Determining the effectiveness of a marketing campaign can be difficult. This is especially true when marketing to farmers.

When marketing to farmers, it is critical to develop a sense of trust that leads to long-term partnerships. This can take time and a variety of strategies.

The first step in measuring the success of a particular campaign is to decide what you want to track in the first place. While you may be looking to do a variety of things with your marketing campaign, usually one goal is paramount. Here are some examples of what you may want to track:

• A rise in website traffic
• Number of leads entering your sales pipeline
• Increased brand awareness

Of course, you can’t know where you are going if you don’t know where you are. For example, how many customers or prospects visit your website in a specific period of time or the number of leads you see in a typical week. Goals such as an increase in brand awareness are more complicated to measure and may require a marketing analysis.

Next, you must decide how frequently you will collect data. Keep in mind that marketing measurement is seldom a one-time event. Instead you need to commit to measuring results over the long term so that you can identify patterns that appear over time. Creating a basic dashboard or even outsourcing this to an agricultural data marketing firm like US Farm Data is often the best way to make sure data is collected and stored correctly. You also will want to periodically update relevant team members on the status of your findings.

Finally, and most importantly, you need to turn the insights you have gained over time into actions. The best way to do this is by using a content scoring system. Doing so will allow you to get a quick view of the benefit or benefits of each marketing technique and move forward based on these findings.

Once you have moved forward based on your findings, it’s time to do it all again. Thankfully you will not be required to start from scratch but you will need to periodically go back and make adjustments based on what you have learned over time. Remember, marketing is a work in progress and the only way to achieve the best results is to always be looking for new ways to improve your strategies.