Attracting Eyes with Magnetic Ag

With an agribusiness management degree in his back pocket, Travis Martin has held prestigious roles in corporate companies in nearly each sector of the agriculture industry. Martin, 2014 Purdue University alumna, grew up in north central Indiana on his family farm, where his passion for the industry began at a very young age. After five years working for companies such as Dow AgroServices, Elanco, DecisionNext and Advanced Agrilytics, Martin recently developed and began offering “Magnetic Ag,” a bi-weekly ag newsletter for young professionals and students.

After beginning contract marketing and communication consulting in February of 2020, Martin said what initially led him to pitch the idea of “Magnetic Ag” in November was his passion to share a handful of content his friends were producing. “I had seen other newsletter types in various other industries that offered a quick, digestible, and one-stop shop where readers could find everything they needed — but agriculture just didn’t have anything similar,” Martin says.

For the “Magnetic Ag” team of content creators, the focus of the bi-weekly newsletter is to deliver content in a digestible and concise way, but with personality, Martin says. With nearly 6,000 readers and subscribers, the free, 5-minute, “morning brew” style newsletter is truly a fix for all things agriculture.

Since November, Martin says the hardest part of making the newsletter was deciding what to include in the newsletter and which outlet sources to use. The team’s goal is to cover all areas of the industry, including trade, policy, agribusiness, and agriculture technology, but Martin says, “It’s not uncommon to see at least 50 different news sources featured in the newsletter every Tuesday and Friday.”

As Martin’s success and workload with “Magnetic Ag” increased, he quickly realized the need of gathering a small team to assist in news writing and content producing. In an untraditional fashion, Martin’s team does not consist of traditional writers or content creators, but instead are individuals who work for seed companies, in policy, or even agriculture education.

Martin says that throughout the last six to seven months, the relationship with industry partners has really shifted. What started out as the team curating content that already existed, has now shifted drastically. “Nowadays, it is not uncommon for at least one, two or three times a day for us to get interesting content to feed into a larger story.

The Magnetic Ag team’s goal is to have nearly 20% of Magnetics’ subscribers to be college students. Therefore, aside from creating weekly content for the bi-weekly newsletter, in January of 2021 Martin built a team of campus ambassadors to share their experiences with other students and ideas. As the industry continues to evolve and advance, Martin says the Magnetic Ag team has big plans for the newsletters future as the they continue working to provide the industry a well summarized, 5- minute read, multi-sector ag new outlook, twice a week.

To learn more about Magnetic Ag and to subscribe to the 5-minute agriculture focused newsletter, visit magnetic-ag.com. To like, share or connect with Magnetic Ag, visit Instagram (@magnetic.ag) or LinkedIn.

To see this CoffeeTalk in action, visit the AGI Community News page.