Herdwatch
The Company
Farm Relief Services (FRS) are an organisation that provides services, products, and skilled personnel for the Irish agricultural sector.
The Challenge
FRS developed an app (Herdwatch) designed to make farm management easier. However, the app had a slow uptake. They sought out Emarkable to come up with a plan to change this and to improve app visibility and awareness with the farming community.
The Research
The farming community in Ireland is not the best demographic for downloading apps. The most recent national statistics show that 5% are aged less than 35 and over a quarter are over 65. However, digging deeper we found that when the app was used it was used most often not by the principle farmer, but another family member who tended to do the farm administration. These individuals were more app-friendly and needed to be targeted directly. A change in focus.
The Plan
Emarkable uses a six-stage plan to help businesses like Herdwatch achieve their goals. The first stage of that plan is to create a digital marketing plan that will make a positive return on investment. Using our research, we developed a plan with Herdwatch and began by reviewing their current Digital Marketing. From that, and using Emarkable’s Digital Strategy Framework, a Digital Marketing Plan was designed to improve the performance of the channels in place, and recommendations for Herdwatch to implement and follow in order to maximise the potential from a multi-channel, multi-platform, inbound marketing strategy.
The second stage of the Emarkable Digital Framework is to create and maintain an effective platform to market Herdwatch. Emarkable designed and built a website that reflected and showcased their business and thus gave them a platform to drive leads and sales for Herdwatch online. Social Platforms, email and Google search were reviewed and adjusted accordingly. When that was in place, the third part of the strategy came into play, which is to drive traffic to the website.
Traffic is driven by the use of blogs, email marketing, SEO and SEM.
Of the traffic on the website, at the start of this process, only 17% was generated by social media, with Facebook being the most important channel. Twitter – even though Herdwatch has 6,500+ followers – generated very little response. The Herdwatch Linkedin page had less than 100 followers and hadn’t been updated for a month. Similarly, the company had 22 Youtube subscribers. Google + had not been used as a channel for years – even though the posts and pages had been viewed 2,500+ times.
Emarkable developed a plan that would maximise traffic to the Herdwatch website, by using the channels Herdwatch was already using more effectively, while also developing the channels they were only minimally using, or not at all.
Having built an audience, the next stage in the Emarkable process is to turn that traffic into leads. This was done by building landing pages that describe special offers, while also collecting lead information. This proven method was enhanced by Calls to Action throughout the site to encourage more visitor engagement.
The conversion of those leads into sales followed. This was done by giving the company the information on which pages their leads were viewing, which leads are most promising, segmenting leads allowing for targeted information to be sent out, email marketing to send timely messages to contacts and customers, and finally a Customer Relationship Management system for an improved sales process.
The final step in the Emarkable process with Herdwatch was the measurement. Traffic statistics, blogging effectiveness, PPC costs and rates and SEO success is measured to give the company valuable information on where to direct efforts.
The Result
The result of all these actions led to increased take-up of the Herdwatch app and faster conversion time for leads. The appeal to the person who is doing the admin work proved much more effective in terms of both take-up and conversion
