Keeping your business name in front of customers is an important component of a marketing strategy for any business. A nice-looking wall calendar featuring high-quality photos of your haying operation can help get the job done, says Clayton Geralds, hay grower from Munfordville, KY.
“People will throw away a business card, but they hang onto a calendar,” says Geralds, who has sent Geralds Farms calendars to his customers for the past three years. “They put it on their office walls, and every day they get a reminder of your business and where they got their hay.”
Geralds, his wife Molly, and son Christopher grow alfalfa, alfalfa-grass mixes and timothy on 600 acres. They market to horse owners in Kentucky, Georgia, Florida and elsewhere in the eastern U.S. Last year they put up 81,000 small square bales.
Christopher puts the calendar together each year. “We now have about 6,000 pictures of our operation on file,” Geralds says. “(Christopher) goes through them to find photos that show some aspect of our business related to each month.”
For example, a spring month photo may show alfalfa fields being sprayed or hay being cut. In the summer, they’ll show baling or hauling hay and, in the fall, someone working with seeding equipment. For December, the calendar photo features the Geralds family.
For each month, their business email address, phone number and cell phone number are prominently displayed. “A lot of our customers are several hundred miles away and have never been to our farm,” says Geralds. “They don’t really know what this part of Kentucky looks like.”
Christopher uses an online service – custombuiltcalendars.com – to lay out the calendar. He tries to get his final photo picks and design to the company for printing in October so calendars can be mailed out around Christmas.
They have 250 calendars printed at about $7/calendar. “We send a few out to potential customers,” says Geralds. “But most go to our existing customers. Some of them have been with us for more than 15 years. It’s another way of saying thanks for the business.”
To contact the Geralds, call 270-528-1238 or email cgeralds@hotmail.com.