Why your rural marketing is failing to reach its potential

Why your rural marketing is failing to reach its potential

Most rural marketing fails miserably because most rural marketers have failed to do their homework.

The tired, same-old, we not me tricks and techniques no longer work in the blizzard of information your rural market battles in their inbox or eyes every day.

Research shows you’ve got about 3 seconds to make your mark or you’re gone when they move on to the next message they see.

Research also shows the average consumer is bombarded with about 1800 advertising messages a day.

If your message isn’t new, unique, different or meaningful you will be wasting your precious marketing dollars.

They are not sitting there waiting for your perfectly manicured marketing message that you spent thousands of dollars or a hundred hours with your big fancy pants ad agency on.

Attention is in very short supply.

Farmers are very time-poor, busy people.

They represent one of the most over-advertised to markets.

This means they ignore almost 98% of what they see and hear.

In order for your marketing message to make its mark and hit the target you must to be distinct and different.

Saying the same thing as everyone else isn’t going to you to where you want to be.

Nor is playing it safe.

Your message needs to be counterintuitive and contradictory to break their automatic “here we go again” guessing machine.

Biologically when our brains see the same thing it won’t waste precious time and energy paying attention to it.

Your brain is a pattern recognition machine.

When it sees something it’s seen before it ignores it.

It only pays attention to things that it sees as a threat – like a change in the environment.

That might be a threat to their status, significance or social standing.

You and they are wired to survive.

Saying something to your marketplace that they already know is a total waste of time.

I have often been accused of being contrarian with emails like “Why Fieldays was already failing” where I imply it’s the lazy rural marketer’s option when they consider there are 361 other days of the year. Or my blog on “Why you should fire some of your farming clients” or “Why most rural marketing is shite and what you can do about it”

But what I can tell you they have been some of my most talked about and read posts.

Sitting on the fence won’t get you anywhere.

Mark Twain was right when he said “There’s only one thing worse than being talked about and that’s not being talked about.”

Readers and viewers of content are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the ordinary, dull and boring.

But the problem is 99% of all rural marketing is as boring as bat shit because it’s been watered down by the copious layers of the corporate that created it.

David Ogilvy said there are no statues of committees.

And a racehorse is a camel designed by committee.

Never ever dilute a big, bold idea. Fight for it.

Time-starved farmers care about themselves, not about you and what you do.

They have a very small and finite window of time to read and research.

They don’t care that you’ve just turned 50 years old as a rural business unless that’s relevant to them.

They don’t care that you have the biggest range unless you can guarantee you will have their parts there in 24 hrs or less.

And they don’t care about your new staff appointments unless that person is highly valuable and relevant to their prosperity.

Talk about them, not yourself.

Get specific about the pains and problems they are facing relevantly at that particular time.

Show them that you understand them and their world.

And then show them how you can help with the proof and truth that you can.

That’s when your rural marketing will make its mark.

To do anything less will only do you a disservice.

And you’re better than that.