Modernising farming equipment sales.

Sandeep Ruhela has made a career of advancing India’s agriculture sector by championing modern farming equipment for rural farmers. More than half of the country’s population makes a living from the agriculture industry and India boasts 160 million hectares of farmable land, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF).

As head of product marketing for Escorts Kubota Limited, a leading manufacturer of tractors and farm machinery equipment, Ruhela is happy to support one of the company’s core missions: powering farmers’ dreams and improving the world’s food security. This includes contributing to the company’s milestone of putting more than one million tractors into Indian farmers’ fields.

Small farmers with less than two hectares of farmland make up 80% of the Indian market, and many have yet to use tractors to improve their yields and incomes. “For farmers, especially in the rural parts of India, it was very difficult to locate and contact local dealers to learn more about options for farming equipment. This made it challenging for them to get information about tractors and accessories that can make their farms more prosperous,” says Ruhela.

Increasing yields with marketing tailored to different languages, climates, and crops

To promote technologies that can improve farming, the company started using Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service to create new websites for its Farmtrac and Powertrac brands. The company also plans a similar website for the Kubota brand, as well as microsites to inform and connect farmers with its more than 1,000 dealers.

Creating websites tailored to the many languages spoken across India and the diversity of crops grown — which vary greatly due to country’s different climates and soil types – is a large undertaking. But with its new digital asset management (DAM) and content management system (CMS), Escorts Kubota can quickly create branded websites in multiple languages, as well as customized dealer microsites.

Partnering for success

Axeno, an Adobe Silver Partner, helped Escorts Kubota implement the new digital marketing platform. Ruhela appreciates Axeno’s specialization in customer experience design. “Axeno provided us valuable insights on best practices for our overarching brand websites, automating content rollout for all the microsites, and optimizing customer journeys tailored to personas,” says Ruhela.

Initial versions of the Farmtrac and Powertrac websites launched in English and Hindi, with the goal to expand to up to ten languages. The team designed the websites for the future, making use of out-of-the-box templates and components that will help to easily translate and deliver text, graphics, and other website content in different languages.

One of the company’s goals is to attract website visitors using video and images relevant to where they are in India. The company offers a large portfolio of tractors to meet different local farming requirements and price points. Marketing content is strategically designed to target distinct audiences by highlighting equipment meant for use with crops like rice in West Bengal, wheat and sugarcane in Uttar Pradesh, maize and soybeans in Madya Pradesh, or oranges and tea in Assam.

This tailored content will be available to all website visitors, even those in rural locations. Dynamic Media in Experience Manager Assets helps render assets on the go based on available bandwidth and device type to optimize user experiences, making the most of Escorts Kubota’s vast image library of more than 100 tractor models plus add-on equipment.

Using Adobe Target, Escorts Kubota can scale its personalization initiatives to deliver the appropriate experiences based on a site visitor’s location and interests. For example, the websites use geolocation to determine where a visitor is and then display the top products for that region.

The company also uses Adobe Analytics to collect insights and continually improve customer experiences. Website leads are nurtured through the company’s marketing funnel, matured by its call center, and ultimately channeled to the appropriate local dealerships for follow-up and conversion.

Seeding more sales with digital experiences

“We visited dealerships in rural areas to better understand their workflows and customer journeys, then used these learnings to thoughtfully design user experiences and ideal paths through the websites,” says Ankur Mittal, founder and CEO of Axeno. To create dealer microsites, dealers add information such as showroom details, number of employees, and awards into Escorts Kubota’s ERP system, and once approved, the details are populated on microsites.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the company has seen more rural audiences engaging with digital and e-commerce platforms. “Customers have moved in this direction and we are well-positioned to cater to their needs,” Ruhela says. “They can begin their research online and still get face-to-face interaction with our dealers to address their concerns prior to making an important purchase.”

The new websites are already having an impact. The company anticipates up to a million views on the websites, a tenfold increase over previous website traffic. With the lift in impressions and awareness of the company’s range of products, overall leads from the website have increased in the first few months.

With a lean IT team, the cloud service offering simplifies website operations and maintenance, while enabling the sites to scale as needed. “With Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, we have a one-stop solution that is easy to operate but flexible enough to expand to meet our evolving strategies,” says Ruhela.

Promoting efficient and sustainable agricultural practices has never been more important for Escorts Kubota. “We’re building a customer-centric program that is fundamental to our overall strategy as we grow our business within India and look to expand to other countries,” says Ruhela.