The Region 3 Best of National Agri-Marketing Association (NAMA) Awards Celebration was held January 19, 2023, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. A total of 246 submitted entries competed for recognition in the competition. Submissions were from marketing agencies and businesses throughout the Corn Belt, including Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota.

Hard work, creativity and exceptional attention to detail were on display, as the AKC Team took home 10 awards from the event (6 first place and 4 second place, or merit, awards). We’re proud to showcase the work that received recognition during the celebration:

You’re interesting people who provide valuable products or services that everyone wants and needs. So, it only makes sense that your customers want to hear from you as frequently as possible, right?

Alas, as any enthusiast of spicy foods can attest, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Bombard your clients’ inboxes with offer after offer, promotion after promotion, and you might start to wear out your welcome, no matter how good your intentions.

Video is a great way to market any brand or product. The average user now spends more than 100 minutes each day watching online video content, and the rise of platforms like TikTok will most likely increase that number in coming years. TikTok has more than a billion users worldwide, and more than 90% access the platform on a daily basis, spending an average of 52 minutes on the video platform.

Social Media use tends to spike around the Holidays (Nov.-Dec.) as more people are at home and on their phones. In fact, Facebook reports that it has seen a posting increase of 26% during that time frame. But does that increase in posting and engagement carryover to some of the smaller holidays? Let’s find out!

With current and prospective customers being constantly bombarded by advertisements, and beginning to identify more with brands than products, marketers are having to stay one or more steps ahead of everyone else when trying to stand out and catch someone’s attention. Print advertising, video marketing and billboards, while still effective, have been around for decades. And while not a new type of marketing, experiential marketing is being utilized more and more by marketers in order to grab customers’ attention and reel them in.

AKC won 11 awards at the Region 3 Best of NAMA Awards Celebration held January 18, 2022, in Des Moines, Iowa.

Thanksgiving is the time of year where we gather with our loved ones to share a meal and give thanks for the blessings in life. We can actually trace back what is believed to be the first Thanksgiving celebration to November 25, 1621, when the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag shared a meal together as tentative, but needed allies. Nearly 250 years later, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving during the heat of the Civil War.

Between posting on social media and binging the latest Netflix series, your potential customer can sometimes be viewed as the un-dead. So what is the best way to reach multiple audiences across various social media platforms?

With the world becoming more connected by the day, the frequency with which customers and companies are interacting is increasing. Gone are the days of customer service representatives only handling customer complaints, salespeople only dealing with sales and marketers only making posters or ads. With social media, website chat windows, phone hotlines and more, customers have more ways to ask questions, access information and interact with your business than ever before. This interconnectivity and ease of access means that everyone in your company will most likely be asked a question about your products or services at some point.

As smartphones reshape the way we interact with the world, video has become the medium du jour for marketers and business owners alike.
The easiest way to accomplish this is by creating a bond with your audience. Does the audience feel something when seeing your latest video? Is an emotion triggered when someone sees your message or an image? If not, you might be getting overlooked, forgotten or even downright ignored.
It’s a tough challenge to overcome without an easy solution or decades of best practices from which to draw inspiration. So why not crack a joke?

When you begin the process of selecting a marketing automation platform, you might already have an idea of the features and capabilities the platform needs to have. Whether you need it to solve a specific sales role, re-engage customers after information gathering, or distill content throughout your wider network, there will always be a platform that can help you reach these goals.

In a recent blog, we discussed how to manage your brand and enhance the overall customer experience. Having a well-focused, unique brand is important. Your brand is the overall personality of your business and the promise it makes to customers.

Once your brand has been established, fostering awareness and building up the public’s perception of that brand comes next. Brand awareness is the familiarity and recognizability of your brand with your target audience. Establishing brand awareness is crucial when marketing and promoting your company and products, especially in early stages of a business.

Have you ever wondered if your audience is actually hearing what your company is saying? If you think your current marketing efforts are being ignored and are looking for a way to interrupt what has now become the norm, then utilizing video may be the way to go.

According to Wistia, 68% of people say they prefer to learn about a new product or service by watching a short video. Additionally, 92% of marketers using video say it’s an important part of their marketing strategy.

At AKC Marketing, we like to talk about the “big brand.” But what is the big brand? Why is a distinctive brand important in today’s marketplace?
Brent Thomsen, Creative Director at AKC Marketing, understands the importance of a brand and how a well-focused, unique brand can enhance the overall customer experience.
According to HubSpot, a brand helps distinguish one organization from another. Typically comprised of a name, tagline, logo, brand voice and more, the brand also refers to the overall customer experience.

As the world ground to a halt at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies were left scrambling to find backup plans for their events. Each year, thousands of trade shows and other in-person gatherings take place. These events are vital for businesses, and the pandemic shut them all down.

Guess what. AKC Marketing was one of those companies scrambling to find a plan B. The good news is, we have a lot of tools at our disposal and were quickly able to figure out how to use them just a bit differently in order to keep our clients’ marketing plans on track. Here are a few things we learned in a world without handshakes.

AKC Marketing Automation Expert Amanda Laverman, a multi-touch attribution specialist, explains and explores the importance of multi-touch attribution. Understanding what multi-touch attribution is, how businesses use it and how prospective customers benefit from its use are all covered.

Jenna Kramer, AKC Marketing Automation Specialist, provides an overview of marketing automation, a software-aided process through which marketing professionals provide unique, customized experiences for users on a potentially massive scale.

AKC Marketing earned nine awards at the 2020 National Agri-Marketing Association (NAMA) Best of award show on January 28, 2021. AKC won six first-place and three merit awards. First-place honors were awarded in Advertorial, Direct Mail, Billboard, Virtual Event, A/V Feature and Social Tactic categories.

Rod Reding, Producer and Editor at REL Productions, has spent decades working in video production. In that time, video technology has changed drastically, as has the mediums of distribution. Rod has been there every step of the way, implementing cutting-edge techniques and equipment into his work.
That experience gives him a unique vision into today’s use of video, as well as some ideas about where video technology will take us in the future.

Business owners and marketers alike want to believe their marketing funnel is airtight. But how do we know our funnels are without cracks and leaks?

While you may not be able to test for leaks like you would with a pipe, there are a few THINGS you can test to optimize your marketing, keep your funnel sealed and ensure more people are moving toward a sale.