The Ultimate Guide for Agriculture Advertising Strategies That Drives Results
5 Tips to Transform Your Marketing
In the dynamic world of agriculture, where innovation meets tradition, navigating the landscape of marketing and advertising can be both challenging and rewarding. Creating a robust agriculture advertising strategy is paramount to drive success and meet business goals, whether you're targeting individual consumers (B2C) or engaging in business-to-business (B2B) interactions. In this guide, we'll dive into the intricacies of agriculture advertising strategy, focusing on B2B marketing, covering everything from identifying your target audience to measuring success.
- Determine Your Target Audience
Understand the needs and challenges of your target audience by developing detailed personas and utilizing market research to create messages that resonate and build trust. - Set Your Advertising Goals & Budget
Establish clear goals and objectives using SMART criteria and determine your budget to allocate resources effectively and optimize advertising efforts for maximum impact. - Select the Best Advertising Channel and Tactics
Choose the right mix of paid, owned, and earned media channels that align with your goals, ensuring a cohesive and impactful advertising strategy. - Craft Your Message
Develop compelling brand messages that differentiate you from competitors, convey your mission and values, and address your audience's pain points using data analytics for personalization. - Measure Your Success
Use quantitative and qualitative metrics to evaluate your advertising efforts, ensuring continuous improvement by regularly reviewing and adjusting KPIs based on performance data.
Identifying the needs and challenges of your target audience lays the foundation for a successful campaign. Understanding your audience allows you to develop messages that resonate with them and helps build trust.
In agriculture, this segmentation often falls into two primary categories: B2C and B2B. For B2C campaigns, factors such as demographics, location, and purchasing behavior come into play. For B2B advertising, those factors are critical and requires a deeper understanding of industry needs, decision-making processes, and relationship-building.
Go beyond job titles and surface-level information when identifying your B2B audience. Be specific about their demographics and motivations. Audience personas are helpful tools that allow you to better envision who you are talking to as you’re creating content and other marketing deliverables. Build out personas by defining characteristics including:
- Job title
- Gender
- Location/geography
- Size of business
- Challenges or problems they want to solve
- Where they get their news and information
- Who influences their decisions
Utilize tools like market research surveys and analytics to gain a deeper understanding of industry needs, decisions making processes and relationship-building. Tailoring your agriculture advertising strategy to resonate with your target audience is key to driving engagement and conversions.
Pro Tip:
Develop detailed audience personas and continually update them based on market research and analytics to ensure your strategy remains aligned with your audience's evolving needs and behaviors.
Before diving into the tactics, it's essential to establish clear goals and objectives. Be careful not to confuse the two. It sounds simple, but confusion between goals and objectives is the biggest cause for misalignment that can lead to wasted time and ineffectiveness.
Goals, typically broad and long-term, set the foundation of your plan and should correlate with business results. A few examples of goals can be:
- Grow brand awareness
- Increase revenue
- Acquire new customers
Objectives define the specific, measurable actions needed to reach the overall goal. Use SMART criteria – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound —to define and measure specific objectives. For example, to grow brand awareness, you can create SMART objectives that may look like this: To grow our brand awareness, we will boost our social media following and engagement by up to 50% in 6 months by creating and sharing more educational, interview-type blog posts and video content and boosting it with a paid media campaign.
From a budget standpoint, determining your budget early on ensures that resources are allocated effectively across goals. Understanding the correlation between investment and outcomes, you can optimize your advertising efforts for maximum impact.
There are several questions to consider when determining your budget. We’ve highlighted some examples below:
- What mediums or channels will help you achieve your marketing goals and objectives?
- How long will your campaign be in market?
- What additional costs – for example, creative development, videography and campaign management – are needed?
And don’t forget that starting small and testing to see what is most effective can be can help you stretch budget dollars.
Pro Tip:
Regularly review and adjust your goals and budget based on performance metrics and changing market conditions to ensure your strategy remains effective and aligned with business objectives.
Your agricultural advertising strategy needs to include the channels your target audience uses and trusts. Traditional methods like print ads, radio spots, and trade shows continue to hold relevance, especially for reaching niche audiences. Conversely, digital channels such as social media, search engine marketing, and email campaigns provide unprecedented targeting capabilities and measurable results. Each tactic comes with its own set of considerations, ranging from cost-effectiveness to audience reach. Aligning these tactics with your predetermined goals ensures a cohesive and impactful advertising strategy.
When choosing channels to use for your marketing, look to POE ( paid, owned and earned). Each brings unique strengths to an integrated strategy and works together in a media ecosystem to drive results. Use the strengths of one type of media to support another across the customer journey. For example, use paid media to drive traffic to your owned media, or leverage earned media to enhance the credibility of your paid and owned efforts.
Paid media:
Paid media incorporates both traditional and digital types of advertising and includes many different ways to reach customers, some of which include:
- Print, radio and television ads
- Paid search and social media
- Display ads
- Paid influencers
- Geofencing
- Pay-per-click
- Retargeting
Paying to promote your message is an excellent way to increase awareness and drive traffic. Because of its advanced targeting capabilities and direct approach, paid content is a highly effective strategy for reaching your audience, driving consumers to your website or social media platforms and increasing conversions.
Knowing where to invest your dollars requires an understanding of where your audience spends their time. For example, B2B companies that want to increase awareness of products and services may incorporate a mix of paid search, paid social, such as LinkedIn, and display advertising.
For companies that want to increase conversions, retargeting campaigns can be highly effective by re-engaging audiences who have already visited a company’s website but haven’t taken the desired action. With targeted ads, businesses can remind audiences of their value and encourage them to take the next step.
Owned media:
These are the channels that your company owns and are unique to your brand. The category includes any web property you control and content you publish on your platforms.
The most common type of owned media is a website, which is likely the main media asset your company owns. Other examples of owned media include organic social media, blog and email marketing content, which further extends your website and brand in the digital space.
It takes time and effort to build up a library of owned media, as the majority of assets are content-based, but it’s a powerful tool in your marketing strategy toolbox. You have complete control of content and design and owned media drives the return on investment (ROI) as long as it is live. Plus, when you provide value to customers and visitors through the content you offer, you develop trust and build a relationship.
Owned media is a great way to supplement and support your paid media. These channels can be used together to promote content. For example, you can use paid media to send traffic to your website to learn more about your company, expertise and offerings.
Earned media:
These are media opportunities that are gained through non-paid outreach and promotion. Earned media is secured when other people talk about you. Media relations is a common type of earned media, which is usually executed through a series of media pitches and press release distributions. Securing speaking engagements, podcast guest segments, guest blogging, or any other free opportunities to represent your business using spokespeople falls into this category.
Earned media can also be described as word-of-mouth marketing. It takes a significant time investment, but the benefits – third-party credibility and trust – are well worth the effort. When others talk about you, it creates social proof of your organization and the value of your services. It can also help you achieve higher rankings in search engines.
Channels work together:
Remember, POE channels work together. Make sure they are connected to truly realize the impact of each. For example, make sure you have strong calls to action to encourage your audience to take the next step. You should also ensure your website has advertising pixels installed to understand what platforms drive traffic.
An optimized agriculture advertising strategy uses each type of media for different purposes. When activated and executed correctly, paid, owned and earned will feed into each other and give you the best results. Think of it this way:
- Paid media can jump-start results for owned media
- Owned media can generate more attention and interest, driving earned media
- Earned media drives strong organic traffic from paid media and content from owned media
Your goals and objectives will guide your media mix decisions. For example, if you are looking to generate leads, the marketing mix may rely more heavily on paid and owned media. If you are looking to increase brand awareness, the mix could be more evenly distributed between paid, owned and earned.
Pro Tip:
Leverage data analytics and customer feedback to continuously refine your channel selection and tactics, ensuring that your marketing efforts remain effective and aligned with audience preferences.
Crafting a compelling message is critical to capturing your audience's attention and driving desired actions. Your messaging needs to help your target audience understand two things: Who you are and how you can help them solve their challenges or pain points. A well-crafted message will help the audience understand that your company offers just what they need.
How do you accomplish this? With brand messaging.
Brand messaging effectively conveys your mission, values, key differentiators, products, services and ideas. The key components of brand messaging include:
- Differentiating traits: Also known as unique selling points, this is what makes you stand out from competitors in the market.
- Clear goals: Your goals help define the purpose and desired outcomes of communication efforts and ensure all messages align with your objectives.
- Audience understanding: To create targeted, personalized and impactful messages that resonate with your audience, you need to understand their needs, preferences, demographics and motivations.
- A compelling story: This will tell the audience your brand’s story and why is it important. A compelling story can add depth and resonance and create an emotional connection with your audience to help differentiate you from your competitors.
Data plays a crucial role in informing messaging, enabling you to tailor your content based on customer behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns. By leveraging data analytics, you can craft more personalized and relevant messages that resonate deeply with your target audience.
Pro Tip:
A/B test different versions of your message across various platforms to determine which resonates best with your audience. Then use these insights to refine your overall messaging strategy.
Measuring the success of your agriculture advertising efforts requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics. Prepare your strategy for measuring results in the planning stages when you set your goals and objectives. Articulate your desired outcomes so you can plan how to measure them and understand if your strategy and tactics were successful.
When evaluating outcomes, note how key performance indicators point to the success of the program or campaign performed. Were those KPIs met? If so, determine the success of the effort based on that information. If KPIs were not met, note pain points and what did not go as planned so you can revise the next time you run a similar campaign.
If you have access to industry averages for metrics, such as conversions, now would be the time to measure your results against those numbers. You can also benchmark these results against the performance of similar tactics that were targeted at this audience in about the same timeframe. Be sure you’re comparing apples to apples here.
After you’ve analyzed your results, take some time to note what you’ve learned throughout the process. How can you use these results to improve upon your next marketing endeavor? There may be opportunities to test new tactics and methods to learn what yields the best results moving forward.
While digital channels offer robust analytics tools for tracking metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates and ROI, offline channels present challenges in attribution. Implementing multi-channel attribution models and leveraging tools like unique promo codes and customer surveys can provide insights into the effectiveness of each channel. Ultimately, tying advertising efforts to tangible outcomes such as increased sales and brand loyalty are key to demonstrating ROI.
Pro Tip:
Regularly review and adjust your KPIs based on performance data and industry benchmarks to ensure continuous improvement and alignment with business goals.
Bringing it all together
Mastering agriculture advertising strategy requires clear goals, a strategic approach, a deep understanding of your target audience and a command of the digital platforms to activate and optimize your strategy. By leveraging the right channels, crafting compelling messages and measuring success, businesses can effectively navigate this dynamic landscape.
For inspiration and real-world examples of successful agriculture advertising campaigns, explore our case studies. From innovative digital strategies to impactful influencer campaigns, these case studies showcase the power of strategic advertising in driving business growth.
- Case Study 1: Working with Influencers - We worked with the Indiana Soybean Alliance and Indiana Corn Marketing Council to raise awareness of how farmers are leaders in sustainability by working with micro-influencers. This allowed the organizations to reach audiences they wouldn’t otherwise reach in a cost-effective way.
- Case Study 2: Increasing Sales and SKU Penetration - Our client Central Garden and Pet (CGP) needed to increase SKU penetration and sales at farm chain retailers. We helped them achieve this by developing a point-of-sale experience that gave their brands a dominant presence in the equine area of the store.
- Case Study 3: Increasing Awareness, Consideration and Credibility - We partnered with CNH Reman to help them increase awareness and the benefits of remanufactured parts among two target audiences: agriculture and construction dealers and equipment owners. To accomplish this, we developed an earned media plan to develop relationships with influencers in the agriculture and construction industries and increase inbound media requests.
If this all feels overwhelming or if you are feeling stuck, don’t worry. We can help. We have more than 45 years in agriculture advertising and strategy. Our experts can help you with any part of your marketing: from building strategy to content creation, to activation, we are ready to be your partner.