As an agricultural photographer, I spend the first couple months of the year meeting with agribusinesses planning for the season ahead. We spend our time discussing the imagery and video needs their businesses will have in the coming months–and next year–to meet their marketing objectives.

Marketing your agribusiness comes with several challenges. One, of course, is seasonality. Many happenings within agriculture only occur within a small window of time–fertilizing, field prep, planting, breeding livestock, weaning, calving, and spring turnout, just to name a few!

In this post, I’ll outline some ways to help you think through your marketing schedule and plan content to capture for the season ahead!

Think about what you need this year.

First, let’s start with the immediate present. As we begin thinking about content to capture, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What are my tried and true products or services that will not be changing?
• What are frequently asked questions about these offers from potential or current customers?
• What is new in my business this year?
• What is the timeline in which these events will happen?

Now, I encourage you to pull out your calendar–whether virtual or paper–and start jotting down ideas for each month. If you know when specific activities typically take place, mark them out on your calendar. For example, in my area, people typically start planting corn mid-April. Cattle are usually turned out to grass in mid-May. What activities in your business revolve around those activities? Marking these down now will give you a visual to plan for the season ahead. Bonus if you dig out the highlighters, colored pens, and sticky notes!

Think about what you need next year.

The reality is that by the time you capture this year’s content and receive it back from your photographer or videographer, you’re left with a very limited window of time to use it in this season, if any. For example, I’ve captured photos of a strip-tiller rolling through the field. The strip-tilling season for this specific customer is about two weeks long. We’re typically not taking the pictures in the first couple days of the machine running (that’s about guaranteeing a breakdown!), so now we’re down to about 10 days. There will of course be scheduling and logistical conflicts, Mother Nature will absolutely throw a wrench or two in some plans, and by the end of it, we’re left with just a handful of days to capture the images and videos needed to market these products and services.

While I pride myself in my turnaround time, it still takes me a few days to return edited galleries to clients, By the time they’re back in your inbox, our two-week window of strip-tilling has come and gone and you are already onto the next thing!

But fear not. With strategic planning, these images and videos will still be relevant in years to come! And had we foregone capturing these strip-tilling photos now, next year’s strip-till season would roll around and we’d be stuck facing the same dilemma all over again. But since we planned ahead and captured what we needed this year, we are prepped and ready for years ahead!

So you’ve planned ahead. What’s next?

If this all feels overwhelming, I’m here to help! First, download my list of The 10 Marketing Photos Your Agricultural Business Needs.

Once you have the guide downloaded, work through the ideas, jot down some notes in the guide, and then outline those ideas in your calendar.

Next, schedule a 30-minute complimentary call with me. I’ll help you walk through your ideas and plan for the seasons ahead. We can discuss ways to capture images that effectively showcase your company’s products, services, value propositions, and differentiators.

After that, you’ll be all set and ready to go capturing the images you need with a solid plan for the seasons ahead!

PS: You can learn more about my process capturing authentic, strategic images for agricultural brands to use in their marketing plans, check out my website here.