Liffey Mills
The Client
Liffey Mills has been a leading Irish grain and agricultural merchant for almost three-quarters of a century. The company employs a team of agronomists, feed specialists and nutritionists to improve grain production, plant and soil health, animal health, and more. Additionally, the company focuses on maximising profitability for farmers who work with Liffey Mills. The company is also a major retailer of fertiliser, seeds, agrochemicals, and hardware.
The Challenge
Liffey Mills engaged Emarkable to help the company meet a number of critical challenges. Chief among those was the ability to create a dialogue with the Irish farming community and build strong, lasting relationships with farms of all sizes. Despite a significant amount of competition within this space, farmers remain very loyal to businesses with which they are familiar. Liffey Mills needed to be positioned as an expert in not only grain retailing, but in all aspects of Irish agriculture, from hardware to fertiliser, and to share that expertise with farmers through educational material and programming.
The Strategy
We advised on a strategy that focused on Liffey Mills nurturing their customers digitally. To complement and support their in-store activities, we provided training in how to use Facebook and email to interact more thoroughly with customers, providing them with the answers and solutions to their needs in a prompt fashion. We also provided in-house training to enable an e-commerce element to their website.
We designed a promotion to get the process rolling through the Liffey Mills organisation, and created a very user-friendly online shopping facility for their customers, whom we knew from our research and polls, were infrequent online purchasers.
As a result of our competitive analysis, and the need to nurture customers (both current and future) we created in-store and online combinations on special products that would deliver exceptional value for their customers who were accessing the company online. We also worked on special deals and seasonal specials for Liffey Mills’s customers to fully maximise the ‘nurturing’ theme.
Implementation
Emarkable put together a customised solution tailored to help Liffey Mills achieve their goals in terms of brand recognition, market share, and relationship building with Irish farmers. We did this in a number of ways, including a complete website revamp, an in-depth competitive analysis to highlight what competitors were doing, and where Liffey Mills could outperform them.
In addition, we utilised both in-store and online combinations to create unique incentives for customers, while also highlighting special products and limited-time deals, as well as the introduction of seasonal specials to help ensure farmers had access to the right products, tools, and supplies during the right time of year, for a price that worked with their budgets.
Testimonial
Thanks very much for the job you and your team did with revamping our website. It was exactly what the doctor ordered, and I think we all agree that it looks very well, it’s very refreshing to look at and user-friendly, just the way the farmers like it.
Mark Flannery, Area Sales Representative & Technical Advisor at Liffey Mills
