What can you expect from The Farmers Report blog?
The Farmers Report blog is for lovers of marketing and growing small businesses.
We will dive into marketing philosophies, trends, news, speaking with movers and shakers, but all through the perspective of a small business owner. You can expect a blend of inspirational, thought-provoking topics, mixed with specific and tactical opportunities that you can apply to your business immediately.
Looking back at my MBA days at the University of Manitoba, my favourite professors had one foot in academia and one fit in business. No disrespect to those that were solely academic, but personally, I gained more from personal lessons from the business world. So, keeping in that spirit, while all insights and ideas may not apply to your business, you can have confidence that the insights presented in the Farmers Report are coming from practitioners of marketing and business owners. In fact, we will be executing digital marketing activities to build our community and we will actually report on our actions and results.
The Farmers Report blog will serve as the core channels to engage with us, share ideas and absorb content. Here are a couple examples of content to look forward to:
Watch for an interview with an architect from IBM Watson. IBM Watson is incredibly technical, so much so, you may wonder how it is relevant to a small business owner. One concept that we will hit on heavily in this blog is that technology is integral to people’s lives, especially due to smartphones. In fact, 50% of people pick up their phones immediately after they wake up. We hope by shedding light on what technology exists today and what is inevitable in the future, that business owners will more fully embrace the need educate themselves on and invest in the digital world.
Watson is a question answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language,[2] developed in IBM‘s DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci.[3] Watson was named after IBM’s first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson.[4][5] The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy![6] In 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.[4][7] Watson received the first place prize of $1 million.[8]
Hear from entrepreneurs who can speak to their strategy, successes and lessons learned!
We will speak with a serial entrepreneur whom I have crossed paths with in various roles over the past decade. Jason Abbott got an early start in marketing and entrepreneurship and runs several businesses, one of which you will hear about shortly called Launch1460. We will dive into his process of identifying opportunities, bringing them to life and marketing them.
You can expect many tactical blog posts. Watch for a series called Modern Marketing Methods, and another series, Modern Marketing Philosophies. There will be many tactical posts on topics; such as marketing automation, Facebook advertising, common website mistakes, and how to choose a marketing agency.
One final note on the Farmers Report blog:
We stated that the blog is for “lovers or marketing and growing small businesses.”
Lovers of marketing? Really?
Well … Yes.
While we are aware there are some people that don’t love marketing (although that is hard to believe), we are building a community for passionate lovers of marketing.
The type of people that don’t turn it off and see marketing opportunities everywhere. They are the type that wake-up in the middle of the night and write a blog post. Or they pull over to write down an idea for a Facebook campaign. They are committed to learning as much as possible about marketing and truly love applying those ideas to businesses they manage.
If this describes you, welcome! We hope you find a new home in our community.
If you are not quite that impassioned about marketing, thank you for visiting us. Maybe you too will consider yourself a lover of marketing one day!
So, thank you for investing your time and attention with us. We hope that you gain as much value from our community as we gain in building it.
Onward and Upward!