Why Social Media for Agribusiness Fails When It Depends on Spare Time
Gain Trust. Grow Influence. Get Customers. The Big on Creative and Small on Bother social media business blog.
In this blog, I share the three principles we work to when an agribusiness has a good team and no spare hours and why they hold up when the season turns.
Do you have a system that runs your agribusiness’s social media calendar without eating your team’s day? Smart agribusiness brands working across agricultural markets and rural industries do. Taking the time to set that system up will make the most out of your investment on social media.
Here’s how we think about it.
What we see across our clients
Nearly every agribusiness that comes to us says a version of the same thing: “I’ve got a good team, but nobody has time nor even thinks to capture content.”
One was a feed company. Great product knowledge, genuinely good people, and a marketing manager juggling five other jobs. Content just wasn’t happening. This wasn’t because they didn’t care, but because there was always something more urgent that took priority.
What we’ve learnt
Time is almost never the real constraint. Design is.
Most agribusinesses fit social media into the gaps in the day. Gaps are the first thing to vanish when things get busy, especially field day season! So the content dries up at exactly the point the market is paying most attention, and the brand goes quiet when it should be out front.
The problem isn’t that nobody has an hour. It’s that the whole thing was built to depend on one.
The three principles we work to
1. Design for the busiest fortnight of the year, not the quietest.
Any approach that only stands up tp calm week isn’t an approach, it’s a good intention. We plan and structure the work any field staff or BDO’s and their availability is never what holds the brand showing up to their audience. That decision changes everything downstream.
2. Shrink what the client gives us, not what we give them.
The instinct with a stretched team is to cut back the output. We think that’s backwards. We think of it as output is what earns the return. It’s the input that needs to get smaller and sharper. Which puts the real work on our side of the table: understanding the business well enough that a little direction goes a long way.
3. Consistency is a structural decision (it should’t rely on discipline alone).
Usually nobody falls behind on social media through lack of willpower. They fall behind because nothing in the setup makes the next post inevitable. Once posting stops depending on someone remembering, consistency stops being a battle and consistency is the single biggest performance lever available to an agribusiness online.
What changes
The feed steadies. The team stops treating social media as something they’re behind on and starts treating it as something already handled.
For the feed company selling to farmers throughout the year, the surprise wasn’t the social media content. It was how little of their week the whole thing needed once it was built properly. Their people went back to the job they’re actually good at, and the regional agribusiness kept showing up regardless.
That’s the outcome we’re after every time. Not a busier marketing team, a quieter one, with a louder (and relevant) brand!!
Done properly, social media for agribusiness shouldn’t feel like another job on the list. It should feel like something running in the background that the agribusiness gets to benefit from.
Wright Social is a team of social media lead generation specialists for Australian agricultural and farming markets.
Ready to take your social media to the next level? Book a free strategy call.We invite you to book a free 40 minute strategy call with Heidi Wright. Find out where to from here, and if we’re the right fit to grow your business.
Photo Credit: Emma Fenner.
