SymTRX isn’t another generic fertilizer product. It looks like nothing else, it works like nothing else, and it’s made in a way that’s something else altogether.
There’s a saying that when everyone is zigging, it’s time to zag. For SymTRX, we transformed the product’s biggest difference into its most memorable element, and zagged the marketing campaign into a whole new dimension.
Anuvia Plant Nutrients creates “Planet Inspired Products” that grow stronger plants today, and feed the soil for greater growth tomorrow.
Unlike most fertilizers, SymTRX uses reclaimed organic matter — which also gives it a dark appearance that makes it stand out from the competition.
At the start of the project, our client said the biggest problem was most of their market didn’t know SymTRX even existed, so market awareness was our main focus.
Most fertilizer marketing shows a nearly universal combination of green fields, rugged smiles and perfect sunny days. This might work for some, but SymTRX needed to separate itself from the rest.
To achieve this, we knew we had to leave the usual elements behind. No fields, no faces, nothing familiar. We even decided photography was too predictable, and painstakingly rendered the entire campaign in computer-generated 3D instead.
The 3D process almost became a project in itself. After matching the real-world texture, colour and physics of SymTRX granules, things really started moving. Through a combination of in-house talent and outside animators, our creative team brought the granules to life as the star of the show.
Along with a lengthy voice talent search and a scratch-built soundtrack, this “hero video” was exactly what we needed to launch “The Future of Fertilizer.” The final look was dark, rich, futuristic and completely different than anything else on the market — just like SymTRX.
The campaign’s stylish visuals were ready to make SymTRX stand out, and our media strategy’s integrated data-gathering potential was ready to help us dig in for deeper audience insights.
15- and 30-second videos: established the key messages of profitability and sustainability, and allowed us to measure engagement on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and push awareness through targeted pre-rolls.
Web banners: focused key messages to attract attention and push viewers toward a campaign-specific landing page.
Landing page: allowed us to gather unique measurements of click-throughs from other mediums, rather than taking viewers to the main Anuvia site or SymTRX product page.
Print ads: are still a valuable way to reach more “traditional” audiences. This campaign only had a small print component, but in larger executions, a unique URL would have been used for more specific measurement.
Radio ads: also remain a valuable medium. As part of our commitment to be different, the spot leveraged the compelling “ASMR” audio technique to make a unique connection with the listener. For metrics, we monitored misspelled online searches for things like “sim tricks” to measure this offline medium.
Sales are only part of what a properly targeted campaign can give you. With a modern measurement strategy, this year’s campaign is also a fact-finding mission for how to better reach the audience in the future. Here are some of the key findings we uncovered:
Over 7M impressions. Through programmatic ad buying, we were able to expand out of traditional agriculture publications and reach a wider audience.
Ad testing showed combinations work better. Running a series of ads through both search and display showed us that growers reacted more to ads that combined ideas like “Yield + ROI” and “Soil vs. Soil Health” than ads that only focused on one benefit.
Growers are data hungry. They want proof the product works as well as claimed. With trial data as a lead magnet, we are on track (August 2019) to beat our lead generation goal by 150%.
Growers are multichannel. Traffic was generated 48% from display advertising, 36% from social and 16% from search, with each channel benefitting the other.
Social media is number one. In lead generation, social represented a surprising 65%.
Unexpected growth potential findings. Growers outside the targeted audience were also attracted to trial data, with 42% of leads choosing “other” for their crop type.
Video ads create product awareness. But they need to be optimized to become a solid lead generation tool.
Excellent spill over, and sales interest. The campaign drove audiences to a targeted landing page, but also increased traffic to the main corporate site by 25% over the previous year — along with an 80% traffic increase for the “Where to Buy” page.
Mobile is key. 75% of landing page traffic came from mobile sources.
Night time is the right time. Our audience was most active Tuesday through Friday after 4 p.m.
On-track for all KPIs (August, 2019). The campaign is expected to meet or exceed all strategic KPIs, including an awareness goal for website visits that is trending to surpass KPIs by 58%, and an acceptance goal for building database leads that is trending to beat KPIs by 150%.
These findings uncovered a number of recommendations for even bigger results in 2020:
“This campaign is a great example of the importance of strong client-agency relationships, and it shows what can happen when a client trusts the agency to take them outside their comfort zone. The creative was so different from anything else in the category, but Anuvia was willing to take the leap with us and the results have been incredible. The response data from our target audience showed that the creative did exactly what it was supposed to: it captured their attention and piqued their interest. And because we put such a focus on gathering both performance and customer data, we can continue to refine and improve this campaign when it rolls out into additional markets next year.”
- Carla Howden, Senior Account Manager
