What are you missing in your seedstock and production sale marketing?
Whether you’re a production sale veteran or trying to host your own sale for the very first time, a key indicator of your success on sale day is how you choose to market your sale and your bulls or females.
At KRose Company, we’ve worked with more than 100 operations in the past 5 years to help their cattle bring higher averages on sale day. In 2021, our customers saw an increased average of $728 more per head over the previous year. This is even higher than industry averages for last year’s sale season.
One of the biggest reasons we are able to help our customers in this way is because I drive up and down your ideal customers driveway on a daily basis. I hear their concerns and how they want to be reached. Last year, my dad John Rose and I bought more than 50,000 calves from your potential customers and those relationships and the feedback we get from them is powerful in helping us understand how to change approaches in marketing to be the most successful.
It’s important to remember that with those increased averages, we also saw costs go up last year. We’re on an uphill trend and there’s lots of optimism in the market, so now it the time to figure out how we can keep costs affordable while continuing to keep our averages increasing.
Mistakes we see in marketing production sales and private treaty
Marketing is not cohesive
Choosing not to invest in good photo and video
Starting marketing too late
Your ranch’s marketing needs to be cohesive to get the best results
There are many different people involved in your marketing: a catalog designer, print advertising, your website designer, social media, and even you yourself talking about the sale to people. It’s not enough for each one of these pieces of your marketing to be good. All of them need to be good and all of them need to work together.
We like to think about it this way: If you removed your name from your marketing materials, would people still be able to tell it was yours? This is our goal. To do this, the cover of your catalog should match the look and feel of your print ads. So should your Facebook cover photo and your website. This helps all the pieces of your marketing work together and amplify each other for more impact with your customers.
Investing in good photo and video for your bulls sets apart the good from the great
This is really about more than the photo and video of your sale animals. Those are important and a necessity to really show the quality of your bulls and females. According to our survey, about 80% of buyers make decisions based on available photos and videos.
Quality photos and videos can help you build trust with your customers in the off-season too. People want to see more than just the photos in your catalog at sale time. They want to hear why you raise cattle the way you do. In most cases they buy bulls from you BECAUSE of you. Hearing from you on a regular basis is an important part of the relationship and builds their confidence in the type of calves they can expect out of your bulls.
Start marketing your sale 9 months ahead of the date
Marketing your sale should begin months before sale day. In order to get the right buyers in the seats, they need to see your marketing about 21 times before becoming a customer. That’s quite a lot, but starting early makes it easier.
We recommend getting your sale date on your website at least 9 months out. The cover of your catalog should be designed about 6 months prior and should be on your website as well. Start talking about your sale on social media about 2-3 months leading up to the sale.
Diversify your bull sale marketing to include more than a catalog and print ads
The marketplace is getting really noisy, so the sooner and more frequently you can get in front of your customers, the better. Just your sale catalog isn’t enough. We put a lot of time and money (on average, $7-$12 per printed and mailed piece) into our sale catalogs and it’s already challenging to get the data and photos for them, but with mail complications, we would need to be getting it ready even sooner. You don’t want to waste money on a catalog that never reaches your customer, so you need to have a plan for mail delays and you need to have other options too.
One way we like to get in front of customers multiple times is through social media. We can get traffic to your website for less than fifty cents per click and you will also get to see a lot more data about who was on your site, checking out your bulls. With print ads, we don’t have a good way to do that yet. But yet most people spend the majority of their budget on print ads. I think print ads still have their place, but I don’t think it’s wise to put all your eggs in one basket and rely totally on a print ad to get people to your sale.
Should we market our bulls how we did last year?
We did a survey to get some data about how people like to buy their bulls. Here’s what we discovered.
What conclusions can we draw from this information? Well, I think a couple things stand out.
We feel a lot of pressure to have an online option for buying, but it’s not necessary for every operation. It’s the last option in how people prefer to buy.
Five years ago online catalogs weren’t even being utilized. We’re trending away from mailing catalogs. It’s expensive and unreliable.
A lot of folks are buying from somewhere they have bought before. How are you nurturing the relationship with your past customers? How can you nurture those relationships better?
According to most of the marketing we see, you would think genetics is the most important factor in buying decisions. But according to our survey, that isn’t the case.
Having a website isn’t an option anymore in this industry. It needs to work.
Get the most from your marketing expenses
When expenses are increasing, you have to figure out ways to make your dollar count. A few ways you can do that are:
Utilize digital advertising to get in front of more people, more affordably
Keep your bull videos hosted on YOUR website, not on someone else’s. This helps you keep more people on your website, which helps you build your “rank” on the internet. It increases the likelihood that when people Google you, your website will come up first. You don’t want the company doing your marketing to come up when someone searches your name.
Make your marketing cohesive. This amplifies the impact of each piece individually.
Don’t have a sale until you can’t get rid of all your bulls by private treaty. Sales add a lot of expenses. So if you are able to move all your animals through private treaty, there’s no reason to add the costs of a sale.
Use smart strategy when planning your marketing. A lot of people want to add females to their sale. This is a great way to diversify, but you have to be careful. You can’t just throw some females in a sale and expect them to sell. Marketing females is different than marketing bulls. When you market a bull, they are a shorter term investment and we make bull buying decisions logically. But females are long term investments and will be in your buyers’ herd for a long time. Buying females is usually more of an emotional decision. The marketing has to match the customer’s thought process or it won’t work.
Wanting a deeper dive? Join myself, Karoline Rose Bohannan, as I teach our May FREE seedstock Marketing class.