How Can Agricultural Businesses Use Social Media Marketing?

Social Media in Agriculture

Over the past 15 years, social media has changed how brands communicate with consumers. This has opened up marketing opportunities for smaller brands in the process and should be part of your agricultural marketing plan. If you’re thinking of using social media to grow your agribusiness we have a few tips to help you along the way.

Know your target market

In our marketing to farmers article, we covered this in more detail, but it is important to know who your target market is. Farmers cover such a wide range of ages and sectors, knowing who your target market is and how they receive their information is critical. This is going to dictate which platforms are going to be important to your social media strategy.

Choose the right platforms

There are numerous social media platforms and each offers something different, with a different audience. If you a farmer looking to use social media for your charcuterie business, you are going to need different platforms than those leasing agricultural machinery. Some options below

• Instagram; Popular with younger people – A great option for those selling visual products such as food and drink as it gives a platform to “sell” the lifestyle element of your brand. It’s also a great platform for larger businesses to show what life is like within the business on a day to day basis, to aid with recruitment.

• Facebook; Although it started as a university-based platform, it’s now popular with an older demographic. – Facebook offers an opportunity for agribusinesses to promote their product to detailed target markets through their advertising platform. Specific Facebook groups and pages offer the opportunity for businesses to demonstrate their knowledge and engage in discussion with customers in the process.

• Linkedin; The platform for business professionals, Linkedin offers the opportunity to promote to individuals in larger organisations and is a strong choice of social media for agricultural brands. It’s a great option if you are selling equipment to industrial-scale producers such as larger dairies or egg producers, or are marketing an agricultural services business.

• YouTube; Renowned as a video platform, and one I’m sure we’ve all used for a multitude of purposes. YouTube is an excellent platform for delivering instructional based content. Often used by people wanting to learn new things, it provides an opportunity to deliver video content on how to use your product. Whether that be a tool brand teaching how to erect fencing or a sauce producer delivering recipes using their products.

Create a Social Media Plan

Set social media goals and objectives

As part of your digital marketing plan, you should work out how social media contributes to your overall business strategy. From this, you can set SMART objectives, such as drive more traffic, drive sales through social commerce etc, rather than just acquiring likes and followers. This should then help to dictate the kind of posts you put out.

Research the competition

Although you don’t want to copy your competition, by researching them, you can see how strong they are on social and what opportunities they aren’t exploiting. You may also get fresh ideas on ways to improve what they have done.

Outside of your direct competition, take a look at what others in similar markets or even global brands are doing. You can get some real inspiration that will help with creating your social media calendar.

Conduct a social media audit

If you’ve been using social media for your business for a while, it’s time to take a look at what you’ve done previously and analyse what has worked and what hasn’t.

1. Make sure all profiles are up to date – Are logo’s, links and bios up to date? Are pinned posts still relevant?

2. Look for high performing posts – What do they have in common? What are stand out features which may have contributed to their success?

3. Which channels are performing best? – Which channels are growing and driving results, which aren’t? What are the potential reasons for the successes and failures and can any issues be fixed?

4. Set up reporting to track this data over time – This will allow you to see if channels are still effective or if they have lost their influence.

5. Understand your followers – Use social media analytics to learn who follows you. This could help inform future campaign activity and decision making within the wider business.

Create a social media calendar

By creating a social media calendar you can plan what content you should be using at what times. This gives you some structure and makes the overall process easier to manage.

Using an 80/20 rule, you can get a balance between offering strong, insightful content and that which promotes your brand. Ensure 80% of your content is there for the benefit of your audience. By educating or entertaining them with it, it makes it easier to use the other 20% to promote your brand or sell your products, without negatively impacting on user experience.

Don’t shout, interact

Social media provides a great opportunity for interacting with your customer. Rather than just broadcasting what’s happening you have an opportunity to enter a discussion with your customer, build trust and also find out what the customer likes (and dislikes) about your product/service.

Some ways to get the most from these interactions include;

• Replying to followers who comment on your posts

• Find hashtags that relate you your product/service/brand and enter discussions

• Engage in discussions about your products/services in groups.