The Power of Podcasting: ADM’s In the Driver’s Seat

As one of the world’s premiere food processing corporations, ADM is always looking for ways to better communicate with and serve an audience vital to its success: corn, soybean, and wheat farmers.

In 2019, DKY offered a solution: a podcast on relevant topics that producers could listen to while they worked in the field. The idea was to equip this audience with the knowledge they needed to better manage financial risk, enhance sustainable agricultural practices, and achieve their business goals. It was a way to strengthen connections between local ADM reps and farmers, while also driving more traffic to ADM’s website.

Our clients embraced DKY’s proposal and we got to work developing today’s podcast known as In the Driver’s Seat. The name tips its hat to farmers who are calling their own shots and making tough business decisions every day that impact their operation’s success or failure. The podcast is a collaboration between ADM and DKY in every sense of the word. ADM marketing team members host the show, and DKY provides content, production, and editing services.

A recent episode of In the Driver’s Seat focused on a new ADM tool that helps farmers discern how fertilizer fits into their total operational expenses, and how they can make more informed fertilizer purchasing decisions. It’s a good example of the power of the approach. It’s highly relevant to the podcast’s niche audience of row crop famers and the information is specifically tailored to helping them succeed with support from ADM. It demonstrates the ag company’s expertise in a very tangible way that serves farmers.

To help maximize the podcast’s impact and extend the reach of key messages and tips, DKY also provides ADM with a comprehensive content package that includes: a feature blog article, a series of emails, social media posts, email templates and text messages that sales reps can share with customers. DKY has also begun leveraging this content to pitch stories to ag writers and trade publications, in the effort to promote the podcast and strengthen ADM’s position as an industry thought leader.

With issues of food, weather, sustainability, and agricultural business practices top of mind in the industry, ADM has been able to effectively share a wealth of insightful content through the podcast. Web traffic to the podcast page has been up 94 percent year-over-year, and social media engagement on platforms where the podcast is shared was up 64 percent from 2019 to 2020. DKY helps ADM track podcast and content campaign metrics by sending a monthly digital scorecard that shows top episodes by download and consumption, open rate of emails, traffic to ADMadvantage.com from emails and other insightful results.

In the Driver’s Seat has proven that podcasting can be an effective medium for any industry with the right strategy in place. It’s all about providing content that resonates and reaches the right people who want to listen. If you’re considering starting a podcast, consider these important best practices:

1. Create content your audience cares about and will benefit them.
2. Develop share-worthy assets, such as pull-quotes that can be posted on social media sites to extend the reach of the podcast.
3. Invite guests to add expertise to the dialogue on your program.
4. Encourage audience feedback and reviews; read comments from listeners on air and mention their names.
5. Establish and grow an email list to engage with your target audiences outside of the podcast.
6. Publish regularly on top hosting platforms, so your audience knows when to expect each episode.
7. Edit and produce a professional-sounding product to build credibility.
8. Create a dedicated web page for your podcast, like ADMadvantage.com to house all episodes.

The success of In the Driver’s Seat is a testament to the ADM-DKY teams and partnership, and the legions of farmers who work hard every day to feed the world.

For more information about DKY’s podcasting capabilities, feel free to contact us.