Cultivating Content: How Mother Nature Rewrites Our Marketing Plan

If you think marketing a business is all about setting a 12-month strategy, scheduling your content, and watching it roll out on autopilot, the weather says otherwise.

In marketing for our family farm client, Triple B Farms, our calendar isn't dictated by corporate quarters, it’s dictated by mother nature. Our strategy relies on everything from crop readiness to unpredictable weekend weather, and our number one marketing superpower isn't automation. It’s the ability to pivot.

Here is a look behind the scenes at how we manage the beautiful but chaotic rhythm of farm marketing, and why flexibility is our most important tool.

“Set it and forget it” is a lie.

Many marketing plans are built on predictable timelines. You launch a campaign,  check in and optimize, then analyze the data.

At Triple B Farms, the timeline is dictated by so many factors. We might plan a massive, two-week promotional push for strawberry season, only for a late frost or a stretch of heavy rain to push the crop back by ten days. Or, we could face a completely different roadblock: a stretch of unseasonably hot weather causing sweet corn or sunflowers to peak quicker, or perfect blue skies that draw massive crowds out to the fields, causing the farm to run out of pickable berries early. 

We have seen it all. 

When the primary products and activities you are marketing can change without consulting your calendar, you have to throw the plan out the window more often than not.

Our Field Guide to Agility

Fortunately, these sudden turns in the road don't have to ruin the plan, they can actually enhance it. Embracing these real-time changes highlights the true authenticity of the brand, which is exactly what makes a family-owned farm so exciting to follow.

1. Turning Late Bloomer Crops into Shared Journeys

We often run into issues where the farm’s crops don’t sprout according to the plan. This could be used as a teaching moment. Campaign elements are instantly switched from hard promotional ads to real-time updates. Polished graphics are traded for raw footage showing exactly what the farm is experiencing that day. Followers love it when the curtain is pulled back to reveal the honest reality behind the scenes. This transparency turns a crop delay into a shared journey, making it all the more exciting for the community when the fields are finally open for picking.

2. Harvesting and Keeping a Silo of Content 

We are constantly on the lookout. Think about it this way: you don’t just go out into the fields and harvest one single ear of corn for dinner, you harvest as much as you can from the plot. We take this approach when we go to Triple B Farms with a camera. We don’t just capture what we need for next week’s post, we stock up and maximize content by preparing ideas and photographing and videoing everything possible. When there are major changes in our social media calendar for Triple B Farms, we are faced with a big challenge. Half of our calendar needs to be shifted around and needs to be done ASAP. This is where our thorough ideation phase and harvesting of the calendar and ad development process comes into play. 

We build a bank of content ideas from the photos and videos that we shoot on the farm to pull from on the fly so that there are never any gaps in the client’s social feed, even when there is a delay, cancellation of an event, or a rainy day. The feed stays active, the messaging stays positive, and their audience is redirected to an alternative way to support the farm.

3. Two Hands on the Reins

At Triple B Farms, the owner and family are the glue keeping the whole operation from spinning out of control. Because of this, they don’t have time for long formal emails. We establish quick, friction-free communication channels such as text messaging. They are the experts in their field, and as marketers, we have our hand on the pulse, ready for any pivot, communicating in the easiest way possible for the client. Keeping these direct lines open between Triple B Farms and our account manager ensures that our partnership remains strong and that we can execute strategy adjustments the moment we get word from the farm.

4. Predictive Measures

With all considered, we enter the growing season with our best estimate of when things will go down on the farm, all based on previous years of information and the farm’s tentative schedule. Even if we know things are going to change along the way, our predictive plan keeps us on track for designing social media content, if mother nature decides to cooperate. For advertising, we keep a tight calendar of all the products, events, crops, attractions, and gifts we will be promoting for the entirety of the season. This calendar is outfitted with “on dates” and “off dates” to keep us aligned with what the client is predicting to be available on the farm. Although this rarely is true to what the crops have in store for us, our calendar of switches ensures we never let an ad rot on the vine for too long and also that nothing is left unadvertised. It is our blueprint, written in pencil, that we can pull from and tweak when we have to pivot.

Fruitful Results

At the end of the day, marketing a family farm requires us to be as resilient, flexible, and adaptive as the land they work on. We might have to rewrite our content plan three times a week, but that constant pivoting keeps their brand feeling authentic, alive, and deeply connected to the hands that make the farm so special. 

Businesses that thrive are the ones that learn to read the environment, scrap the script when necessary, and pivot. At POWER we do just that for every client, from farms to startups, to corporate finance firms and car detailers. Every client deserves a strategy that is agile enough to fully encompass their business’ full story!Let's cultivate a winning strategy for your business!