The case study in this interview has been nominated for the Dutch Interactive Award 2022 in the Data category.
Digitization is also increasing rapidly in the agricultural sector. Media company Agrio therefore had to change course: "The use of customer data is essential to remain relevant. Only with a personal offer can you deliver the necessary added value and then market it efficiently," argues Arjan Goorman, Head of Marketing at Agrio. "That starts with data."
Solutions & results
Increase in conversion average x4
Increase in conversion trial subscribers x7
57% more inflow of new subscriptions
From 0 to 100% data-driven farming
As a medium-sized media company, Agrio focuses exclusively on the agricultural sector. With a cross-media portfolio, Agrio manages to achieve the highest reach in agricultural Holland. "Like our target group, we don't like unnecessary blabla either," says Goorman. The media company offers practice-oriented, independent journalism and addresses topical issues that farmers encounter in farming, such as nitrogen, nature inclusive farming and future-proofing your farm.
Digitalization brought a shift in farmers' media usage. Agrio faced a multitude of challenges: insufficient growth, decline in subscribers, no good customer view and marketing processes that were too laborious to change. Goorman: "We not only had to digitize our offering, but also improve in terms of added value and how we market it."
Agrio began by digitizing the trade magazines in-house and adding additional content to the subscription in the form of exclusive articles and video's, with podcasts planned this year. It then looked at how to better tailor campaigns to customer needs. "That involves collecting data, creating a central customer view and then using it for targeted marketing campaigns. Through another media company, we were pointed to Ternair Marketing Cloud, which we started using in 2017."
Start with data
With the Agrarian Database, Agrio has over 50,000 up-to-date addresses and farm-specific characteristics of virtually all Dutch farmers. The first step was to enrich this database with behavioral data to achieve an integrated customer view. The online click behavior makes it easier to see what farmers are interested in in the various fields. As a result, Agrio can select readers in a targeted way and provide them with appropriate trade information, as well as connect them with advertising partners.
"We had to learn to deal with data differently," Goorman states. "It's not just a toy of marketing. You can also substantiate business-critical decisions with data analysis, such as whether it makes sense to develop a proposition for a particular issue."
"Because we have a better understanding of what's going on with our target audience, we can make the shift from push to inbound."
New way of doing marketing
As a 30-year-old family business, Agrio likes to do things itself with its own people. "We are not used to outsourcing things. We do all content production in-house, like digitizing content for example," Goorman says. Agrio also employs a permanent data analyst for data analysis. Marketers were trained to work with the new marketing tooling. Nevertheless, the decision was made to have a Ternair consultant join the team one day a week: "Initially because we couldn't fill the vacancy. But we immediately noticed that if you want to get the most out of it in terms of possibilities, facilitate knowledge transfer and achieve the necessary speed, bringing a specialist in house is also a very good way. When the staffing is back in order, we also have the knowledge to do it ourselves."
As an organization, Agrio gradually made the transition to data-driven. The inside sales representative of yesteryear has now become a campaign marketer, Goorman observes. "We used to hire marketers on their commercial skills, such as telephone persuasion. Now we look at online marketing or database skills." Still, intrinsic motivation is most important, Goorman believes: employees can grow in digital skills but changing the mindset is a lot harder.
