Digital marketing in agriculture initially was guided by wasteful spending to reach a random few early adopters. Since then, marketers have been fighting against both overspending and lack of reach.
While neither should cause a psychosis among hopeful marketers in agriculture, those two areas are key in producing results.
Here are two tweaks to your digital marketing to improve response:
- Guide marketing spending based on the performance of the digital mechanism. If you want leads, you should not be pouring a high percentage (if any at all) into banner advertisements that typically max out at 1 percent response rates.Search, mobile texting, social and email messaging will garner a greater number of prospects than standard digital tactics. Search and social can also be handled on shoestring budgets to maximize each marketing penny.All of the tools are made more effective with ever-improving targeting data. Use a list, a CRM or fine-turn with the tools offered through social and search to cast only as wide a net as necessary. Social channels, specifically, have been noted to have declining engagement, but that decline is mitigated with audience data targeting.
- Second, farmers engage with marketing in a different manner than consumers. Adoption of certain digital categories differs quite a bit even within the various segments of agriculture. For instance, podcasting among the livestock category has much higher adoption than on the row crop side. Meanwhile, consumers have adopted podcasts significantly more than all of agriculture. There are device and connection speed issues still hindering adoption.Those hinderances also mean there is ebbing and flowing even within the audience segments on adoption. The willingness of one farmer to be an early adopter on mobile doesn’t mean there is an equal willingness to be early on Twitter, for instance.The easy answer is to buy banners, but the best answer is to buy an array of the most engaging options. Sixty-five percent of farmers are on Facebook at least once per month, but that means you need search, email and mobile (or other options) to reach the remaining 35 percent.Expanding the type of offerings will allow for the widest reach.
These two tweaks will expand your reach into the audience and expand your engagement with them. More targets responding to your messaging can only mean more business.
Don’t miss the Ag Marketing in the Digital Age conference, March 24 in St. Louis. To hear more about it from Chief Digital Officer James Arnold, listen here. To read more about the conference, click here.
If you are interested in more information about how Rooster Strategic Solutions can help you, reach out via our Contact page.