Unlocking Growth With Retail First-Party Data

Agriculture is a niche sector. Often, advertising reach across digital channels is limited since the audience is finite and rural, with only around 76% of the farming community having access to the internet. The goal was to increase the ag company's reach and awareness to soybean and corn growers in remote rural areas and identify opportunities for product and crop prioritization and optimization. Recognizing the constraints of advertising to an agricultural audience, Goodway and the company's AOR researched innovative ways to increase market share in smaller rural markets and boost overall campaign performance.

To address the challenge, Goodway suggested the ag company tap into DGMN’s audience data to expand its audience. As the nation’s largest retailer by store count, Dollar General has 90MM reachable customers, and, with 80% of DG’s footprint in rural areas, they have proven incremental reach in rural. We conducted research to compare Goodway’s proprietary Farm Connect agriculture audiences with DG audiences. We discovered several overlapping similarities in behaviors and online media usage. For the strategy, the AOR and Goodway used data signals from both DGMN and Farm Connect to inform optimizations within a carefully selected test group. We hypothesized the large dataset of audience signals would expand the ag products company's market share of voice within the agricultural sector and enhance its ad campaigns with the newly reached audience.

The collaboration between its AOR, Goodway and DGMN expanded market share within the agricultural sector for the ag products company as hypothesized. In addition, the ag products company uncovered valuable insights for ongoing optimization in using a mix of first-party data from Farm Connect and DGMN. The success of the strategy highlighted the importance of data-driven decision-making in niche markets and proved how using a targeted approach with RMN audiences as a non-endemic brand can significantly improve both campaign performance and audience reach.