About two weeks ago, KHC, along with many partners, hosted the 2021 Agriculture Direct Marketing Summit. The Summit consisted of webinars over three nights that garnered over 660+ registrant interest.
Night one consisted of social media & marketing strategies by Amanda Kelly and Julie Fritsch. First up was Amanda with a deep dive into social media analytics, tips & tricks, and the do’s & don’ts of each platform. Amanda developed SKED’s Be Boss Online digital marketing program and has worked with a number of small businesses. Immediately after, Julie presented on marketing strategies, content creation, and whether you should consider hiring a specialist for your business. Julie is a marketing professional in Kentucky agriculture and specializes in creating marketing pieces for agriculture businesses. Her wealth of knowledge shed light on different organization tools, planning, and all things marketing strategy.
Night two was just as well-attended with sessions on value-added products and customer retention by Megan Bruch Leffew and Emily Spencer. Megan started with a session about getting into value-added (VA) products, how to price your VA products, and how to be market your VA products to be profitable. Megan is from the University of Tennessee Extension Center for Profitable Agriculture and has been in the field for over 17 years! While you may be thinking, “Tennessee isn’t Kentucky!”, our friends to the south have just as amazing input in direct marketing! Megan had many real-life examples to share and helped some attendees with deciding whether VA products were an opportunity they should pursue. After Megan’s session, Emily Spencer, Extension Associate from the University of Kentucky’s Agriculture Economics department, covered customer retention in the time of COVID-19. Emily’s presentation and check-list of “to-do’s” helped attendees learn how to deal with difficult customers, communicate effectively, and retain customers. She helped attendees understand why it is better to focus on keeping customers rather than focusing on getting new ones (hint: it is much more expensive to market to new customers than to keep current ones!).
After two nights of informative sessions, creative ideas, and Q&A’s, we ended this 3-night mini-summit with a producer panel with farmers from around the state. Producers detailed the adaptations they’ve made due to COVID-19 and their intentions for continuing them into 2021. While things are looking brighter for the year, life and business aren’t back to normal just yet. Producers were honest in what did and did not work for them and shared lessons they learned. This was the perfect end to our first annual Agriculture Direct Marketing Summit.
So far, we’ve had great responses from those that attended and shared their experience at the summit. We are already working on ideas for next year (we have so many we didn’t get to include!) and would love your feedback if you attended (see survey below).
Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2021DMSummit
Thank you to everyone who attended, supported the summit, and of course, to our amazing speakers. Thank you as well to our partners—Kentucky Farm Bureau, Kentucky Department of Agriculture, Kentucky Center for Ag & Rural Development, University of Kentucky Center for Crop Diversification, University of Kentucky Department of Ag Economics, & UT Center for Profitable Agriculture.
Be on the lookout for more information about the 2022 Agriculture Direct Marketing Summit coming later this year!