Italian agribusiness accounts for about 25 percent of our country’s GDP. This success is certainly due to the fact that Italy is a unique country in the world, we have 838 agri-food products that are recognized as PDO, PGI and Traditional Specialties Guaranteed.
People often think of wine, but as many as 309 products are not wine.
We are talking to understand 540 billion in total value, and when we talk about agri-food products that we sell in the world we are talking about 60 billion.
Agribusiness in our economy has achieved this importance because companies in the sector have been able to translate the traditional goodness of our country into products of sublime quality, guaranteed by protective standards and expressed in the values mentioned above.
This capacity for growth is also linked to the intelligent action of continuous innovation that the industry has been able to express in order to meet the ever-changing demands of the consumer whether it be Italian or international markets.
Competitiveness in a fast-paced world never ends, so many challenges still face the industry, just think of the wide margins of growth that defeating counterfeiting could bring about globally.
My experience in my profession as a Temporary Manager entering companies as Chief Digital Officer (CDO = Director of Digital) tells me that often the powerful lever of “digital” is still marginally, if not wrongly, used.
Here, then, is the meaning of the title of this paper, “Digital Strategies that Bring Value to the Agribusiness World.”
Still recently, I have attended major trade fairs, and these have been opportunities to visit booths, not only of small entities, and to see how the relationship with the visitor is still handled with the classic “paper contact sheet,” on which to staple the business card.
In my wanderings among companies in the industry, I have seen that their online positioning is often neglected and not considered strategic, often one has merely made a “beautiful site” in the aesthetic sense but then I find that trivially that beautiful website does not fall within the minimum performance characteristics that Google requires for proper positioning.
The Role of Technology in Agribusiness.
New technologies are playing an increasingly important role in agribusiness, both in the production and marketing of products.
How can we not mention precision agriculture, which uses drones, sensors and other technologies to optimize agricultural production. Or the applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that using algorithms and mathematical models enable them to analyze data and make decisions that were unthinkable in the past.
Let’s say we are in the realm of the most complex and innovative strategies here; in other contributions we will look at these aspects in more detail. Instead, today I think it is more interesting to point out the preliminary steps, the ones that need to be considered when deciding to start plotting a digital strategy, when an agribusiness wants to gain new market share through digital as well.
How to set digital strategy.
Step One: Define your goals! What does the agribusiness want to gain from this new strategy? Do we want to increase online sales, improve brand visibility, generate new customers or improve the experience of existing customers?
Step Two: What is the target audience? If you have defined a goal you need to go and figure out who you want to target. It will be necessary to draw one or more Buyer Personas. You will need to ask yourself the following questions: what are their needs and preferences, how can your company meet these needs through the use of digital. You will need to understand, for example, how these potential customers approach the purchase (Buyer Journey).
Step three: the market will have to be analyzed. It will be necessary to check how our online competitors behave. We will understand how they use digital channels, sense trends we may not know about, and see opportunities we could exploit in terms of competitiveness.
Step Four: The digital platform on which to move to reach our goal and talk to the right people will have to be chosen. We will need to figure out if we need to implement CRM (after mapping out processes and redesigning them at the “digital” To_Be); we may need to choose which social channel to use to promote products; perhaps we need to equip the company with a new high-quality website to increase brand visibility; start an e-commerce project.
Step Five: It will be necessary to create a content plan (Editorial Plan) to govern our communication in a coordinated way with respect to the various tools we decide to use: social media posts, blog articles, newsletters, etc.
Step six: We will need to decide how to monitor and how to measure the activities we are going to activate. Only with objective data will we get out of the world of opinion, of supposed experience, of you’ve always done it this way, and enter the data-driven that is, of the data-driven company that the digital will provide us with, certain data will help management make the right dacision.
Conclusion
In conclusion, digital strategies can offer concrete competitive advantages for agribusinesses, if we want to summarize we have the ability to quickly create greater online visibility, we will be able to improve consumer understanding of products, and finally we will have easier accessibility to markets.
In concluding a provocative question but one that the reader will welcome as a stimulus to the understanding that he needs to open the doors of his company to the new technologies that travel on digital channels: a new season of important national and international trade fair events dedicated to agribusiness is starting, have you asked yourself the question that in the face of major investments to be able to participate in Anuga or Tutto Food the event can no longer be managed with a contact sheet to which you staple a business card and distribute kilograms of paper of brochures and catalogs?
We Chief Digital Officers at Maia Management know how to guide you through the complexities of digital. If you are interested in understanding how Fill out the test Or schedule a call with us. We are ready to accompany you on your company’s digital innovation journey.
