Marketing Strategies for Extension Programs: Reaching New Audiences and Making an Impact
Early Career Development
Ashley Wright
Livestock Area Associate Agent
The University of Arizona
Vail
Abstract
It’s no secret that we all wear many hats in our Extension work. Researcher, academic professional, farm advisor, technical expert, events coordinator, writer, presenter, and even making the coffee. One skillset that is often overlooked in Extension programs is developing an effective marketing strategy. Have you ever truly thought through how to best advertise the program you’ve created? We agonize over getting the right venue, speakers, handouts, and making sure we don’t conflict with the local sale barn, then we just default to the same methods for marketing: post the flyers, put an ad in the newspaper, and email those we have contacts for. This may reach our “tried and true” producers but might be limiting our ability to expand to new audiences – who may be exactly the people who need us most but don’t even know we are a resource! From hosting a workshop, to looking for applied research collaborators, to communicating extremely important information on an emerging issue, if the necessary information doesn’t reach the audience that needs it, the program won’t be able to effectively create impact.
The goal of this presentation is to help you think through and develop a flexible marketing strategy that fits your specific programs and audiences. By working through a set of key steps, you’ll be able to identify your audience/potential audience, decide how they are best reached, and determine which types of marketing products you should create to reach them. You’ll then be able to create a template market strategy for your programs that can be easily adapted to new programs and efforts. By setting these processes up on the front end, we can make sure we effectively cover all the appropriate marketing bases each time we run an event or program in a systematic way that reduces labor and time to complete. We’ll also discuss evaluating your marketing strategy (it’s simple, I promise!) so you can see which efforts are paying off, which need to be tweaked, and which might not be worth the time or money.
Authors: Ashley Wright
-
Ashley Wright Livestock Area Associate Agent, University of Arizona, Arizona, 85641