Bits4Farms
Website: www.bits4farms.co.nz
Company: Bits4Farms provides a consolidated listing site for farm orientated suppliers in the New Zealand farming market. The purpose of the website is to provide a platform to suit all farms suppliers whether they are a large multinational or small regional operator. Each supplier is provided with their own management portal where they can manage their own homepage, contact details, brands and product listings.
Brief: The farm supply industry in New Zealand is highly fragmented with over 2000 companies supplying products dedicated to the farming market. Given the small population base and climatic conditions farming in New Zealand represents a huge proportion of GDP. The owners of Bits4Farms saw this as a huge opportunity to offer a consolidated information and product source to the farmer which is easily accessible over the internet. The site needed to focus on breaking down the traditional geographic hurdles to farm distribution; for example how does a manufacturer of a small niche farming product in Canterbury promote their product in the Waikato? The site also needed to stand out from the traditional farming crowd with similar competition websites already trying to carve out their own space in the market.
Delivery: The first goal for Bits4Farms was to ensure that the branding created a distinction to traditional farming orientated websites. After substantial market research it was determined by Synapse that a good majority of the initial information searching for farm purchasing was conducted by females. Consequently it was essential that the website aesthetic was designed to appeal to this audience. Multiple iterations were tested through focus groups until a final design was settled on that presented a high impact recall and established the fastest brand familiarity. This scheme was then tested on alternate psychographic groupings to ensure that the aesthetic did not cause offence to other audiences. Pleasantly this aesthetic was well received by all audiences. With the design approved the site then progressed to technical development. The core theme of the brief was ‘keep it online’ so all promotion of Bits4Farms was to be online via the search engines. This site is about delivering information to farmers in a digital format. Synapse developed the site with this mind, assembling the product upload pages in a way that subtly collected core keyword information from the hundreds of suppliers who be using the site. This keyword content would then be used to dynamically alter the optimisation keywords used throughout www.bits4farms.co.nz. Finally the site had to be easy to use for members. These members would often lack high level technical savvy, so product uploads had to be possible in one screen, administration areas had to be one click deep and statistics provided needed to be flexible enough to suit all members’ needs.
Results: Two years following its launch Bits4Farms is now cemented as the leading rural products website in New Zealand. With over 30,000 independent visitors per month (there are only 62,000 farmers in whole market), over 70,000 product views per month and representing 130 suppliers and over 200 brands the numbers speak for themselves. This has all been achieved with no advertising expenditure outside of search engine optimisation. All of the Bits4Farms visitors are captured through Synapse proactively monitoring search engine rankings and ensuring that Bits4Farms is featuring where farmers are searching.
