Our digital marketing associate Dharmendra writes about his experience leading the marketing for Solitude Farm’s latest project.
As a member of Yuvabe’s Digital Marketing team, I have had the privilege of managing digital marketing for Solitude Farm, one of Auroville's most renowned farming projects. This experience has been quite a journey for me as I continue to learn and grow in the field of digital marketing.
As a social media manager and as someone with an avid interest in healthy farming and food, I loved the opportunity to promote organic farming, natural farming, permaculture, and local food to a wider audience. Working closely with Krishna McKenzie, the owner of Solitude farm, we've created a successful social media strategy that has helped to attract more customers and raise awareness about the benefits of local foods and recipes.
Project Requirements:
The initial task was to launch and run a one year campaign named ‘365 Days: A road back to nature’ to promote different ways in which we can adopt a natural and organic way of living. The campaign consisted of daily blogs that would also be promoted on social media channels, mainly Instagram.
Overtime, the project requirements also came to include redesign and development of their website. The website has helped to establish Solitude farm as a reputable source of organic food and farming knowledge with information about the farm's history, farming practices, and products, as well as a blog section where we share updates and insights about the world of organic farming.
Additionally, we also worked on a digital marketing campaign for a concert featuring Krishna McKenzie's band and other musicians.
Our Challenges and Learnings:
1.) Simplifying content management through technology:
Content management was a herculean task. We had content for half a year, with blogs, photos and captions. All this had to be used to create a blog post for every single day, and a social media post.
To overcome this challenge I wanted to develop a faster system than the traditional social media scheduling options. After a little bit of research I discovered a way to develop a fully automated system to schedule and manage content directly from Google Sheets for all the platforms like website, social media, email et cetera. Together with one of Yuvabe’s tech team members, we built something that has automated the entire process of daily postings.
Today, this system has helped us to streamline our content creation process and ensure that we are able to consistently post high - quality content across all of our social media platforms.
2.) Getting comfortable with mundane tasks:
As we automated the social media publishing, a big part of my job became managing Excel spreadsheets. At times, this work would feel repetitive and very unstimulating! After a couple of excruciating weeks, I was able to recognize the importance of these tasks in my job as a social media marketer. Even the seemingly mundane tasks were an integral part of the creative process, and a necessary step in achieving project success. Ultimately, I remained committed to delivering high-quality work and ensuring that the client's needs were met.
3.) Learning Project Management and communication:
During the website redesign project, I encountered a different style of challenges. While the website development was handled by one of our designers, I was responsible for all content-related changes and updates. It was also my responsibility to manage website-related communication. However, coordinating and aligning with the client was often difficult, and required significant effort from my side in terms of communication and project management.
With time, however, I eased into the role and became more comfortable with liaising between the client and our designer. This has definitely been a skill that I know I can leverage in future projects!
Overall, my experience of working with Solitude farm has been incredibly fulfilling. I'm proud to be part of a team dedicated to promoting sustainable farming practices and providing customers with high-quality, organic food.
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