How to Enhance Your Organic Agribusiness Lead Gen Campaigns

Just about every agribusiness focuses on and prioritizes paid advertising as part of its marketing strategy. But have you considered how organic marketing can help you generate more leads?

There are a number of important benefits that come from organic channels:

Spend less of your marketing budget
Generate actively searching inbound leads
Build long-term relationships with your audience
Leverage search engine channels
Boost your website traffic

Focus your organic marketing efforts on specific groups of growers, and use data to drive your content topics and help you nurture your inbound leads. By doing so, you can build an effective and measurable lead generation engine without spending a single ad dollar.

Here are our tips for turning your organic marketing into an agribusiness lead gen channel.

Offer engaging content

You may be trying to convert organic traffic from search engines, affiliate links, paid ad campaigns, social media, or direct visits to your website. In all instances, one thing remains the same: If you don’t craft interesting content, you won’t attract an audience.

Website content goes beyond just having a blog. It involves many aspects of your online presence:

Your website, including pages describing your products and services
Any downloadable content offers, including sales sheets
Press releases
Editorials and advertorials in trade publications
Social media posts

These areas are all opportunities for you to provide helpful, interesting information that will draw farmers to your website.

Make sure your value proposition is front and center. Speak to your farmers’ pain and problems by offering information that’s truly unique and helpful. Write compelling and descriptive headlines, and keep your copy clean and easy to understand.

But how do you know where your farmers’ interests lie? And how do you ensure that you’re creating the right content for the kinds of farmers you want to attract?

The answer to those questions is where the buyer persona comes in. Personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer and can give you insight into how your farmers think and make decisions. Once you better understand who they are and what they are looking for, you can then offer content that speaks specifically.

Create stellar landing pages

Once you’ve placed interesting and engaging content for your farmers to see, the next step is to turn those pageviews into actual leads.

To do this, you need landing pages.

There are many thoughts and opinions on what constitutes a “landing page” versus a standard webpage or content page. However, for the purposes of this post, let’s use these definitions:

Content pages, or standard web pages, have the primary goal of providing as much relevant information as possible to the users who view that page.
Landing pages have the primary goal of converting users into leads, providing just enough information to do so.

It’s possible for users to convert after viewing a content page or learn more information about your products or services from a landing page, but the distinction between the two lies in the primary objective.

A landing page, then, should be optimized for the express purpose of converting visitors:

Feature a bold, clear headline that hooks the user
Place the conversion form above the fold
Offer additional details below the fold, but keep it brief
Use images to illustrate further what you have to offer
Remove your navigation menu to drive users to complete the form

And, of course, the most important thing: your landing page should feature a compelling reason for the user to convert.

For an active buyer, a “Contact Us” form would be a good fit. But not every farmer who visits your website is an active buyer.

In those cases, offering another compelling offer, like a downloadable piece of content or a newsletter subscription, could be enough for them to opt-in to communications from your business. From there, you can follow up with additional marketing messages and push them further down your sales funnel.

Shorten your forms

According to some research from online marketing expert QuickSprout, limiting your form fields to just three fields can almost guarantee a conversion rate of 25 percent.

If you think about it, this makes sense. In terms of inertia, it makes the task of filling out the form seem more manageable, meaning the user is more likely to do it. In terms of data privacy, the less information you ask for on a form, the more likely a farmer will fill it out.

So if you want to attract the maximum number of leads possible, consider shortening your forms.

(By the way, this principle applies not just to organic lead gen but to your paid campaigns as well.)

But how will you know whether a farmer who converts on a form is an actual lead for your business without information on crops, fields, acres, etc.? After all, you’ll need that information to understand the complete picture of the grower and its operation.

That’s where third-party data comes in.

Integrate third-party data

If you have a conversion form with three fields, you’re barely scratching the surface of the data, information, and insights that can help you not only qualify a farmer lead but convert them into a customer.

How do you overcome this challenge?

Picture this: a farmer fills out a conversion form providing their name, email, and mailing address. From there, you can match that record to other grower information — crops, acres, field boundaries, grain bins, irrigation, soil data, and much more — from a third-party source (like DTN).

In this case, you get the best of both worlds: increased conversions from a shorter lead gen form and all the information and insights you need to effectively market and sell to this farmer.

Does that sound too good to be true?

We actually make that type of seamless integration possible with our Application Programming Interface (API).

In short, an API is a tool that enables the communication between one program and another. It quite literally allows two computers to talk to each other.

In this case, the two systems would be your company’s CRM and the DTN database. If your developers have correctly set up our API calls, you can quickly and easily retrieve the information you need from our database to provide full context on your farmer leads.

Some of the data points we provide include:

Grower details
Land and field boundary details
Crop data by planting year
Grain bin details
Geospatial data
Irrigation data
Persona data
And much more

Bolster your organic marketing with DTN

When you combine engaging content, optimized pages and forms, compelling conversion offers, and integrated third-party data, you have all the tools you need to implement a powerful agribusiness lead gen campaign.

Having each of these pieces in place is what makes the difference between a brand awareness campaign with no measurable success or failure and an effective and measurable lead generation campaign that brings in revenue for your agribusiness.

For more information on how the DTN API can help you integrate farm and farmer data into your agriculture marketing campaigns, click here.