DuraCor Herbicide: Launch
THE CHALLENGE: Applying DuraCor® expands grasslands while reducing weeds, which translates to cheaper feed and healthier, heavier cattle. Unfortunately, most cattle ranchers don’t think they need herbicide for their pastures since they primarily focus on raising their herds.
THE SOLUTION: We engaged progressive, well-known ranchers to discuss the importance of weed-free grass to their own operations. To them, great cattle producers must consider themselves great grass farmers too. This simple insight grew sales more than 20%.
Team: Jaclyn Phenicie (CD), Mark Henderson (ACD Copy), Jordan Hart (ACD Art), Justin Hernandez (Sr. Designer)
Making the case for ranchers to care .
The most important thing to a cattle rancher is the health of their herd. And in maintaining their health, the focus has been on the cattle themselves. But they’ve been overlooking one very important thing, and it’s been right underfoot all along, healthy grass. Because with healthy, weed-free grass, comes a healthy well-fed herd and a healthy bottom line. When we launched DuraCor Herbicide, we had to shift their mindset, that to be great cattle ranchers, they had to be great grass farmers. So we turned to the people they trust most, their peers, to tell our story across a range of channels.
Telling real ranchers’ stories.
Broadcast played a key role in telling these personal stories, which were recorded unscripted. The crew filmed our three ranchers going about their workdays, telling their stories in their words. These slices of real life played brilliantly in TV’s most popular cattle production show — Cattlemen to Cattlemen. We even worked out a sponsorship for a seven-minute educational segment and a fully sponsored 60-minute “grass farming” show to highlight the features and benefits of DuraCor®.
We didn’t stop there.
We did cut downs to :30s, :15s and :06s for each rancher. This gave us teasers we could use in any channel. All driving to the longer content for our website.
SOCIAL MEDIA LEVERAGED THE RANCHER’S RECOGNITION. The immediacy of social media, paid and earned, provided another rich outlet to celebrate cattle producers and the products benefits. Like most ag segments, cattle producers find great pride and passion in their business, making it as much a lifestyle as a job.
To cattle producers, print still matters.
We invested heavily in high-impact print since magazines remain the most relied-upon information source for our market. We turned to industry-recognized leaders to elevate the importance of grass as a plentiful, renewable, lowest-cost feed source.
We drove visits. And closed sales.
Every touchpoint of our integrated plan directed audiences to our product page on the website. This page became the most-visited of any Corteva Agriscience product during our campaign, nearly doubling the next-most-visited page’s unique visits and doubling the average time on site, lengthening it from 2:06 to 4:19. Our banner CTR was 3x the industry average, direct and referral web traffic scored over 60,000 unique visits, and, most importantly, the Year 1 sales for DuraCor helped grow Corteva’s weed control segment by over 20%.