BEST PRACTICES FOR SUCCESSFUL AGRIBUSINESS MARKETING

by admin | Jun 25, 2021 | Agtech

Marketing is an inevitable aspect for any business’s long term success and growth. While agriculture marketing trends are always changing and evolving and the specifics may vary from company to company, one thing that remains important for every agribusiness in today’s era is leveraging data and market research.

Listed below are some data-driven practices that every agribusiness should follow to start off their marketing on the right foot and get the most out of their marketing efforts.    

DEFINE YOUR GOAL

As with any form of marketing, the building of a successful agriculture marketing campaign starts with defining a primary goal. Without an understanding of what exactly you want to achieve from your campaign, you will struggle to determine where your campaign is going and to justify your spending. Your decision to run a marketing campaign is an indication itself that you are working toward a goal; you just haven’t defined what that goal looks like, yet.

It could be that you want to reach out to a wider farmer audience and generate more leads. Or you want more people to know about your newly set up agribusiness. Maybe, you are after better social media engagement. This goal will help you create campaign messaging, call-to-action, creative, follow-ups and metrics to track the progress of your campaign.

Here are some examples of marketing campaign goals:

Brand Awareness: This type of campaign uses a mix of audience marketing and targeted digital marketing to ultimately generate more awareness around a business among farmers. These campaigns are especially helpful for companies that are not into direct-to-farmer marketing but sell through dealers. 

Conversion: These campaigns use targeted marketing where personalised ads are run to encourage farmer prospects to convert into customers. Campaign copy should clearly and precisely communicate company values and offers and include call-to-actions that are visible, easy to follow and enticing enough to induce people to click.

Engagement: As the name suggests, these campaigns are more concerned with engaging with target audience on various channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. The engagement campaigns utilise content that is informative, relevant, and interactive, so that more and more people like, comment and share (or retweet) it on the platforms they actively use.

Education: These types of campaigns are focused on educating the audience on your products, services or expertise/specialisations, so that they are aware of the value that your company offers. These campaigns generally use a variety of channels, like social media, email, blog, video, inforgraphics, and eBook channels for sharing educational content with the audience.

When setting your goal, it is important to be as targeted as possible so you can effectively align your campaign to your goal and measure the campaign outcomes against what you set out to achieve.

IDENTIFY YOUR TARGET MARKET

When asked the question – “who is your target audience?” many marketers would answer “anyone who is willing to buy our farm products”. But if you put more thought into this question, you will realise not everyone who needs you product is going to buy it. When determining your ideal customers, you need to dig deep into your target audience using the farmer data available to you.

Here are some questions you want to ask yourself:

• Are your customers young, middle-aged or senior?
• Is it men or women who buy more frequently from you?
• Does your target audience live in a particular area or are they geographically dispersed?
• Do your potential customers belong to a certain income level?
• Do they belong to a certain ethnic group?

Using answers from these questions with available farmer data, you can boil down your target market into a specific segment of people who are most likely to buy from you.   

If you are just starting out and have no idea who you should market your products to, do a research on your potential competitors and observe their customer base. This will give you a group of prospects that will most likely buy from you as they are buying similar products from your competition. If you already have a set of existing customers, determine the ones who generate most revenue for your business and have been loyal to your company. Note that your target market might be different for different products and services you offer. Depending on your products and whether you are targeting new farmer prospects or current customers, you will need to customise and target your marketing messages differently.

CRAFT TAILORED MESSAGES FOR EACH CUSTOMER SEGMENT

Once you have clearly defined targeted customer segments, you are ready to craft tailored messages to market to those segments individually. Generally, it is advisable to create highly relevant and contextual messages to engage in one-to-one conversations with each farmer. When you are targeting different demographics or have a diverse range of products, however, you will need to tailor your communications to address the needs or concerns of groups of similar growers.

The following are some areas of your agribusiness marketing where you can implement customisation for better targeting:

• Campaign Copy: Determine the specific pain points and needs of different segments, so you can capture each group’s attention with messages that address the related concerns. 
• Visuals: Using clear quality images that communicate the right message can go a long way to appeal to the target segment and drive engagement.
• Call-to-Action: Depending on the specific segment, lifecycle stage, demographic, and whether the group you are targeting is an influencer or decision-maker, the call-to-action may need to be tailored.
• Follow-up: Whether you are targeting prospects or existing customers, different segments are going to need different follow-up techniques. While quick e-commerce purchases can happen with a short and crisp follow-up, high-dollar sales will need multiple touches and much fine-tuning in follow-ups, to be closed.   

DETERMINE THE RIGHT TIME TO LAUNCH YOUR CAMPAIGN

No matter how well-crafted your ad or how powerful your marketing messaging, if your campaign doesn’t reach your target farmers at the right time, not only will it cost you time and money, but the rest of your marketing efforts will also go in vain.

Timing plays a vital role in whether your customers will respond to your campaign or it will just go unnoticed. Since farming is a seasonal business, you want your marketing messaging to be relevant to what customers need at the time you run your ad. For example, if you sell agriculture equipment, you must let your product out there before the harvesting season starts.

Another important consideration is the frequency of your marketing message. Sending too many messages can overwhelm and irritate customers while sending too few messages may cause them to lose interest in your communications over time, making it difficult for you to catch their attention again.

Also, note that the frequency of your messages for your customers should be different from that for prospects. Farmers who have recently communicated with your company don’t need to be bombarded with bulks of messages. But prospects closer to the end of your sales or marketing funnel may need more frequent communications to make their buying decisions.

Similarly, customers who just purchased from you may not want to communicate with your company immediately, but after a couple of months, they may need to hear from you about your latest offerings or company updates.

 CONCLUSION

As your agriculture business in Australia grows over time, there will always be several marketing possibilities to consider – be it launching a new product in the market or attending a global agriculture event, sprucing up your product packaging or rebranding altogether. With access to KG2 – Australia’s most comprehensive and reliable agricultural database and market research services, you can not only build a robust marketing campaign but also run it at the most suitable time to generate best outcomes.