Case Study: Taurus Agricultural Marketing
What Do Marketing and Agriculture Have in Common?
Both are practices that have worked with traditional means for years but have grown and thrived from technological innovations. Both take patient work and accurate environmental assessment to thrive. But most importantly, both are industries that require careful planning to succeed.
Everbrave utilized those methods to help our client, Taurus Agricultural Marketing move from traditional, low key marketing to a thriving inbound marketing ecosystem.
“It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn,”- B.C. Forbes
Out With The Old
As a business in an industry where experience and relationship building is seen as the benchmarks for credibility, Taurus built its business on the primary tenants of traditional sales tactics. The progress of the company’s revenue growth was heavily dependent on the sales team, which reflected in the underutilized website, and the reliance on word of mouth and referrals for leads. With relatively little digital marketing in place, Everbrave knew that Taurus was an ideal candidate to leverage a marketing program that would deliver exceptional content to an information-hungry audience.
Our main mission was to find a way to translate the business’ personal, relationship focused values to a digital platform but this presented a unique challenge— how do you give digital interactions the same personal touch as a handshake?
Enter Everbrave + Inbound Marketing
The entire inbound methodology is tailored to the audience’s needs. From the first contact to checking in with longtime customers, inbound marketing is information made available how and when consumers need it. And in agriculture, growers are continually searching for knowledge and insights to help them improve their yields and business. This made it a natural fit to implement HubSpot to the Taurus website— a relationship first company needs relationship first tactics.
The initial thought behind this process was a creative idea from the client— a vision for creating a ‘virtual sales rep’ working 24/7/365 online. One that would harvest contacts and build relationships through the value of quality content. From here we started our mission to take Taurus and its online rep to digital marketing success.
Everbrave began the process by implementing a growth driven design methodology to the website. Starting with a ‘launchpad’ site covering the essentials, we quickly iterated additional features as it became evident where the demand was building. From launch pad to a full product catalogue, a more robust homepage and a recently launched resource database, the Taurus website continues to benefit from consistent innovation helping to ultimately better serve a growing user base.
Through the initial onboarding and strategy phase of the inbound marketing program, it was evident that industry credibility was crucial to success in the agronomic vertical. Creating a consistent and persona specific blog was one of the first ways in which we began to establish this credibility. These blogs addressed specific concerns and topics, providing information few other industry peers could and demonstrated Taurus’ extensive experience and agronomic knowledge.
Above and beyond the blogs, Everbrave also began launching premium content offers (PCO’s) to capture and nurture leads. Creating content of this specific nature proved no easy feat but our content team collaborated with the Taurus team to adapt to the technical rigours of agricultural writing while applying best practice inbound methodologies.
After utilizing blogs and PCO’s to establish credibility and a solid contact list, the next step was to add the personal touch that we knew this traditional demographic required. One of the ways in which we did this was by utilizing emails to provide value to the Taurus contact list. Each weekly blog post was accompanied by an email showcasing it, alongside social promotion to grow the Taurus social network.
The key to the entire strategy, and what differed from many inbound campaigns, is the deep technical nature of the content. Content was created for the Taurus demographic so specifically that it was hyper-relevant while making the scientific nature of it digestible and enjoyable for a diverse audience. The content provided real value to growers and this value was quickly demonstrated in the impressive result’s that began to accumulate in the following months.
From Seed to Sow
It didn’t take very long for Taurus to begin to enjoy the benefits of a full-scale inbound marketing program. Traffic rates quickly grew, conversion boosted, leads became customers, and all web metrics exceeded the goals we had set at the outset of our engagement. Most notable is a stunning 768% improvement in visitor conversion rate, providing solid evidence that valuable content yields valuable results. Here is a round-up of analytics, showing year over year growth comparing 2016 (pre-Inbound) to 2017 (new website + inbound strategy in place). During this period, there was absolutely no paid advertising in place.
| Key Metrics | 2016 | 2017 | Change |
| Users | 4,645 | 8,343 | + 80% |
| Sessions | 7,869 | 17,231 | + 119% |
| Page views | 16,014 | 40,322 | + 152% |
| Avg. Session Duration | 00:01:40 | 00:02:26 | + 46% |
| Contact Conversion Rate (Visitor to contact) | 0.32% | 2.46% | + 768% |
Above and beyond the exciting results, the client satisfaction is what’s been notable to our team. The easy view of web and marketing metrics to Taurus from the HubSpot platform has been invaluable to internal reporting and the increased lead generation has generated a positive financial return for the company. Ultimately, the initial inspiration for utilizing the Taurus website as a ‘virtual’ sales rep to the organization, working 24/7/365, has become a successful reality.
“Bringing an Inbound Marketing focus to the Taurus business model has revolutionized how we educate our customers and connect with the industry. Everbrave has done a great job in working with our team to create and execute an extremely effective inbound strategy. The ability to now digitally reach further and touch more people and businesses is something that wouldn’t have been realized without them. The Hubspot platform has been a tremendous asset to easily organize, measure and track our growth all in one place, delivering on our customer’s expectations and our company goals. Watching our digital rep come to life and our website becoming a hub of sought-after information has been a huge enhancement to our business.“
-Krista, Internal Operations & Marketing Manager – Taurus
Continual Growth
Seeing the exceptional success that Taurus has experienced as a result of inbound has been gratifying but more exciting is the continual growth experienced through exploring and incorporating new tactics. As we continue to produce tailored content and utilize new HubSpot tools such as pillar pages and campaign strategies, we continue to see Taurus flourish and grow.
Want to learn more about how you can help your own business flourish and grow? Contact Everbrave for a free inbound marketing assessment.
