5 Keys for Ag Websites To Convert Visitors into Leads

Often in the agriculture industry when a potential lead visits your site, they likely already know a bit about your business. Whether through trade show appearances, industry publications, word of mouth or cold calls, your first impression is often elsewhere. And because of that fact, it’s even more reason your website should go beyond just making a good impression and guide visitors through the buyer’s journey until they’re a highly qualified lead.

Website needs will vary depending on your specific business – such as seed company, equipment manufacturer or ag retailer – but we’ve found there are at least five factors everyone in ag should consider when it comes to their website.

Establish Consistent Branding

A strong visual brand ties all the finer details of your ag business together, but a recognizable logo isn’t enough. After getting to know your company, a customer should be able to identify and have a brief understanding of your elevator pitch. Tight and modern overall brand positioning not only builds market awareness, but trust in your company.

Optimize Web Content

A mistake many make when approaching website creation is prioritizing search engine optimization, or SEO, above all else. It’s certainly an important consideration, but your site should benefit a human first and algorithms second. Website content and navigation should break down complicated processes into easy-to-understand pathways and address the target audience’s industry-specific knowledge levels and needs. It’s vital to develop relationships with your sales team, talk with customers, attend conferences, and read product manuals so you understand exactly who you are talking to, what needs to be conveyed and how they need to hear it.

Keep the Website Flexible

It can be tempting to design a flashy website with heavy animations and complex graphics, but often that makes it harder to adjust your website later as your ag organization’s priorities shift and products evolve. Selecting the right content management system (CMS) for your specific company and website will allow for easy access to make updates and optimize the journey for your visitors.

Create a Simple and Effective Contact Form

If you’re relying on customers to reach out only through phone or direct email, you’re not leveraging your ag site to its full potential. In our experience, a user visits a site for multiple reasons from purchase intent to customer service requests to job opportunities. To ensure all leads are funneled correctly and to remove barriers from the process, a contact form plugged directly into customer relationship management (CRM) software makes for faster and more efficient processes from lead to conversion.

Invest in Paid Search Support

Even if a company attains category dominate SEO, boosting your ag website with paid search will improve discovery and protect your company against constantly changing search engine algorithms and platform updates. Search and social media companies and device manufacturers can change their practices at any time and without notice, and that has the potential to alter search position and impact organic discovery. By maintaining an always-on paid search campaign you can lessen the impact these unexpected changes have on your company and gather a wealth of analytics that can be used to optimize your marketing efforts.

Jump Company recently implemented these strategies in a website redesign for an Ag client resulting in a record 10% increase in visitors and over 60% increase in monthly conversions. With over twenty years of agriculture industry marketing experience, Jump has enjoyed watching our partners’ companies grow alongside their crops.