Digital Marketing for Agriculture Products & Equipment Sectors

Digital Marketing for Agriculture Products & Equipment Sectors

What does digital marketing in agriculture offer your business?

In the united states, the agriculture and agribusiness worlds have grown to represent a market of nearly $390 billion in products and produce. The farming and agribusiness world itself has grown in complexity to encompass subsectors like agricultural machinery, precision-agriculture, chemicals, farm equipment, crop production, supply-chain services, and more.

Companies in these sectors can now choose between traditional business outreach channels or online marketing practices. But the truth is, that digital marketing for agriculture and the agribusiness sector provides businesses with the opportunity to increase visibility and to generate business-to-business leads more efficiently than ever before.

As these industries continue to grow and continue to modernize, the proportion of operations that take place online will grow as well.

Right now though, the agricultural world has the lowest adoption rate for digital marketing at 78%, low when compared to the average 88% across all other industries. For brands and suppliers looking to increase their reach across the industry then, digital marketing in the agriculture sector presents the opportunity to grow organic site traffic, increase search-engine rankings, and boost perceived industry authority.

For businesses, AG services, and online retailers in this sector it might seem like established KPIs may not translate as obviously to the universe of internet marketing. But this isn’t true. Digital marketing for agriculture – including search optimization and paid advertising – gives businesses opportunity for better B2B lead growth as well as for the digital marketing of agriculture eCommerce products.

Let’s talk about why.

Agribusiness and farming businesses tend to rely more on non-digital and established business growth strategies making digital marketing more of an accessory. But search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search advertising offer well-established benefits for long-term business performance and are proven strategies. They also cater well to agricultural product sales, wholesale product sales, export/import business and product eCommerce – regardless of industry.

The potential of digital marketing for agricultural eCommerce products

Search engine management includes both SEO and paid search ads (or PPC advertising). According to data from BrightEdge, 51% of all website traffic now comes from organic search, and an additional 10% from paid search advertising. Search engines like Google and Bing have become such an important channel that they drive more than 40% of online revenue.

Digital marketing in agriculture and agribusiness markets means being able to tailor a strategy that drives both organic and paid traffic towards your business’s preferred goals and KPIs. Placing in Google’s spot #1 for target search keywords can help raise average traffic share to 32.5%, and 1^st page search listings take in more than 90% of traffic – as searchers prefer prominent results.

So why consider SEO as a strategy?

One of the advantages that digital marketing for agriculture provides is that a professional SEO campaign can help improve the quality of traffic coming to your site by targeting high-value, high-traffic industry keywords and then by implementing site content with those target keywords.

In business-to-business sectors (like agriculture and farming) 67% of purchases for multiple industrial manufacturing and industrial businesses are influenced by digital.

Via Think With Google

Search engine optimization as part of digital marketing in the agriculture sector is ideal for:

• Ensuring long-term business growth and reliable revenue
• Maintaining or growing industry market share
• Promoting brand recognition and building a business’s loyalty base
• Growing traffic to your website across organic, referral, and social segments
• Gaining authority with improved page-linking and natural backlink growth
• Improving sales and revenue affordably, without an ad budget
• Generating leads and sales by catching search traffic for customers who are at the top of the shopping funnel

This means tracking a site’s existing keyword rankings, finding related keywords, and discovering LSI related phrases, can lead to overall better rankings within search engines. Algorithm and search focused strategies also mean optimizing the site’s content with on-page SEO designed for farming services, agriculture products, industry eCommerce products and more.

For agribusinesses and commercial agriculture sites there are best-practices and B2B SEO strategies that can help target traffic that’s more suited to their market.

Digital marketing for agriculture products, farm equipment and more involves accurate, long-tail keywords designed to match industry language and terminology. A professional SEO service will be able to match search optimization with your business’s important content as well as to target traffic for keywords related to “wholesale,” “industrial,” “food grade,” “manufacturing” and more.

For businesses in the agriculture, farming, AG machinery, irrigation, and agribusiness spaces this also means building out a strategy that accounts for regulatory specifications, and technical product specifications. This sort of digital marketing in the agriculture sector is suitable for companies that sell tractor parts, agricultural chemicals, food processing equipment, farming accessories etc. – and it gives businesses the opportunity to improve on-page meta data, text content, and technical SEO elements that can improve their organic rankings over time.

Optimizing on-page SEO elements like keyword density, page titles, internal linking, site structure, and more allows business to optimize SEO along side their existing content marketing strategy. Because onsite content is one of the most important search ranking signals, SEO as part of digital marketing in agriculture means working within a business’s existing content and matching that work with their existing brand language.

Search optimization and search engine management both also offer the opportunity to collect important performance data, traffic data, and sales data to help improve overall online strategy.

Tracking KPI Data with Google Analytics and Search Console

Businesses can use returning data to improve their marketing by fine-tuning areas of their site with the best engagement, rankings, and conversion rate. Understanding how users come to your site and how they behave allows you to improve your site design and adjust your SEO campaign over time.

Google’s Analytics tools means that digital marketing in agriculture can track page-views, sessions, revenue/sales, form-fill outs, advertising performance, conversion rate percentage, and a lot more. This data let’s agriculture companies and related industries track which segments their traffic comes from including search engine, social media, referrals and more, meaning that they can use this vast data to build out their digital marketing strategy and to more accurately measure KPIs.

Google Analytics allows for digital marketing in agriculture that can keep pace with website growth and measure traffic to help you see the results of your marketing. This information can also help your agribusiness or eCommerce site track user interest and how your online presence is growing.

Plus, companies and websites can get detailed statistics on how their website is performing in Google with tools from Google’s Search Console. Search Console data helps marketers inform, maintain, and fine-tune digital marketing in agriculture by using nformation on how visitors are arriving at their website, which search terms they are performing the best for, and average click-through-rate (CTR) for high-value search topics.

Over time this data can be used to further improve a site’s SEO and to grow revenue even further. Because Search Console is designed to give sites information about how they are presented in the Google index, it can also be used to watch for technical SEO factors and to make sure agriculture businesses and farming businesses aren’t being penalize for bad search practices.

Paid-ad digital marketing for agriculture & agribusiness

Another option within search engine management involves pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) on search engines like Google or Microsoft’s Bing. These platforms provide search-advertising options for paid listings that appear on search pages next to regular organic results.

For agribusiness and agricultural digital marketing this gives businesses the opportunity to expand their online visibility and improve their revenue quickly with a strategy that improves CTR and site conversions.

Google famously claims that its search ads offer businesses and advertisers $2 in revenue for every $1 spent. But the truth is return-on-ad-spend is contingent on an optimized and professional campaign that’s designed to match with your business’s goals. And to target the right keywords.

Paid search can help agricultural and farming related businesses target high-value, industry relevant keywords with bidding strategies that weigh cost-per-click with a business’s specific goals.

The advantage of this sort of digital marketing in agriculture sectors is that paid ads provide businesses with more website traffic than organic search alone and help boost visibility even further. Paid ads take up the top 3 spots on Google search and are able to take 46% of search traffic. Site visitors that click on a search ad are 50% more likely to convert as well.

PPC search ads also offer much faster results than organic optimization strategies. They offer a way for agriculture businesses, eCommerce sites, and agribusinesses to get revenue quickly and to gain site traffic during a short time-frame. For this reason, paid search advertising as a part of digital marketing in agriculture is good for:

• Gaining traffic or revenue during holidays or during short seasonal periods
• When expanding an agriculture business to a new niche or market
• Rapidly gaining traffic for certain industry keywords
• Quickly gaining visibility to new business sectors and geographical markets
• Targeting traffic in certain regions, countries, states, or cities
• Generating cash-flow or revenue quickly
• Helping promote farm/agriculture brand recognition or for competing against a dominate competitor
• Subsidizing a business’s marketing along with SEO content marketing

According to Wolfgang Digital, 2019 was the first time that paid-search ads outpaced regular search traffic in terms of revenue with PPC ads driving 33% of revenue in the retail channel. This means that a comprehensive digital marketing campaign for agriculture businesses along with websites in the farming sector can be crucial for modern business growth. In fact, for online-only businesses paid strategies boast responsibility for as much as 46% of revenue!

Paid social media marketing for agriculture

Finally, there’s social media paid ads that work on the same cost-per-click functionality as search engine ads.

Popular social media platforms represent one of the fastest growing, and newly most popular marketing channels on the internet. Likewise platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram still offer opportunities for business-to-business and eCommerce growth.

For agriculture this still provides websites with an opportunity to grow online visibility and revenue. Research from IDG shows that decision makers within business-to-business segments use social media in decision-making at a rate of 84%.

For B2B buyers, the amount was 75%. Social media outreach, social media content, and digital marketing in agriculture sectors now means that businesses have an unlikely opportunity for new growth, within a relatively new channel.

Social media sites tend to offer a range of ad styles, including:

• Photo and video ads in user feeds
• Messenger ads and mail ads that are designed to reach individuals
• Stories ads
• Shopping and eCommerce focused ads for digital retail opportunity

What’s more is that these advertising platforms let businesses define their marketing goals, meaning that ads can be set up for revenue, brand awareness, site traffic, conversions and more. Professional social media ad management means using these tools (plus your business’s data) to fine-tune paid ad campaigns and to narrow down your target audiences to get the best results. Social media ads have the advantage of being able to audiences based on interests, jobs, location and more.

This is why PPC search ad campaigns and social media marketing strategies in agriculture both allow businesses to find their ideal clients at any point on the conversion journey.

Paid ads strategies as part of digital marketing in the agriculture sector also allow online brands to get the most out of their total marketing strategies. This is because they work with SEO and content.

Social media marketing and paid search ads allow businesses to get the most out of their existing content and their on-site marketing material to naturally grow traffic over time. Increase traffic and a greater social presence help feed SEO by building back-links and boosting website ranking authority.

All of these methods combined, means businesses with an online presence are able to get the most bang for their buck.

Learn More

Get more information on digital marketing for agriculture sectors and agribusiness websites. Our team can help guide you with information on strategic SEO services and paid advertising management designed for growth.