Recently, members of our team had the honour of assisting in the judging for this year’s Best of CAMA awards. These awards are a highlight for us every year, a time to come together as an industry of agrimarketing professionals and celebrate the work we do every day.
Once finalists were announced, we realized we had found judging particularly interesting this year, sparking conversation about how the industry has progressed in recent years, and how it can continue to evolve. The entries overall were excellent, maybe the best we’ve seen yet.
In that spirit, we wanted to share some of our top observations from our experience judging Best of CAMA this year. The categories our individual team members judged are not necessarily representative of the whole but we’ve also started to see these same threads throughout the industry, all through the year.
Agrimarketers are uncovering much deeper insights to help them inform their strategies. From varied personas to a more nuanced understanding of the challenges faced by farmers, we saw a wealth of smart, actionable insights that went into the strategy behind campaigns.
Results, while impressive, are not as useful when they are taken out of context. High impression numbers are wonderful – but were those impressions in your target audience or geography? Did your generated leads open your marketing automation emails?
Framing your results with your insights is invaluable – not just when you’re entering awards, but also when it’s time to optimize.
We’d also love to see results tied to outcomes. Sales-ready leads are important if the desired outcome of your campaign is to increase sales, but they’re somewhat meaningless if you’re campaign was designed to increase awareness by increasing organic branded search traffic.
It’s time to get serious, fellow agrimarketers. We’re a very white, very male industry and it shows. We need to think long and hard about how we’re going to include an increasingly diverse population of farmers in our marketing efforts. And we need to do it without tokenizing BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+, and women as we do it. It’s not enough to toss one racially ambiguous woman into your campaign. We’re also including ourselves here – this is an ongoing challenge that we all need to work harder at resolving.
It seems easy to forget, especially lately, that joy and amusement are powerful emotions, and ones we don’t tap into nearly often enough in our marketing strategies. The funny campaign tactics that we got to see filled us with absolute joy, and they were much more memorable than tactics without it.
You know what we’re talking about. Heck, we know we tend to lean into it ourselves. But the old formula that highlights dusty boots, fields at sunset, a faithful dog (or truck, or horse, or tractor), and a deep-voiced narrator talking about hard work is just that – old.
It’s undeniable that retailers are an incredibly important part of the customer journey for many ag brands, and they should be celebrated for their hard work. We loved seeing the efforts that went into helping to make their job a little bit easier. We’d love to see more of it, especially more of it tied to real insights about what retailers really need from ag brands to help make their day to day simpler. Swag is fun, but relating it back to an insight is much more compelling.
Raise your hand if you’re tired of hearing about these “unprecedented times”? We are.
Yes, we are living through a particularly difficult time period in history. The thing is, these tough times are not unique to farmers, and they’re a weak foundation to base a campaign on. You can’t differentiate on how times are tough so you’re helping out, because at this point, adjusting operations to accommodate the challenges of a global pandemic are a requirement to continue doing business.
A quick look outside of the ag industry shows that other industries have accepted changes like online ordering, touchless delivery, and virtual appointments as simply a part of doing business. So if you’re campaign strategy is to highlight that you know it’s hard and you’re here to help, you may find you’re already behind the curve.
We’re genuinely excited to see what’s coming next for this industry. We’ve made major progress, continuously raising the bar on the quality and impact of the work. We know that we’ll continue to evolve and improve, and we love that we get to be a part of it.
What agrimarketing campaigns have you loved this year? What cliches are you ready to leave behind? Let us know on Twitter @simply_ws
In addition to participating in judging, we’re honoured to be finalists in the following categories:
Thank you to our clients and partners who have made it possible for us to continue to do this work and to our agrimarketing peers who have helped us continuously elevate the standards in this industry we love so much.
