Ag marketers are tired of wasting their time. 

You spend hours of work on a campaign… only to hear crickets when you launch. Or you have a backlog of content ideas that don’t quite match your brand — but your competitors are pumping out similar content, so you feel like you have to add it to your never-ending list too. 

You get to the end of your week… only to realize you didn’t hit your LinkedIn posting quota. Now you’re left scrambling on a Friday afternoon to throw something at the (social media) wall.

These marketing tactics, driven more by obligation than effectiveness, are all over the industry. 

The antidote? 

The barbell strategy. 
It’s an idea first coined within the investment space. Here, the two ends of the “barbell” are extreme risk aversion and extreme risk loving. Moderate risk lives in the middle of those two extremes, and often leads to more error. In other words, this “dual strategy” combines aggression and defensiveness — weighing against each other — in order to protect your assets and increase your chance of big returns.

But digital marketing isn’t about balancing risk. It’s about balancing your efforts to get concrete results. 

That’s why the “barbell” in marketing looks more like this:Here’s the breakdown: 

• Data/tech management/analytics on one side. Think SEO/GEO discoverability, website speed, lead scoring, internal linking, metrics: all the “boring” stuff that helps customers find you. 
• Human-centered branding/relationships on the other side. Think brand messaging, relationship building, and storytelling that showcases the humans behind your business. This is the personality of your business that helps customers know, like, and trust you.

One end of the weight amplifies and balances out the other. Ensuring your tech foundation is solid helps boost the in-person relationships your team builds. Investing into relationship building and branding ensures the customers who found you via a Google search can truly trust your team to have their back once they get in the door, fill out a form, or make that first phone call.

A positive feedback loop keeps these two sides of the marketing machine working together. But in the middle of the spectrum, things get messier.

If these two buckets are the counterweights at either end of the digital marketing barbell… what’s in the middle? And why do so many marketers spend so much time there?

The danger of just checking the boxes

In between these two extremes lies what we call “checkbox” marketing: going down a to-do list and checking off marketing tasks out of obligation, not necessarily based on the value they bring. 

In the investment world, staying in this middle — or the “moderate risk” bucket — keeps you stuck. You expose yourself to risk, while simultaneously killing your chances of benefiting from positive Black Swan events.

In marketing, getting stuck in this middle could look like: 

• Your marketing calendar filling up with activities that don’t actually move the needle
• Cranking out content with no clear strategy driving it
• Stressed out teams trying to move through too-long to-do lists
• Not seeing enough real-world ROI or feedback, then struggling to figure out why things aren’t clicking

Too many marketers fall into a sense of obligation around their strategies and tactics. And you probably know this feeling well: 

• “We’re buying this print ad because we always do.”
• “We go to this trade show/conference because we’re supposed to.”
• “We post about National Ag Day, because who doesn’t?”

A question to ask yourself is: Are we doing this because we “have” to? Or are we taking on this marketing initiative because it has a clear aim? 

That aim doesn’t necessarily have to be metrics-based, like gaining X new leads or scheduling Y sales calls by the end of the month. Brand storytelling and trust-building are equally as important. But there does need to be a goal. 

Value happens at the ends of the spectrum

Given how loud and crowded the digital space is these days, you don’t want to waste your (and your team’s) time and budget on things that just don’t matter. Instead, you need to invest in your two counterweights. 

Here’s an example of what that could look like in the ag lending space. 

They could: 

• Go through a tech audit to make sure the website is discoverable via both search and LLMs
• Beef up website speed
• Ensure proper schema markups and internal linking
• Check 404 errors or broken backlinks 
• Identify internal link opportunities
• Add negative keywords to a Google Ads campaign (bad credit, no down payment, etc.)
• Install heatmap or behavior analytics tools 

While ALSO… 

• Investing in human-centered longform videos introducing their team members
• Writing blog content aimed to help customers with a specific problem (how to set up their estate plan, for example, or explaining what paperwork they need to secure a land loan) 
• Hiring the best loan officers who know how to build strong relationships
• Crafting content that lifts the industry – with no visible CTA 
• Showing up in person. Leverage offline conversations to inform online marketing channels. 

These two buckets feed into each other, whether you’re in lending or another sector of the ag marketing space. Think about those two ends of the barbell. Before a potential customer ever picks up the phone to talk to someone on your sales team, they’ve already checked out your website. They’ve browsed products, skimmed through the blog, and read customer reviews. 

By the time someone in your office starts a real conversation, expectations have already been set. And if a customer’s first impression from the website is weak or unclear, that team member is already starting the race with a hand tied behind his back.

If an ag marketing team has spent 80% of their budget and time on things like: 

• Blog content with no clear goal 
• Social media posts every day for the sake of “consistency,” even when they serve no true purpose
• Ad campaigns driven by what “everyone else” is doing

… chances are, that customer is going to notice the difference. They’re not going to feel like you’re actually talking to them. And they’re going to keep scrolling, move on to the next result, and forget they ever browsed your website. 

You could have the best sales team or products in the world. But without a solid tech/data foundation on the other end of the spectrum that reliably drives customers to the phone, sales volume is always going to be lower than it could be. And your marketing team is always going to feel like they’re chasing their tail trying to follow every trend and “obligation.”

If you’re ready to drive more effective marketing at your organization and build both ends of your barbell, drop us a line. Through our free performance analysis and competitor audit, you’ll better understand your business’s opportunities — and time wasters.