Online Farm Marketing Solutions

Online farm marketing means leveraging the internet to market farm peoducts. As one of the 11 farm marketing channels, marketing of farm products online is rapidly growing. Many farmers and farm stores are registering their presence in the eCommerce ecosystem, making it more competitive to market food products online.

Buyers are also patronizing online stores now more than ever before, and the trend is going to continue. According to research by Deliotte, 51% of Americans prefer buying goods online, especially food and households commodities.

For your farm to be visible on the internet especially in search engines, you need to do a whole lot of strategic work.

So in this article, we are going to provide practical, result-oriented solutions to your online farm marketing.

Online Farm Marketing Strategies

• Search Engines Optimization
• Email Marketing
• Content marketing 
• Pay-per-click ads

Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Drive Traffic to Your Farm Website

Search engine optimization plays important role in driving traffic to your farm site. Many users of search engines have the intention of buying products online. So you need to make your farm visible to them. SEO is the process of increasing the chances of website ranking in organic search results to reach quality traffic.

SEO therefore helps your site to appear at the top of search results any time people search for keywords related to your farm. This enables people to see and contact your farm to generate leads.

There are basically two types of SEO: the on page optimization, and off page optimization

1. On page SEO

On page optimization are the activities you carry out on your site to improve the appearance of your website pages in search engine results.

The following are the optimizations you should do on your site to improve your SEO campaign.

• Do proper keywords research: Keywords are the phrases users search on search engines. Your farm site can appear on search results when users conduct searches that match specific keywords used on your pages. So conducting keyword research will enable you to find the proper keywords for your SEO campaign. If you are abeginner (if your website is somewhat new) you should stick to long-tail keywords with reasonable search volume, to help you improve your site's search appearance and drive most relevant traffic to your site.
• Write a well detailed content describing your farm products based on the keywords: After conducting keyword research, you have to write well optimized contents that describe your farm products.
• Optimize title tags and meta descriptions: Title tags and meta descriptions play important role in SEO strategy. Title tag and meta descriptions are the first that audience see in the search results, which determine whether your listing is relevant. Your title tag should meet searchers’ intents, and the meta description should give a brief information of what your list contains. Adding keywords and catchy descriptions will help you create title tags and meta descriptions that will influence more clicks and visits to your farm site.
• Improve your site's load speed: Delayed load time leads to increase in bounce rate. The average site load time is 10.3 seconds for desktop and 27.3 seconds for mobile. If the load time increases to above 70 seconds, it will affect user experience as many users may not be patient to wait for your site to load before they hit back button. Google algorithm aggregates many factors before showing results to search queries, which includes site speed, bounce rate and overall user experience.
• Improve the responsiveness of your site: Responsiveness of a website is the ability of the site to offer a consistent experience on both desktop and mobile devices and reach wider audience. Non responsive design theme will hamper your site’s ability to offer good experience to desktop and mobile device users. Make sure your template is  compatible on both mobile and despot display. Search engines such as Google deploy mobile and desktop crawlers to crawl your site contents at different occasions. If your site theme is not compatible to any device, it will prevent the crawler from crawling and possibly indexing your site contents. Your site Mobile Usability largely depends on your theme, ensure to use a good theme. To test your site's Mobile Usability, go to Google Search Console, at the menu, click on Mobile Usability. Same thing is applicable to Bing Webmaster.

2 Off page SEO

This involves having your site being mentioned on other sites. Other sites referencing and linking to your site. In simple term, it means building backlinks. You can naturally get this when you offer great products and services, products reviewers can write reviews of your products and embed your site links in their contents. You can reach out to other webmasters for guest posting slot, which can earn you backlink. You can also use site directories to list your site with backlink to your site.

Backlinks help you build your website Domain Authority. Search engines algorithms usually aggregate the authority of website domain and page to determine the most relevant pages to show on search results.

There are many more optimization strategies to enable your farm site rank higher on search results. Implementing the ones listed above will definitely improve your farm site ranking and traffic.

Search Engine Optimization is an excellent strategy to add in your farm online marketing plan, if you are seeking to garner more relevant and quality leads to grow your farm.

Engage in Email Marketing to Reach Customers

Email marketing has been proved to be one of the most effective methods of internet farm marketing.

To get started with email marketing, you will need to gather emails of people who are interested in your farm products. There are two ways to get these emails.

1 Get visitors (customers) to subscriber to your website. Add an email signup bar on your website or ask for email when people visit your farm.

This is the most effective way to organically get email contacts of those who are really interested in your farm.

Once you earn subscribers, group them according to their interests, income, etc. This will help you to create more personalized email campaigns.

Personalization enables you to send only relevant contents to your audience. The more relevant the content, the more they are likely to interact with your emails. People receive loads of emails from businesses per day, so they will only engage with the emails with valuable information.

Email marketing is an indispensable strategy in an effect online farm marketing. It will surely help you reach more audience and get them to visit your farm and to patronize your offerings.

2 Another way to get email list is buy email lists. But this method is not advisable as you are likely to buy emails of audience who may not be interested in your business offerings. And email you sent to them may end up in spam folders as users never signed up to your email list.