Long cycles, high seasonality, and changing client needs — all as equally applicable to farming, as they are to B2B marketing. But while farming has been around for over 12,000 years, marketing as a discipline only took shape three centuries ago during the industrial revolution. Could marketers possibly learn anything from an industry forty times as old as their own?
Certainly - and that’s why I’ll walk through the lessons we as marketers can learn across the whole farming cycle.
Pick the right field to play in
Before farmers even start thinking about planting their crops, they need to pick the right fields for their crops. And not just that - they also know when is the best time to pick each field.
But, like the farmer, do marketers pick the right fields to play in? A common pitfall of B2B companies is a lack of focus on the right segments of buyers. Either they try to cater to everybody (because “everyone is our target group”), or they try to go too narrow and put all their eggs in one basket by investing too much in one account.
While marketers may not be the sole deciders of who to target, they must challenge and support their internal stakeholders to define the target group that makes the most sense for them. Go too broad, and you’ll end up with messaging too general and watered down like a bog of a failed farm field. Go too narrow, and you’ll spend too much effort and time putting all your eggs in one basket. The new craze in B2B ABM of hyper-personalisation and hyper-targeting is an ineffective use of a marketer’s time since most companies within an industry face similar challenges - and marketers can use that to make their messaging just as relevant to the whole category, rather than just one account.
Along with picking the right field, farmers are also great at planning when to use each field. While B2C companies excel at using occasions like Christmas and Thanksgiving to boost sales - B2B marketers often miss out on moments such as the end of their target accounts’ budget cycles to boost revenue. By analysing sales data, it’s possible to find seasonality within each industry, and use those moments to deliver targeted campaigns around specific services or products.
If marketers can pick the right field by focusing on the right category of accounts or industries, and plan ahead to deliver the right messages at the optimal time for each category, they’ll increase their chances of running more effective campaigns.
Prepare the soil before you plant
Before farmers plant their crops, they make sure they’re using the right soil. They prepare and tend to the soil to make it just right for their crop, optimizing the ability of the crop to thrive. Without the right amount of nutrients and moisture in the soil, their crops simply would not grow to their full potential.
In conventional farms, fertilizers are often used to provide this extra nutrient boost to the soil and generate higher short-term yields. Similarly, in marketing, we often use short-term sales activation tactics in search of an ever-increasing number of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). But just like how an overuse of fertilizers can harm the soil rather than help it, so too can an over-reliance on sales-driven tactics hurt your brand in the long term.
Up to 95% of business clients are not in the market to buy your product or service at any one time. Therefore, by focusing solely on short-term sales tactics that last a few weeks, you’re likely to miss out on future cash-flows. Marketers’ goal should be to balance their need to show short-term results, with long-term brand-building tactics. Consistent messaging over a longer time period will help build familiarity with your brand, while short-term sales activations increase the physical accessibility of it - making your brand “easy to mind” and “easy to find”.
Aside from the use of fertilizers to enrich the soil, farmers also develop a deep understanding of the kinds of soil and conditions that each crop needs to thrive. Similarly, marketers need to develop a deep understanding of their target audience. If we don’t understand the challenges and goals our audience has, how can we make our messaging relevant enough for them?
The starting point for any marketing plan should therefore focus on a diagnosis of your customers: understanding who they are, what makes them tick and what challenges they’re facing. Armed with this knowledge, you can then make better decisions about how you can segment your audience, and target them with the right messages and tactics.
Just like how farmers have a deep knowledge of the precise conditions each of their crops needs, and how to develop those conditions, marketers need to get used to diving head first into the shoes of their customers and building the right mix of short-term and long-terms plans.
Use crops that will support each other
Organic farmers often use the technique of polyculture when planting their crops. This is the process of growing more than one species of vegetables in the same place and at the same time. They do this because complementary crops create natural protection from pests for each other, and make the soil more nutrient-dense — among other benefits.
Similarly, when marketers plan their campaigns and tactics, they should think through which tactics will be complementary to each other and will increase the chances of a prospect taking the desired action.
Rather than picking your tactics in isolation from each other, you can start by thinking about what goal you want to achieve. Is it to get a certain number of meetings? Is it to grow your email list? Based on those goals, what complementary tactics will help you achieve them?
Let’s make this concrete. Use whitepapers and blog posts together to generate 1:1 meetings with your sales teams: You can use the content of the white paper to create a blog post around the topic, then link the blog post to the download of the white paper and ask for contact details to gain access. At this stage, you might even ask people if they would want a 1:1 meeting to go through the content of the white paper with an expert at your company. And now you have something concrete to provide value to your potential customers with, rather than just your sales reps showing a slide deck of how great you think your company is.
That’s why just as the farmer considers the best complementary crops, marketers should plan complementary tactics centered around the specific goal they want to achieve.
Nurture your crops
Once a crop is planted, the hard part begins. Without proper nurturing, they won’t grow to their full potential (if at all). Are they getting enough sunlight? Enough water? Did some pesky insects attack overnight? Constant care is a must for farmers wanting to make the most of their crops.
Staying alert to variable conditions is just as relevant to marketers as it is to farming life. So why do we as marketers love to spend so much time and money on preparing big campaigns and launches, but aren’t ready to adjust them based on actual performance?
For marketers, paying attention to the thing that’s already launched is sure to wane in the time where it should be the most present. For large organisations, it’s a common occurrence that once a campaign is planned and executed, marketers are already rushing to the next one.
Instead, marketers should run fewer campaigns and spend more time on the post-launch phase with a clear set of questions. Ask yourself: which metrics will we pay attention to for each type of campaign? Which audiences are resonating with the campaign, and which aren’t? Which topics are standing out the most?
By spending less time on bigger campaigns marketers can focus more on creating “always-on” experiences that nurture the audience based on where they are on their journey. This way of marketing is more customer-centric as it hinges on using the behaviour of the audience and anticipating what they will need next.
If marketers can adopt the farmer’s mindset of nurturing their crops, then the focus goes away from preparing the big reveal, and instead to crafting the right journey that can be constantly optimised based on real-life learnings, rather than vague assumptions.
Don’t stop after you’ve harvested the crop
After farmers have harvested their crops for the season, the work doesn’t stop there: maintaining their fields to avoid weeds, maintaining machinery, and planning for the next season are just some of the many tasks farmers must do in the off-season.
Many companies have similar peaks and troughs in their work. When we aren’t in the throes of the high season, us marketers should leverage the time we have to better our knowledge of our campaigns, and gain a refreshed understanding of the marketing landscape.
Therefore, marketers must have a regular routine to explore and learn from what others are doing.
Every marketing team should establish their own digital upskilling programme to ensure their teams are not just keeping up with the latest marketing trends, but know how they can tap into the broader technological trends impacting businesses today, such as: artificial intelligence, data & analytics, and machine learning.
We as individuals should also develop a regular routine to reflect on what we have done and take note of the learnings that can be taken into the next campaigns that we run, especially when things didn’t go well — there’s no point making the same mistake twice.
Conclusion
Even though the comparison seems odd at first, marketers have a lot to learn from the wisdom that farmers have developed over the centuries. If we can learn to cultivate a mindset of nurturing our campaigns, our audiences, and ourselves - we’ll create more organic & fruitful marketing experiences for our customers.