Before the Harvest Moon: When to Start Marketing to Corn Farmers

Figuring out when to market your products to buyers is always a challenge, especially when it comes to seasonal products, like farming products.  At US Farm Data we know when you have a new product you need to start planning and marketing a few months before your product is finished and ready to be sold. But when your product needs to be sold every season, how do you decide when to start marketing?

When’s the Season?

We think the place to start is by doing research and figuring out when your customers are going to start needing your products, and that might vary a lot depending on where you’re selling. Take US corn farmers as an example; the harvesting season for corn farmers is different depending where you are in the US.

For example, farmers in Texas tend to start harvesting corn in the middle of July while farmers in Oregon tend to start closer to the middle of October. Since that’s when their harvesting season starts, they’re going to want to start getting everything they need in the months beforehand, meaning you’re going to have to start advertising in the months leading up to the harvesting season. Generally, starting a marketing campaign about 3-4 months before the season begins is a good plan. In addition, you’re going to need to know when the season ends so that you can get a good picture of exactly how you’ll allocate your resources.

What’s Available?

Next you should evaluate what resources are available to you, what you need, and how much you’re willing to spend on advertising. If you can start advertising earlier than your competition, that’s ideal; being the first to get word out about your product is good, but it’s not enough. If you don’t have the personnel and resources to keep your advertising campaign going until the harvesting season starts, starting early won’t do much good. Starting early is useful because when people are ready to buy your company might be the first company they think of, but if you can’t keep up interest until potential customers are ready to start buying, it’s a moot point. Marketing  is a continuous process, starting with a hook to get people interested and keeping them interested until they’re ready to buy, meaning you should start at a point where you’re confident you can keep up a strong and energetic marketing strategy.

The Data:

Now it’s time to look at the data itself and come up with a plan. Since every state has a different set of dates during which the corn farming season normally takes place and those dates can be significantly different from one state to another, it’s probably best to sort states into a few different groups based on their start dates, that way you don’t have to figure out a separate date for every state you want to do an ad campaign in, you can instead assign one date to a group. For example, say you are looking to start marketing to farmers three to four months before the harvesting season starts. You could group together all of the states that start harvesting in September and plan to start your campaign approximately four months before the latest date in that group, which, according to data gathered by Cornell University, would be September 29th. Since the states are grouped by month, now you have a working start date for your campaigns in several different states, all between your three to four month time range.

Obviously this isn’t the only way to come up with a start date; now that you have the data, you might have an idea of how your company might want to do it. But it’s important to remember that it’s okay to simplify things. When you start advertising is important, but narrowing it down to an exact date generally isn’t, especially near the beginning of the planning stage. Simply coming up with a date range provides a more flexible deadline and saves time and energy that can be better spent coming up with an action plan for your marketing campaign.

In summary,

Starting your marketing campaign before your competitors is often good, but may or may not work well for your company depending on the resources you have at your disposal. In general, for seasonal marketing campaigns it’s recommended that you start your marketing to potential clients about three to four months before you expect those clients to need your product.

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