Generate Transparency and Brand Trust with Digital Tools

Most purchasing decisions in agriculture are driven by personal relationships. If an agribusiness doesn’t already have a one-on-one rapport with a grower, it can be a challenge to convince them their recommendations are data-based and trustworthy.

While nothing can replace the trust generated from human connections, digital platforms can be a vital tool to bridge that gap between an agribusiness and its customers. They bring transparency to the data behind a company’s recommendations, which helps build confidence in the brand.

“One of the things that digital tooling can do for a company is make it more clear why the product itself has value,” says Kat Crawford, CEO of Skyward Apps. “It makes it so that the company itself can have a relationship with whoever the end consumer is.”

The value of a glimpse under the hood

To understand the power of digital platforms, we can look to the auto industry as an example. Before websites like Carfax, consumers shopping for used vehicles often had to trust the auto dealer or previous car owner was transparent about a vehicle’s history. Now consumers can use applications to verify a vehicle’s past and gain a clearer understanding of what they’re actually purchasing.

Leading agribusinesses are also leveraging digital platforms to give farmers a glimpse “under the hood.” From annual seed and fertility selections to once-in-a-decade equipment investments, companies can use digital tools to show farmers the data that supports their recommendations. As agriculture evolves to a tech-driven industry, suppliers not taking full advantage of digital platforms will find themselves at a disadvantage, if they haven’t already.

Where digital really proves its value

One risk of relying too heavily on personal relationships is when a sales rep or advisor leaves. That’s when your digital investment really proves its value. Data is validation. Data is transparency. Data is decision support. While digital applications can’t replace one-on-one relationships, they are an always available representation of your brand, and your brand is everything. That’s why the developers you partner with must be able to support your digital pipeline all the way down to the grower. Experience matters here.

Digital tools also provide regular touchpoints to keep your brand top of mind and foster engagement throughout the year. A seed company might send reminders to take soil samples, offer a checklist of tune-ups growers should make to their planters before the season, or share insights that apply to a farmer’s specific conditions. If a grower finds a tool that benefits their operation, they’re less likely to take their business elsewhere, even if they lose a personal relationship. 

Give farmers what they want

The key to implementing a successful digital platform may be obvious: give farmers what they value most: quality of life. That means more free time, less labor, more free time, fewer resources to produce more sustainable yields, less complexity, and did we mention more free time? Even if ag suppliers pooled all their data, and we’re not going down that rabbit hole, creating applications that can take massive data sets, analyze, boil them down, and build in features that allow farmers to compare options, is no small feat. It also means a commitment to put the farmer first.

“It adds credibility to a company when they can look at both more expensive and less expensive products and show how they compare to one another,” Crawford says. “Sometimes it’s worth going with a less expensive product. For a salesperson to be able to say, ‘You know, this is actually a better deal for you,’ that also generates trust.”

When Skyward Apps works with an agribusiness to build a digital platform, we first focus on what the end user needs to make their job easier. What do they need to know to make a purchasing decision? What makes them say yes or no to a purchase? These help guide the creation of customer personas, which allows us to define a digital tool’s functions and features.

From there you can determine what data holes need to be filled. Sometimes the data exists but isn’t being used—or more commonly, isn’t incorporated with other data systems to create a clear, cohesive picture. Other times, it’s not being collected.

Making the complex simple

Collecting the right data isn’t enough. It needs to be presented in a way so that whoever interacts with the platform can easily understand it – not just farmers, but the advisors they trust. That means making the complex simple, at the same time more data will be needed to make farming more sustainable. For farmers to cash in on carbon credits, they will need data to monitor, measure and validate their progress.

“A lot of companies collect a lot of data,” Crawford says, “but if it’s not exposed in a way that is understandable for someone who hasn’t taken specialty courses, it feels less transparent, even if the data is there.”

This was a challenge faced by Advanced Agrilytics. Specializing in in-depth sub-acre field analysis and scouting, the business does a lot of complex data work. It needed to help its customers understand the data behind its figures. Working with Skyward, the company launched a mobile application to give growers a visual way to consume data on a field-by-field level. As a result, its customers felt more comfortable and confident in the decisions they made based on the transparency of the data insights.

Let digital support relationships

Digital tools can’t replace the one-on-one relationships sales advisors form with their customers, but they can support relationships and build them quicker.

“If you’re going to send someone out, you should send them with something that early on can define them as credible,” Crawford says. “Digital can allow you to create a faster showing of value and why this relationship can be meaningful to the farmer.”

Digital teams at agribusinesses only have so much capacity to build the internal infrastructure necessary to help them outcompete. It’s critical to work with top tier experts that can support the digital pipeline all the way down to the grower.

For more information on Skyward Apps’ experience collaborating with leading agribusiness brands on the digital tools that have propelled their business, visit Skyward Apps, or go to skywardapps.com/case-studies to see how to build transparency and trust through technologies.