Publications and Direct Communications

Lloyds TSB Agriculture and its sister brand, the Agricultural Mortgage Corporation (AMC), provide a full range of specialist banking and financial services exclusively for farmers and rural businesses.

With one of the largest networks of specialist agriculture managers and support staff in 44 rural branches, Lloyds TSB Agriculture wanted to raise its profile amongst all sectors of the UK agricultural industry to increase awareness of its range of farm finance solutions.

At the same time, the client also wanted to raise awareness of its AMC brand whilst maintaining distinctly separate brand identities for each of the businesses.

ABC’s involvement
As well as providing a full press relations support package to both businesses, ABC also writes, produces and publishes two separate quarterly newsletters:

• Financial Landscape – for Lloyds TSB Agriculture
• Down to Earth – for the Agricultural Mortgage Corporation

Our brief was to redesign the client’s existing publications in order to improve communications with customers and to drive new business through increased brand awareness.

By working with our team of external design specialists we gave each newsletter a fresh, clean and easy-to-read appearance that is appealing to the target audience of farmers, consultants and industry associates.

Each newsletter contains a range of farmer case studies covering all sectors of agriculture – from dairy and livestock production, to arable, horticulture, pig and poultry.  In addition, each edition contains a selection of industry update articles, news items and expert commentary.

Each article is researched and written by ABC and delivered using our straightforward, no-nonsense writing style to ensure that the client’s key messages are delivered in a concise and easy-to-digest format.

Full service approach
ABC’s client directors provide a full service approach to producing newsletters and other direct communication tools: from researching and writing articles, to photography and artwork design.  All of this is done within the client’s strict timeframe with 100% delivery for each and every issue.

ABC’s publication and direct communication services cover the following areas:

• Article and issue based research
• Interviewing case study contributors & industry experts
• Copy-writing
• On-site photography
• Artwork design & page layout
• Proof-reading
• Print management
• Client feedback

Measuring success
The impact of an internal newsletter can be measured in two ways:

• Feedback from the relevant audiences;
• Level of new business generated by each edition.

On both levels the service provided by ABC to Lloyds TSB Agriculture and AMC has been deemed to be an absolute success with positive feedback and new business generated by each edition of Financial Landscape and Down to Earth.

Direct feedback on this case study can be arranged by contacting Paul Jennings at ABC.