Target Your Ag Audience with Precision to Boost ROI

When you’re cooking a special meal, you find a good recipe, make a list of the ingredients you need and head to the store to buy them. If you just guess at what you need, you’ll probably end up wasting money and time, buying things you can’t use and maybe missing a few things you need to make the meal a success.

Some companies take a similarly wasteful approach with their marketing campaigns. They rely on guesswork, using third-party data and look-a-like audiences in hopes of reaching the farmers or ranchers most likely to be interested in their products or services. The vendors they choose only have access to basic data, such as age, demographics and maybe some purchasing histories. When combined with other data sources, this data might be enough to target a broad B2C audience, but if you want to reach specific producers in the ag industry, it’s just not precise enough.

The companies that rely on this vendor learn a valuable, frustrating and expensive lesson: in the world of ag marketing, guesswork doesn’t work. It leads to waste and disappointment. Let’s take a minute to look at why. Through our platforms at Precision Reach, we can access 100 million third-party, B2B ag-industry records that these other companies may use, but the 2021 USDA farm survey lists only 2.1 million farms in the US. Do the math. There are quite a few irrelevant third-party data segments. Do you want to pay to reach them?

Or do you want to boost the bang for your buck by trimming the waste? Here are a couple of ideas on how to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of your next campaign.

Use domain/app inclusion lists

Your data vendor can find ad space for you on all types of websites, including those where you don’t want to be seen. Vendors can provide exclusion lists to minimize this risk, but those lists don’t eliminate the possibility of appearing on unwanted sites. It’s more prudent to create a list of domains and apps where you only want to appear—where you know the audience you want to reach is more likely to see your ad. At Precision Reach, we offer an ag-specific inclusion list made up of 8,000 brand safe domains/apps to all our ag clients. When assessing your next data partner, find out if this type of list is offered.

Use first-party data

To further eliminate waste, choose a data vendor that can provide you with a true agriculture-specific data source for your campaigns. Many vendors simply don’t have this capability. At Precision Reach, for example, we use Farm Journal’s first-party data to construct ideal audience segments for our client’s campaigns—more than four million records representing every segment of agriculture that marketers can target. Our programmatic proprietary technology enables us to segment by commodity, size of operation and location. We can drill as deep as you need to go to find the influencer who can buy your product or service.

Whether or not your data vendor can provide your campaign with first-party data, you can start with your own. Pull data from your customer CRM file as well as from your prospect, subscriber and event-signup lists. You want to target all of your pre-qualified leads. Ask your programmatic vendor to onboard your custom lists for your campaign.

Increased ROI

By eliminating waste through more precisely targeted advertising, you boost the return on your investment, making the money you spend work harder and deliver better results. At Precision Reach, we can provide our unique algorithms and the industry-leading Farm Journal data base to deliver your message at a detailed and granular level.

Use the right data to reach the right audience and you can build a successful campaign, just like taking time to use the right ingredients will help make a special meal truly delicious.