Agriculture Technology (AgriTech for short) is booming in the Middle East.
As the region undergoes rapid digital transformation across sectors, companies operating in the AgriTech industry are embracing investments in digital innovations and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, Machine Learning, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
The Middle East is home to one of the world’s fastest-growing populations, which has sparked the need for companies in the agriculture industry to look for more environmentally-friendly and sustainable methods of production. This has given rise to various AgriTech solutions focused on the promotion of robust and resilient farming systems and production techniques.
As AgriTech startups spring up across the region, companies operating in the sector must find ways to differentiate themselves in a competitive market. The agriculture industry, which has typically relied on traditional methods of advertising and marketing, must embrace digital strategies that focus on increasing visibility, boosting traffic and nurturing relationships with customers to ensure their success.
In this article, we share our top digital marketing ideas for AgriTech startups in the Middle East. Let’s jump right in.
Identify your target audience
Knowing your target audience is imperative no matter which industry your company operates in. The more in-depth you go, the better you can get to know who your ideal customers are and what makes them tick.
Don’t develop your marketing strategy based on a generalized “market”, instead, dig a little bit deeper and identify the details and features that differentiate unique buyer personas.
Once you have an understanding of who they are, you can segment them and determine how to target them in the most effective way possible.
There are various ways to segment your audience, including based on factors like:
- Geography
- Operational size
- Operational types
- Demographic traits
To help you get started, check out this list of 20 questions to ask to create your prospective buyer personas.
Optimize your user experience
To stand out in a competitive industry, you need to deliver a user experience that doesn’t disappoint the visitors to your website. It might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many companies get this wrong!
First of all, you should conduct an in-depth competitor analysis to get a better understanding of what other AgriTech companies are doing, and then make sure you do it better. This will help you identify opportunities to outshine your competitors, as well as help you to ensure you don’t waste time and money on strategies that simply don’t work.
There are various ways you can ensure your website offers a great user experience, including:
- Optimize for mobile: Over 50% of website traffic comes from mobile. If your website delivers a poor mobile experience, it’s likely you’re losing potential clients before they even get to know what it is you’re offering.
- Optimize for voice search: With tools like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri increasing in popularity due to the convenience they offer, it’s important to ensure your website is optimized with long-tail keywords, FAQs, and content organization.
- Optimize with valuable content: Ensure the content you share is valuable and relevant to your audience as an agritech company. Moreover, it should be accessible to the entire population, even those with disabilities.
SEO is essential
Search engine optimization plays a key role in any digital marketing strategy. Ensure your agritech website and social media pages are optimized to appear in SERPs pages of search engines like Google and Bing.
Using SEO principles, you can better attract quality traffic, which refers to those users who are actively seeking information about the agritech industry and products and services on offer.
Moreover, organic SEO is more stable than PPC (explained next) and is better at building brand authority and targeting the entire sales funnel. It’s also cheaper in the long run as great SEO content can continue attracting traffic for years.
There are many ways to implement an SEO strategy. Here are some helpful starting points:
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- Share high-quality content: Create valuable and relevant content for the various stages of the marketing funnel. This content should answer your target audience’s questions and pain points, helping them to find exactly what they need. Use the Google EAT principle when developing content (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) to ensure it ranks highly.
- Keywords: Ensure your website and its contents feature short and long-tail keywords and search terms that your audience is likely to be searching for. There are various programs to help you discover the right keywords to use including SEMrush, AnswerThePublic, Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner.
- Ensure your pages have strong meta descriptions: This refers to the block of text that appears below the page title in the search results pages. Consider how you can convince a user to click on your page above others.
Leverage PPC
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) comes under the umbrella of search engine marketing and involves bidding for ads to appear on Google and Bing. These can drive traffic to your website, help boost brand awareness, and increase conversions.
The value of PPC is undeniable. In fact, paid advertisements have a 200% ROI and can increase brand awareness by 80%. Although these statistics might be true, the ROI of paid ads (return on ad spend) is contingent on businesses implementing optimized campaigns that align with their business goals. It’s also imperative to target the right keywords when designing ad campaigns.
When done well, this form of advertising can help agritech companies in the Middle East (and all over the world) to target high-value, relevant keywords that are being searched for by key players in the industry and potential customers.
PPC strategies deliver faster results than organic strategies and are a way for agritech businesses to gain revenue and site traffic quickly. However, it’s important to note that PPC must be implemented in combination with the other strategies on this list, as PPC alone isn’t enough to succeed as a business and it won’t lend itself to improving your credibility as an agritech company or industry leader.
Use email marketing to boost ROI
Email marketing ROI is one of the highest of any digital marketing strategy, returning $36 on every $1 spent.
Once you’ve established your agritech company and have a database of leads and customers, implement an email marketing strategy. This allows you to stay in contact with existing and potential clients and helps you to build relationships and credibility among your followers.
There are plenty of things you can include in an email newsletter, including:
- Information about new products and services
- Company updates
- Custom content
- Industry trends and news
Most people check their emails at least once a day, so sending out a newsletter is a great way to maintain regular communication with customers and stay on their radar.
Create content customized to your audience
Bouncing off the point mentioned above, custom content is an effective way to answer your target audience’s questions and provide them with solutions to their pain points.
Content marketing is an essential inbound marketing strategy for building relationships with customers, delivering value and attracting new leads. Not only that, it can significantly boost your SEO strategy to help you rank higher in search engines and drive traffic to your website.
Content can take many forms. One of the most popular today is video content, so be sure to include this across your website and social platforms. Make sure to include a variety of content forms in your strategy, including blog posts, long-form content like downloadable white papers, infographics, and more.
The purpose of the content you create should be to deliver value in some form or other to your customers. Whether it’s entertaining, educational or inspirational – just make sure it’s relevant to the audience you’re trying to target.
Social media marketing
No modern business can succeed without a social media page. 4.7 billion people around the world use social media, so there really is no better way of reaching your audience where they spend their time. If you don’t leverage the power of social media, you could be missing out on countless high-quality leads and conversions.
When it comes to developing a social media marketing strategy, you’ll need to go back to your buyer personas. Take a look at which platforms they’re active on and what kinds of content they engage with across those platforms. Once you’ve created your profiles, you can share various forms of content to boost engagement, build community, and increase brand awareness.
When implementing your social media marketing strategy, keep these points in mind:
- Develop a social content calendar to ensure you post regularly and at the most appropriate time
- Engage with your audience by replying to messages and responding to comments
- Ask customers for feedback
- Use paid social ads to increase your reach
- Share reviews and testimonials to boost your brand reputation
- Experiment with different types of content, including video posts and stories
Grow your AgriTech company with YourTarget
Digital marketing can be difficult to conquer. If you’re not sure where to begin, you can always reach out to a professional inbound marketing agency like YourTarget to help you develop a strategy that gets results.
AgriTech is a growing industry that’s guaranteed to expand in the years to come as consumers become more conscious about the ethical origins of the products they consume, as well as more aware of the environmental impact of doing so.
Knowing how to best reach and engage your audience online is essential if you want to succeed and outshine your competitors in today’s business landscape.
Want to learn more? Download the YourTarget eBook on Digital Marketing Trends and Forecast 2022 with a Special Focus on the Middle East
