding everything there is to know about these crops? To apply this principle to your own marketing strategy, think about your area of expertise and how you can put your inside knowledge to work to help your customers. For example, let’s say you own a home renovation business. Any homeowner who has undertaken a remodeling project knows how quickly all of the choices they must make can become overwhelming. Give these potential clients a hand by producing a series of videos that explain the advantages and disadvantages of different materials for countertops or flooring or showcase trends in lighting and other decorative fixtures. You’ll likely find that by dishing out a little free advice, you can earn major trust points with potential customers.

2. Be human.

One of the criticisms most often launched against Walmart is that it’s a big, unfeeling corporate giant with no face and no heart. But the Growers’ Stories spots show us that behind the Goliath, there are many Davids, and when we buy watermelons from Walmart, we’re actually buying them from third-generation farmer Jack Wallace in Edinburg, Texas. And we’re buying tomatoes from Scott Rush in Florida and strawberries from Mike Ferro in Oxnard, California. These are honest, hard-working Americans who care deeply about putting a quality product on your dinner table. The lesson here is this: Branding is important, always. But your company must be more than a brand. It must be human through and through. Whenever possible, you should remind your customers that they’re working with a team of people who are passionate about what they do, driven to exceed expectations and honestly apologetic if and when mistakes are made.

3. Counteract your brand’s vulnerabilities.

To sell anything – whether it’s a tomato or a tablet or a total kitchen remodel – you first must overcome the psychological objections of your customer. The current trend among foodies is the local food movement, which is focused on buying and using fresh, locally sourced ingredients. As cited previously, one of Walmart’s biggest branding challenges is their perception as the enemy of Main Street and the nemesis of the Mom-and-Pop. Therefore, Walmart is the antithesis of all things local, right? Not necessarily. As their Growers’ Story spot on tomatoes demonstrates, Walmart partners with small farmers around the country to distribute locally grown produce to nearby stores. And, in the end, if a customer is not satisfied with the quality of the produce, they can get their money back. The combined effect of these two messages is that Walmart has implicitly defended itself against a commonly held negative perception about its brand while negating any risk for customers in giving their products a try. What can you take away from this approach? Every brand has its weaknesses. While you don’t want to explicitly acknowledge these vulnerabilities, at every step along the way in the sales process, you should be aware of the red flags and concerns that might be giving your customer pause, and proactively counteract those inhibitions by providing  helpful (and true!) information that will help them make a confident buying decision.

---

Seven Ways to Shed Weight Fast!...For Your Website

With the holiday season and all of its excesses in the rearview mirror, for many of us, our thoughts turn next to resolution-making, specifically vowing to shed the extra pounds that are the collective result of any number of regrettable dietary choices made over the course of past months, from digging into the kids’ trick-or-treating bags to raiding the fridge for Thanksgiving leftovers to a daily egg nog latte habit. But while we’re in resolution-making mode, we’d do well to think not only about how to trim our waistlines but also how to slim down our websites. Why? Just like all those little culinary indulgences add up to extra pounds on our bodies, the small additions you might have made here and there on your website can weigh it down and leave its performance in the same type of sluggish slump as you might feel after one too many pieces of grandma’s pumpkin pie.

The problem

Today’s websites have become bloated, with the average web page tipping the scales at over 2 megabytes. That may not sound like much in an era when we’re well accustomed to talking in terms of gigabytes and even terabytes. However, when it comes to the Web, even 2 megabytes is too much, especially for visitors using low bandwidth or mobile devices, who are likely to leave your site rather than wait for a too-slow page to load, leaving you in the perilous position of losing their business altogether. Hefty page weight and poor performance can also have a negative impact on your site’s search ranking, as Google and other search engines now include these elements as key factors in their algorithms. As a result, streamlining the size of your web pages is certainly a best practice, but where do you begin? Just as shedding pounds requires you to make changes in multiple aspects of your lifestyle, there are a number of aspects of your website that you can examine to find ways to trim the unnecessary dead weight that’s detrimental your site’s performance.

Your seven-step plan for website weight-loss success

1. Optimize images.

As giant, screen-spanning images have become a popular trend in website design, pages have gotten heavier and heavier over the years. One way you can make a drastic reduction in the weight of your web pages is to ensure that the images on your site are properly optimized for the Web and that you’re not serving unnecessarily large images to mobile devices with small screen sizes.

2. Retool HTML files.

HTML files also impact the download size of a page, so look for ways to optimize the code to reduce the overall size of the file. Although these savings are likely to be small, remember that even small changes can add up to measurable improvements.

3. Streamline style sheets.

Because CSS files must be downloaded in order for a user to view your site, poorly formatted files or loading of unnecessary styles can increase the size of downloads. Requiring multiple style sheets can also have a negative impact on performance, since each one will require a separate HTTP request to fetch that file.

4. Ditch JavaScript where possible.

Using JavaScript files or libraries is a common practice in modern website design, but when it comes to optimizing page download size, there are a few drawbacks to this approach. First, requiring an entire library for just one effect (like an animated carousel of images) is not the best use of bandwidth. It can also lead to a critical user experience fail if your website does not work as intended because a visitor has elected to disable JavaScript in their browser. In some cases, JavaScript may be necessary, but be sure to make the distinction between when it is truly a must-have versus when it is simply a nice-to-have feature.

5. Use Web fonts sparingly.

The rise of Web fonts has given designers much more flexibility in their application of typography on the Web. Instead of being forced to select from only a handful of Web-safe fonts, Web fonts allow new typefaces to be included with a site’s files or linked from a third-party resource, such as Google Fonts or Adobe’s Typekit service. While these solutions have greatly increased the options available to designers, they can also significantly impact the performance of a web page. Font files must be downloaded with the page, so it is important to keep these to a minimum. Requiring three or four different weights of one font may be attractive from a visual standpoint, but it will be brutal from a file size perspective.

6. Eliminate external feeds whenever possible.

Content that is pumped in from other sites, including social media feeds and ads from by a third-party provider, will absolutely slow a website down, as external feeds are notorious bandwidth hogs. While these resources are sometimes necessary, their use should be limited as much as possible.

7. Check for CMS dependencies.

If your site uses a content management system, there are likely to be aspects of that CMS and how it is configured that play a role in performance. Since CMS platforms draw their content from a database, the calls to that database can slow the download speed of your page if there are too many of them or if they are not configured properly.

Know your numbers

Just as you need a scale to help you gauge your progress toward your target weight, you also need tools to help you measure the impact the steps you’ve taken above have made in improving the performance of your website. The Website Speed Test from Dotcom Monitor is a great tool that allows you to “instantly test your website speed in real browsers from 23 locations worldwide.” This application will not only tell you how large your page is but also measure its load time and reveal which elements contribute most to its size (similar tests are also available from Google). Armed with this data, you can charge forth with confidence, knowing that your website will soon be a leaner, meaner business growth machine – no fad diets or gym memberships required!

---