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24tsi4192 blog v2 01

How to Stay Strong As Ag Goes Soft

David LazarenkoApril 16, 2024

What Goes Up

At about this time in 2018, whispers started circulating throughout the halls of the NAMA convention that a new state in Ag was fast approaching. With commodity prices dropping and consumer trust in Ag at an all-time low, the notion of “flat is the new up” became a near universal sentiment for most Ag organizations.

Fast forward to today, and similar sentiments are starting to grow with dropping commodity prices being exasperated by all-time high input costs. Making for what many are now calling the “softening” of the Ag market.

Source: Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT)


Whether you call this softening, bearishness, or simply a correction, the hard truth is that our reality as agrimarketers is quickly changing and history dictates that those who react most quickly and effectively will thrive while others fight to survive.

What This Means

While bear markets are rarely desired, they aren’t new, and that means all agrimarketers can look to and learn from history to predict where and how our realities will be required to change the most. As such, to best understand what our future efforts will need to look like, we must embrace the realities ahead of us including:

  1. The End of Price-Driven Growth:
    As commodity prices decline, the market simply won’t be able to “afford” more of the significant price increases that have defined the last 3 years. As such, if most of your top and bottom-line growth has been achieved through enhanced pricing, gains will need to be made elsewhere (namely cost efficiencies and market share).
  2. The End of Record Spending:
    If your marketing budgets haven’t been frozen or reduced already, its best you immediately prepare yourself for a reality where spending will be heavily scrutinized and very likely cut.
  3. The Start of “More with Less”:
    To punctuate points 1 and 2 above, the harsh reality that agrimarketers need to prepare themselves for is one where we will not simply be asked to spend less, but to achieve more at the same time. While seemingly impossible, the “more with less” mantra many other industries have embraced and excelled in for years must now become our own.
  4. The Start of Hyper Competition:
    With the “rising tide lifts all boats” commodity price boom of the last 5 years coming to an end, success will now go to those who earn it. For agrimarketers, this means an all-out dog fight for market share where we’ll not only need to preserve, protect, and enhance what we have, but target and steal what we don’t.

What To Do

While we may have painted a somewhat bleak reality so far, the positive is that great success can still be achieved in a soft market and you still have time to embrace the efforts required to earn an unfair share of the upside. To help, we’ve captured three marketing best practices that have proven to deliver success in bear markets across many industries. Though these are far from the only ones you can and should consider, we’ve paid special attention to those that are significant drivers of the “more with less” approach we believe will soon become the dominant focus of Ag for years to come.

  1. Optimize Your PESO Ratio
    As a quick refresher, your PESO ratio is a direct reflection of your Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media strategies. We liken this to your overall agrimarketing investment strategy as it ultimately boils down to where and how you allocate the finite dollars you have to spend every year. As such, while there is no one size fits all approach to PESO optimization, much like in the world of personal finance, there are strategies that work better in different market conditions.

    To this extent, a general rule of thumb for a bearish market is to limit spending and increase investing. What we mean by this is to shift the allocation of your finite marketing dollars from Paid and Shared to Earned and Owned. More specifically:

    • Reduce Paid Media to “Necessary Spends” – While critical, paid media is typically the most expensive and least sustainable area of ongoing investment given its “pay to play” nature (I.e., you have to spend budget dollars each and every time you use it as there is little if any residual value once it’s been executed). Likewise, as dollars spent on paid media go to external parties, internal bean-counters will want to limit these “expenses” as much as possible.

      As such, an effective strategy is to limit spending on paid media to essentials only, where the only way you can reach and engage your audiences is through someone else’s paid channel.
    • Shift Shared and Earned Media from Quantity to Quality – While shared and earned used to be considered the same thing, the biggest difference is where the dollars involved go (namely is budget going to internal vs external parties).

      For example, earned media is typically characterized by generating press. As such, it takes a lot of internal time and effort to build the relationships, sow the stories, and expand the reach/impact of these efforts. However, outside of paid content sponsorships, you typically aren’t paying directly for press so budget will generally be invested within the company (on the resources and assets being created and leveraged for media outreach and engagement).

      For shared media, the dominant factor is now influencers. While you can and should still use online and social platforms to build an audience following and engage them accordingly, to achieve the biggest reach and impact through shared channels, influencers are key. That said, influencers aren’t free so any efforts to “leverage their networks” come as an external cost to your organization (again something that the bean-counters will want to limit).

      In either case, in a bearish market, you must be cognizant of how much of your spend is going to someone else and ensure that if it is, you are achieving significant results in return. And this applies to earned media as well, since the media outlets will also be feeling the pinch of the market and simply won’t be able to handle mass quantities of releases and outreach.
    • Use Owned Media as Your Marketing Engine – While owned media isn’t free, if you have already made the investment into the technologies required to drive direct communications with your audiences, it is by far the most effective and efficient means of marketing and must therefore be prioritized accordingly.

      This is especially the case in a soft market where spend will be significantly limited and results will still be desired. Luckily, this is where owned media shines as it allows agrimarketers to directly control the frequency and impact of their audience communications with limited per usage costs. Likewise, with ongoing use should come optimization so your owned media engine should typically be getting more effective and efficient over time.

      Additionally, given that maintaining, capturing, and growing market share will be the primary means of driving top line growth, owned media also allows you to better track, measure, and manage the critical relationship between sales and marketing. As such, the sales enablement efforts that owned media allows for, like lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, conversion tracking, etc., will all be essential to your ongoing efforts.
  2. Prioritize Winning
    One common reality of a soft market is that focus will often shift to the short-term as senior leaders are forced to prioritize immediate income statement performance over long-term balance sheet gains. From an agrimarketing perspective, this will mean a prioritization of short-term wins as longer-term strategies like brand building and new market creation won’t deliver the immediate financial results Ag organizations will be asked to deliver. As such, agrimarketers will be best served by thinking more like sales, focusing time, effort, and investment towards the opportunities that can be captured and converted quickly and efficiently.

    One of the fundamental business models that will serve you well in a bearish market is the hierarchy of sales. This time-tested tool can allow you to prioritize your marketing efforts and spend on the areas where immediate results and returns will likely be greatest simply by better understanding both the audience’s mindset and the effort required to convert the sale.



    A) Resell/Up-Sell – It has long been proven that existing customers (including lapsed customers) are the most efficient and effective to convert as you have already established the levels of awareness, engagement, and trust required for them to complete a purchase transaction. Unfortunately, for many agrimarketers, existing customers are often a secondary audience to new customers, seen as the responsibility of sales and customer service teams.

    In a soft market, where market share preservation and generation are key, ensuring a significant focus on reselling and/or up-selling (I.e., selling existing customers more of the same products they’ve already purchased) will be critical to maintaining and growing overall revenues.

    B) Cross-Sell
    – The selling of new products to existing customers has been the primary focus of the world’s largest brands for decades. The greatest examples of this are likely still Apple, who uses well established, core offerings (I.e., the iPhone) to attract customers into their “ecosystem” and then cross-sells them on a myriad of complimentary products and services thereafter.

    For agrimarketers in a bear market, cross-selling should be your primary focus for market share and new revenue generation as it is significantly less time consuming and costly to reach, engage, and convert an existing, trusting customer to try another one of your products (over a competitive offering they’re already using).

    C) New Sell – Most broad based, multi-channel media campaigns should be considered new sell efforts as they allow you to reach and engage potential new customers. While these campaigns will also reach your existing customers, they are a horribly expensive and inefficient means of doing so, especially when compared to the direct owned channels you may already have in place.

    As such, new sell efforts should be used very strategically and sparingly in a bear market as they require time, effort, and investment that resell, up-sell, and cross-sell don’t (remember that you are now trying to reach, engage, and convert someone who has never trusted you enough to buy before).

    For these efforts, it is best to focus on only the opportunities where you truly believe you can win, and win quickly. This would include opportunities where you have a market leading/dominant product and are looking to eat the share of your second and third place competition, and/or opportunities where your competition are significantly faltering, and their customers are actively “looking elsewhere”.

    D) New Market
    – Also called market creation or market penetration, these efforts are the most costly and time consuming as you are facing an audience that typically knows little about you or your product. As such, while the long-term benefits of these efforts can be significant (creating fully new and different revenue streams) you should only include them in your agrimarketing efforts if you have already adequately invested in resell, up-sell, and cross-sell (I.e., don’t sacrifice one for the other).

    As seen with Apple’s recent foray into the world of VR and exit from the electric vehicle market, even the largest and most successful brands attempt new market efforts sparingly and with a high degree of caution.

    Finally, one additional benefit to focusing more (if not most) of your agrimarketing efforts on existing customers is the need to “show them the love” after three years of record setting price increases. Given that they now have to face higher input costs than ever with commodity prices that have dropped significantly from recent highs, maintaining strong, successful relationships with your existing customer base will be critical.

  3. Minimize Excess
    As many agrimarketers believe that their marketing budgets are already very modest (when compared to big consumer brands) it may be hard to believe that excess spending already exists and costs can be effectively cut from your budgets quite easily without any major impact.

    To best understand this, it helps to compare agrimarketing efforts to those of consumer marketing. And for the sake of helping to emphasize the point, let’s use what is widely considered to be the most egregious and inefficient ad spend of all, the 30 second Super Bowl ad.

    In 2024, the cost of one 30 second ad during the Super Bowl was $7M. For a one-time, one-shot placement, it’s easy to understand why so many marketers doubt its merits.

    In comparison, let’s consider a full page, full colour placement in a prominent Ag publication in the Corn Belt. At 2024 rates, this placement would cost roughly $15K. A far cry from the Super Bowl ad.

    However, something interesting happens when we compare the costs per viewer as the Super Bowl was watched by 120+ million people, whereas the maximum number of corn farmers in the Corn Belt is 250K. When we use this math, we can see that the cost per audience member is nearly identical at $0.055 per.

    While you can factor in the notion that not all 120 million viewers are “the market” for the brands advertising during the Super Bowl (I.e., not everyone is going to buy Coca Cola), the same can be said for the 250K corn farmers (I.e., many corn farmers will never buy your products). And this doesn’t consider the fact that with consumer brands now placing their ads on social media and getting mass pick-up from content aggregators, repeat viewership of the 30 sec commercial trumps the print ad (at a ratio of roughly 10:1).

    Please note that we’re definitely not using this example to say that print advertising is a bad idea for Ag, but we can’t let the seemingly low cost of a placement skew our judgement of its value. The same applies to digital as many agrimarketers are purchasing significantly higher quantities of impressions than our audience count requires (inflating spend while creating ad fatigue at the same time). As such, the reality is simply one where in times of reduced budgets, like in a soft market, there are always ways to reduce your spend by right sizing the types and amounts of ad placements you’re buying.

    Likewise, agrimarketers should also be paying close attention to the brands that they are choosing to support with marketing spend. As most Ag organizations already suffer from a reality of “too many brands”, trying to spread your agrimarketing budget across many brands in your portfolio will be a recipe for failure. This is not going to be easy, as product leads and sales teams will inevitably push back given the inherent belief that a product or service that isn’t supported by ad/marketing spend is doomed to fail.

    The greatest example of this not being the case is again Apple. While many see them as being one of the most significant spenders in marketing, it is critical to pay closer attention to where and how they allocate their dollars.

    While Apple’s iPhone is by far their most well-known and popular product, Apple still allocates the majority of their marketing/ad dollars towards it. An odd choice if you consider that awareness and even interest in the product are already stellar. The real reason why they do so goes back to their ecosystem approach where Apple knows that the best way to sell consumers all of their products and services is to “hook them with the iPhone.”

    One need only look at the products and services Apple doesn’t invest significant marketing dollars towards to see how this cross-sell strategy is paying off:

    • Head Phones – 22% Market Share (1st place)
    • Wearables – 28% Market Share (1st place)
    • Music Streaming – 14% (2nd place)
    • Smart Speakers – 10% (3rd place)

    As agrimarketers, we will need to employ similar strategies going forward, embracing a reality where marketing time, effort, and investment are intentionally allocated disproportionately across the many brands in our portfolios. For if we don’t, we not only risk spending too little on the “shouldn’t have” brands (to the extent that our efforts generate little if any results), but also short-changing the “should have” brands (to the extent that we aren’t leveraging them to their fullest).

What's Next

If this piece has either piqued your interest or possibly even made you uncomfortable, that’s a very good thing as it means that you are emotionally invested in your role as an agrimarketer. It also means that you are already and to some degree thinking about what the future has in store.

If this is the case, we encourage you to explore more best practices, tips, and tricks like these in our annual and ongoing Evolution of Agrimarketing report and/or to reach out to chat.

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