Marketing and Communications

AgFirst’s Marketing department is a multidisciplinary team delivering high-impact digital marketing campaigns, market research, customer insights, creative design, media buying, marketing strategy and communication services. To help Associations remain competitive and grow their business, this team:

Provides accurate and timely primary and secondary market research and actionable insights about Association customers, prospects, competitors and markets.
Leverages market research and insights to create and execute strategic marketing campaigns and programs.
Provides marketing strategy support to help Associations develop approaches and programs that support their business objectives.
Creates printed and digital assets, as well as mobile-friendly digital environments, to enable Associations to reach existing customers and prospects.
Works closely with Associations and the Bank’s Product teams on strategic Customer Experience (CX) initiatives, executing and analyzing Districtwide surveys for key metrics, such as overall borrower satisfaction, propensity of borrowers to promote an Association’s services, sentiments of new and departing customers and channel preferences.

Design

AgFirst’s marketing team provides District Associations with end-to-end digital marketing solutions designed to optimize paid digital media to deliver measurable loan growth. By integrating the Bank’s CRM system and industry-leading marketing automation technology from HubSpot, AgFirst marketing delivers business results for our Associations. The team leverages market insights and data and combines them with powerful media optimization technology to deliver leads that convert and to help Associations build their brands.

Digital Marketing

Marketing Automation

HubSpot
This cloud-based tool powers professionally designed and automated email marketing campaigns from within CRM, enabling sales and marketing teams to track and measure customer behaviors through the sales funnel to improve communications and optimize engagement. Campaigns have a variety of uses, from creating sales opportunities to announcing customer appreciation events or photo contests to sending holiday e-cards and newsletters. Each Association has its own dedicated instance of HubSpot, which enables regularly updated Association-specific customizations. In addition to automated marketing campaigns, HubSpot offers built-in analytics and reporting, social media management, blog creation, search engine optimization (SEO) and ad tracking and management.

Market Research

The foundation for every strong campaign starts with detailed territory and environmental research to ensure a deep understanding of the local market. AgFirst Market Research analysts provide each Association a portfolio of reports and dashboards to better understand their local territory and current member-borrowers. Reports include topics such as:

County penetration reports.
Competition reports.
Young, Beginning and Small Farmer demographics.
Association member-borrower analytics.
Product usage reports (i.e., AccountAccess users by branch).
Voice of the customer research.
Ag market intelligence data.

In addition, Market Research analysts work with each Association to support ad-hoc reporting initiatives, such as customer mapping requests, detailed analysis on AgCensus data, and website analytics for improving usability.

Website Development

AgFirst’s Website Development team builds and maintains Associations’ customer-facing websites with the following powerful features:

Responsiveness: This robust feature allows the site to automatically adjust its format and size based on the type of device being used for access, making it mobile-friendly.
Content Management System (CMS): Association administrators have the power to manage their local content through a CMS provided by AgFirst. They can make content changes quickly and independently and have the ability to enable a tiered approval process to ensure a secondary review before changes go live for added security.
Reusable Modules: Instead of creating multiple solutions for commonly used features like photo calendar contests and location finders, the AgFirst web team can create one solution and deploy it across multiple sites. This improves time to market, helps ensure someone can support the feature if there is a local resource issue, takes advantage of economies of scale, and enables each Association to leverage winning ideas from across the District.

Printing Services

AgFirst’s professional in-house print shop – accessible through an easy-to-use digital storefront – enables Associations to print, sort and mail collateral at cost (meaning AgFirst does not charge Associations a markup on printed materials). The print shop’s high-quality work is complemented by a variety of paper choices, folding and finishing options, as well as binding, to give printed materials a polished, professional look. Once a job is complete, the print shop can coordinate drop shipments of materials to Associations and their branches or directly to their customers.

Meetings & Events

The Bank’s corporate Meetings and Special Events group can assist with or manage any part of the development, coordination or execution of Bank or Association meetings and events, regardless of size. This includes logistics, such as:

Coordinating registration.
Scheduling speakers.
Choosing an event location.
Contracting with hotels or other vendors.
Developing supporting print collateral.
Managing vendors.

The team works closely with a meeting sponsor to understand the purpose and vision for the event and then develops a meeting plan, budget and schedule to ensure all parties are aligned on expectations.

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