How to reach farmers with FACEBOOK ADS

66% of farmers use Facebook every single day.

If you sell to farmers and you’re not running paid ads on the platform, you’re leaving a significant amount of pipeline on the table. This isn’t opinion. It’s from our own Marketing to Farmers Report, where we surveyed just shy of a thousand farmers across the UK, from 18 to 60 plus, covering every farming type and region.

Facebook is, without question, the go-to channel for agricultural businesses looking to reach farming audiences at scale. Our paid social specialists Ash and Anna, alongside sales and marketing manager Ed, recently ran a webinar covering exactly how to make it work. Here’s what they covered.

Watch the full webinar below

Organic reach is shrinking. Paid is where the growth is.

Average organic reach on Facebook now sits at around 2% of your followers. A few years ago it was 10 to 15%. The platform throttles it because it knows businesses like yours will pay to reach the audiences they need.

Organic still matters, but for a different reason. When a farmer sees your ad, the first thing they’ll do is check your page. If it looks dormant or unconvincing, you’ve already lost them. Think of your organic presence as the credibility check that makes your paid ads work harder.

Build the community. Then put serious budget behind reaching new audiences.

Get clear on your commercial goal before you touch the ads manager

Facebook ads can deliver brand awareness, lead generation, event sign-ups, and direct sales. Agricultural businesses that get the best results know exactly which of those they’re going after before a single campaign goes live.

Work backwards from what you need. If you want 50 qualified leads a month, calculate what a lead is likely to cost you on the platform, then set your budget accordingly. If you’re selling high-value machinery or inputs with strong lifetime customer value, you can afford to invest more in acquisition. That’s not a cost. That’s a commercial decision.

Reach and impressions are not success metrics. Leads, cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend are.

Targeting farmers on Facebook: what actually works

Meta’s interest-based targeting has become broader in recent years, which makes it harder to go granular on farm type alone. The businesses that cut through lean heavily on first-party data and custom audiences.

Your customer database is one of the most valuable assets you have. Upload it, build lookalike audiences from it, and retarget people who’ve visited your website or engaged with your content in the last 30 to 90 days.

When you’re building audience personas, go beyond farm type and geography. Think about what your customers actually engage with. Jeremy Clarkson. John Deere content. Farming Guardian. The more you understand the wider interests and behaviours of your audience, the more precisely you can build targeting that finds them.

One persona is never enough. Build four or five. A dairy farmer buying a milking system has completely different motivations to an arable farmer looking at crop inputs. Different audiences need different messages, different creative, and different campaign structures.

Creative and landing pages: where most campaigns succeed or fail

Great targeting gets your ad in front of the right people. Creative is what makes them stop scrolling.

For agricultural businesses marketing to farmers, user-generated content and farmer testimonials consistently outperform polished brand creative. Farmers buy from farmers. A straight-to-camera video from a real customer on a real farm, talking about a real result, will almost always outperform a studio shoot. Test both. The creative your marketing team loves most is often not the top performer.

The landing page is just as important. If farmers are clicking through and bouncing, the problem usually isn’t the ad. It’s what happens next. A slow, cluttered, or poorly structured landing page will kill campaign performance regardless of how good the targeting and creative are.

If your website isn’t ready, on-platform lead forms are a strong alternative. They reduce friction, keep users in the app, and can generate solid lead volumes. Just make sure you’re feeding quality signals back to Meta so the algorithm learns what a good lead looks like for your business.

Testing, measuring, and knowing when to adjust

Set up a campaign and leave it alone, and you’ll burn budget fast.

Continuously test different audiences, formats, and copy angles. Change one variable at a time so you can actually attribute what’s working. If you’re generating strong engagement but no conversions, dig into the data before switching anything off. Good reach with poor leads usually points to a targeting or messaging issue, not a reason to write off the channel.

Set your KPIs before the campaign launches. Monitor them consistently. And make sure your sales team is feeding back on lead quality. If the people coming through aren’t the decision-makers on farm, that’s data you can use to tighten the targeting.

Budget: what should agricultural businesses be spending?

A starting budget of £500 to £750 a month will get you meaningful data to work with. To run a proper multi-audience campaign with room to test and optimise, £1,000 to £1,500 a month is a more realistic foundation.

Put that alongside the cost of a half-page in the farming press, a stand at a regional show, or a direct mail campaign. Then factor in the targeting precision, real-time performance data, and the ability to measure every click, lead, and conversion. The commercial case for Facebook advertising as part of your agricultural marketing strategy is compelling.

We help agricultural businesses reach farmers at scale

Hillsgreen is an agricultural marketing agency that exists to help brands connect with farming audiences. We’ve run Facebook campaigns for machinery dealers, agri-input suppliers, agri-tech businesses, rural events, and more.

If you want to understand what a paid social strategy could deliver for your business, get in touch with the team.

And if you want the data that underpins everything we do, download our Marketing to Farmers Report. It’s the most comprehensive picture available of how UK farmers use digital, make buying decisions, and engage with brands online.