Why Are You Watering The Concrete?

You see it all the time.

You take your dog for a walk and there’s your next door neighbour diligently watering their lawns, except that half of it hitting the pavement.

What a waste of precious water you think. And the same goes for your rural marketing.

I see rural marketing wastage everywhere.

Press ads, print ads, field day events, social media organic content that no one likes except your employees and family members (aka. vanity metrics) and boring as b * * shit newsletters that are treated more like a compliance exercise, than content that is newsworthy and rewards the reader for reading.

The list of these heinous rural marketing crimes goes on. Anything you invest in your rural marketing budget needs to show some form of growth.

There needs to be some green shoots which we call accountability and attribution.

When times get tough – and as sheep and beef prices schedules take a nose dive at time of writing – the first thing that gets a line put through it is marketing.

Marketing that cannot prove value should be stopped.

Yet I’ve yet to have a marketing manager pull their marketing when it’s providing them and their rural sales team with a flow of predictable, reliable and repeatable qualified leads.

When you hear the local radio ads it’s a sign those companies don’t know what they are doing.

It’s what I call “hit n’ hope” / “spray n’ pray” advertising. And it’s mostly peddled by annoying media sales reps who pester potential clients into submission selling them perishable goods in the form of airtime others don’t want.

So what is the best way to market your rural business?

You know the answer:

Your customers. Farmers first and foremost listen to their own. They place great trust in what their fellow

farmer or non-pavement watering neighbour says or does. They say they don’t pay attention or get swayed by others but they do. They are always watching and observing crops or paddocks as they drive past.

There’s not much they miss as their antenna is always up. It’s their survivcal mechanism as they work out who’s who in the zoo and where they and their fellow farmers role and rank in status and significance.

All humans play status games (and if you want to read a brilliant book go and buy Will Storr’s The Status Game).

The next place to market is using your network. Find complimentary businesses who you can refer customers to so they end up reciprocating back. We call it influencing the influencers.

Next is online.

“But not every farmer is on Facebook!”

No but one third of them are along with a third (2b) of the world’s population.

Facebook has 3b daily users and a powerful algorithm that can geo-target specific people based on the 280+ data points it has on each user.

Scary but also useful for you if you want to connect and capture new customer data from Facebook who own it till you do.

We have had countless success stories using a specific “out teach to out sell” lead magnet like ebooks, free reports or calculators that have provided rural clients with many leads.

We can clearly point to where the leads came from.

So stop watering the concrete.

Stop wasting the precious resource that is your marketing dollars.

You work hard for them. Invest them wisely.

The grass is always greenest where you water it.

Aim and deploy your rural marketing dollars better.

Your business will thank you for it.