June 12, 2009 US Farmers Not Well Represented Online!

Part of the challenge of marketing a new product is letting people know that the product is available.

Even though Live Asset has been creating waves in the Insurance and Green industries for over two years now, there are still so many end users that could benefit from our services, who would want to have the protection that we offer, but they just do not know that we exist. We fear that our policies are, for too many, a wishful pipe dream that is an unknown reality.

Complicating the challenge is the adoption and internet use of some of our target audiences. Live asset insurance is great for:

• Nurseries and Growers
• Tree Farms
• Golf Courses
• General Farming
• Insurance Brokers
• Homeowners with landscape exposures
• Greenhouses

But reaching out to some of those markets is the real challenge!  

Using the internet is great, but if you look at social demographics for things like social media and internet use, there rises the difficulty of this medium. 

 The average age of farmers in 1997 was 54.3 years. The proportion of farmers age 55 and over rose from 37 percent in 1954 to 61 percent in 1997 which indicates that our farmers are continuing to get older as a population demographic.  While some internet places like Facebook report that older age groups are growing rather fast, in actuality it seems that while people join, they don’t often come back often enough to become actual users of the mediums.  In general studies have found that that the use of the various social networks decline with age: 10 percent of those aged 55 to 64 and just seven percent of those aged 65 and older.

Sadly, that’s our traditional US farmers right there: not using the intenet.

An organic and eco friendly small farmer, by contrast, seems to be represented by a younger, upcoming generation who is much more comfortable online, but often is still in the beginning stages and not always aware of the benefits of serious risk management, yet. The green industry is well represent on various internet services for networking such as Twitter and blogging, but sometimes then, this groups on a whole seems to have an inherent mistrust of “big business” type industries.. like insurance.

The Wineries are comfortable online to sell wine. Some with our greenhouses and other nursery industries…

And so, we ask you: You are here, you have found your way to us and hopefully you represent one of the many industries that may be interested in Live Asset Insurance. So, where do YOU go online? What is your source of information for you and your peers and, while we are at it, how to we get there?