Welcome to another episode of The Marketer’s Edge, a series designed to share senior level marketing perspective about marketer challenges, opportunities, and agency relationships. Our goal is to help marketers and agencies learn from other marketers across different industries. Today, we are talking with Doug Bastian, North American Sales and Marketing Manager at Alforex Seeds.

Alforex Seeds

Alforex Seeds is more than a seed company. It represents the culmination of 100+ years of innovation and focus, combining the legacies, the products and the R&D strength of longtime leaders in alfalfa and forages. Alforex incorporates heritage, innovation and focus to provide you a new perspective on alfalfa and forage crops; perspective to help you get more from your acres and find out how good you can really be. Alfalfa and forage are what they do best because that’s all they do.

What We Discussed:

In today’s interview with Doug Bastian, we discussed a wide variety of issues:

  • What kind of company Alforex Seeds is and the challenges of marketing such a company
  • What about the industry interests Doug the most
  • Throughout Doug’s 30 years in the industry, what have been some of the biggest changes and how those changes have changed the way he markets in that industry
  • How Doug differentiates Alforex Seeds from other competitors in his space
  • What value manufacturers (like Alforex) need to provide to farmers
  • How he builds awareness for both farmers and dealer-distributors
  • What kind of content they most often post
  • What role influencers play in this specific space
  • How important branding is to both farmers and dealer-distributors
  • The “Agriculture’s Brighter Side Video Contest” that Alforex Seeds launched back in 2021
  • How the sales portion of his job informs the marketing of Alforex Seeds
  • The types of marketing assets they create for their sales team
  • Doug’s experience with working with different marketing agencies
  • Advantages of using an agency vs an in-house team in his space
  • The importance of category experience when searching for a marketing agency in his industry
  • Advice he would give to marketers thinking about bringing a new agency on board.
  • And lastly, if an agency was trying to knock down Doug’s door and attempting to win business from him, the advice he would give them.

Thanks Doug for a great interview!

Want to watch more of The Marketer’s Edge interviews? If so, click here.