Do You Have a Plan for Marketing Your Lambs?

All sheep operations must market sheep or their products to generate income. To be successful and prosperous in your sheep enterprise, you should understand basic marketing concepts for selling sheep and their products. This includes specific business models for marketing lambs during the holidays, marketing lambs at other times of the year, marketing breeding stock, and marketing wool and woolen products. As a sheep producer, what sort of plan do you have for marketing your lambs?

One of the first steps to consider when starting any business is to develop a detailed marketing plan. This plan will serve as a blueprint for your business, covering everything from how you will target your customers to calculating profitable prices.

Simply put, a marketing plan outlines your strategy for achieving your business goals and objectives. More precisely, it is a clear and detailed "map" for how you will sell your lambs or their products to your customers. Your marketing plan outlines how you will handle specific tasks, such as getting your lambs to market, building a market niche, identifying your customer base, maintaining sales growth, and dealing with future changes to your operation.

Your plan also serves as a practical means of accumulating valuable data and gauging day-to-day tasks and events. For instance, you might use your plan as a template for marketing tasks that occur throughout the year. Additionally, the marketing plan may identify when specific activities require attention, such as registering sheep, submitting performance data to the National Sheep Improvement Program (NSIP), or establishing a processing schedule to ensure an adequate inventory of lamb meat cuts for festival markets.

To prepare your marketing plan, you will need to start with a basic concept for the plan: position.

Positioning involves influencing how your customers perceive your business and your product. It creates your unique farm identity or puts your lambs or lamb products in people's minds. In turn, when consumers are interested in buying sheep or lamb products, they will think specifically of your farm or unique brand.

A brand or branding is the marketing practice of creating a name, symbol, or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products. For this reason, your brand is essential—it is what distinguishes your products or services from those of your competitors. It also helps keep your customers focused on your image and helps maintain and grow your sales.

As a sheep producer, there are some strategies that you can use that will help ensure good positioning and branding, or that "customer allure", to entice sales. For instance, you could:

• Develop a farm name and logo that serves to identify your product or products
• Sell pasture-raised, or grass-fed, lamb for a unique taste and quality
• Offer organic lamb
• Highlight your production practices as a selling point
• Identify genetic and/or visual characteristics that appeal to buyers interested in breeding stock
• Highlight wool characteristics that appeal to hand spinners

Identify the unique aspects that differentiate your product from other sheep or lamb products. For instance, you might want to identify the genetic merits of your sheep through NSIP, which highlights outstanding estimated breeding values (EBVs), to sell breeding stock. Alternatively, if you choose to market lamb, you could utilize any unique attributes to differentiate your product from those of your competitors. Remember, your buyers want to feel confident that your product is superior and consistent, which will give you an excellent market position.

Spending a few minutes developing a marketing plan can help you stay on track to produce sheep that best meet your customers' needs and also utilize the resources available on your farm effectively. By maintaining high standards and offering a quality product, you're likely to attract loyal buyers who will promote your farm and the products you offer for sale.