Making Agro-Tech Firms Lucrative, Investor-Friendly

Pain Area

The client was a venture capitalist who invested in agro-based Indian technology companies. The firm was in turn sponsored by big companies overseas which demanded commission in return of their investment. The Digital Fellow was approach to grow the VC’s business and reach.

TDF Research

Research Findings: 

We categorized their 32 branches in to urban, rural, semi-urban and semi-rural across 13 districts in West Bengal. For each of the four categories, we divided the branches into performance levels based on highest and lowest contribution to the firm’s annual turnover.

Then, we visited one high and one low-performing branch for each category and interviewed 10 customers of each branch based on age. Upon discovering that 90% of the client’s customers are above 40-years-old, we classified them based on their transaction data and came up with the following groups: 

• There were 9,000 live clients who had transacted within 2 years of our survey. The rest 13,000 clients had old transaction history and their contribution were deemed to be dead.

• Out of the live clients, only 2,250 members had their transactions in the past 6 months, deemed to be active customers and the rest to be inactive customers.

We initiated persona research to know about the target group of our client. Our consulting for them was divided into two groups, namely process consulting and digital consulting.

TDF Research

• We undertook a comparative study of its prominent 5 competitors in the Indian market.
• We formed a content meter matrix of the client’s content strategy along with the same of its competitors to analyse the rank of our client. We used content creation and distribution across all major social media platforms and posts to test the performance of our client.
• We tallied the share of voice (the number of platforms where the client posts its content) and the share of noise (the frequency of content submission across all platforms) to measure their performance in digital marketing.
• We conducted persona research based on start-ups and investors to find out how the two categories approach content differently to generate leads.
• We planned the content funnel according to the best practices of inbound marketing: i.e having 70% of ToFU (top of the funnel-educative) content, 20% of MoFU (Middle of the funnel-brand-specific) content and 10% of BoFU (product/service specific) content to grab attention.

Observations

• The website architecture of the client for desktop and mobile phones were not optimized. There is content congestion in the mobile version, causing viewers to opt out of the site early.
• The placement of call-to-action (CTA) buttons across the website is faulty, causing confusion in the minds of potential buyers who may also feel the CTAs to be overwhelming them with sales push.
• The images were not optimized across social media. Correct customer targeting is not achieved with the repeating and predictable sequence of images used.
• Content creation had not been done keeping the customer in mind and was too sales-centric. This deprives potential buyers of the necessary brand information for purchase. Thus, the brand message was absent in the content.
• The server took too long to load websites on multiple devices, causing frustration among potential buyers who have an interest to know about the brand before deciding to buy.

Recommendation

1. We created the following classification of content for investors and start-ups for 360 degree customer targeting:
   1. Investor-friendly content should discuss the reasons why agricultural harvest is a lucrative investment opportunity in India.
   2. Investors would also like to know how the client’s investment has yielded results, processes and benefits of choosing the client over competitors regarding the right investment.
   3. On the other hand, the start-up owners would like to know the possibilities and benefits while seeking investment from our client.
   4. They should also know the pain points of investments in agriculture, the industry scenario and criteria for being qualified as a firm worthy of investment in agro-based technology.
2. We suggested content creation based on buyer personas to target the needs of potential buyers.
3. We suggested running informative awareness campaigns for better lead generation.
4. We suggested content creation in multimedia, i.e. slideshare PPTs, videos, blogs, infographics and E-books to reach target groups of Investors spread sporadically over the digital world.

Conclusion

We limited our consultancy to advising the firm about the steps they should take to improve their content hygiene and make their brand message more robust.

Think You Need a Consultant?