How to promote an agricultural APP? unexpected……

The author of this article, Zhang Jianzhong, has been in the agricultural industry since 2005. He has worked in many companies including feed, pesticides, and agricultural products. In 2010, he began to fully transform into agriculture + Internet. He has successively operated Taobao (Apple), Tmall (red dates), QQ Mall (yam), yam portal, city fresh food website, industry e-commerce platform (animal husbandry/agricultural supplies), and is committed to agriculture + Internet.

Before answering this question, let’s talk about the positioning of agricultural apps and lay the groundwork:

1. Positioning

Based on the core business, APPs can be divided into information, social and e-commerce categories. The information category includes news, question and answer, forum and tool categories. All four belong to the information category, but they have different focuses.

In fact, there is no fixed standard to judge whether an APP is information, social, or e-commerce. Some APPs are relatively pure, for example, Nongyi.com APP is a pure e-commerce APP. There are also many APPs that actually combine two or three of the three categories: information, social and e-commerce. For example, Yimutian APP combines information and e-commerce. I Will Plant is mainly information (Q&A), with a small amount of social elements. The WeChat APP that we use most is an APP that mainly focuses on social networking, supplemented by information, and also has transactions.

Every APP is constantly developing. For example, Shuiguobang has begun to add social functions, gradually developing from pure information (forum) to information + social. So our examples are all based on the current APP version.

Relatively speaking, the threshold for information apps is relatively low, so many apps, like websites, focus on information when they are first launched, and then gradually add social or e-commerce elements. Social apps tend to consider the social needs of the target group more. For example, Funshine Sales is actually an app product focused on enterprise management, which is based on a social app and combines it with the internal management of the enterprise. E-commerce apps can be pure e-commerce applications or they can incorporate information and social elements. For example, Taobao app also has social elements, namely Taobao friends.

At present and in the next 3-5 years, the biggest opportunity for the Internet is industry +. If business design is based on the needs of industry groups (information, social networking, online shopping), the APP needs to have information, social networking and e-commerce. Zhuyitong is such an APP. It was developed based on Zhue.com (a pig farming industry portal). Based on information, it integrates social and e-commerce functions to become a three-in-one APP.

2. Two industry characteristics that agricultural apps should pay attention to

Lao Zhang has been engaged in agriculture for more than ten years. He has deeply felt that the demand for APPs in the agricultural industry is very strong. In the past few years, a large number of agriculture-related APPs have appeared. Lao Zhang believes that since it involves agriculture, the characteristics of agriculture - regionality and specificity - must be fully considered.

Agriculture, that is, the planting industry, can be divided into several major categories, such as grain, oil, vegetables, fruits, etc., and further subdivided into apples, bananas, rice, tea, tobacco, potatoes and so on. In addition, agriculture is constantly developing in a specialized and professional way. People who grow tea, potatoes, peanuts, and citrus all grow them all year round and will not change easily. Therefore, these people's demands for information, social networking, and e-commerce are obviously stable and specific, which has also spawned industry-specific Internet platforms such as the Grape Cooperation Network and the Fuda Peanut Network.

Agriculture is an industry with extremely strong regional characteristics. Even for the same grapes, there are great differences in variety, planting level, occurrence of pests and diseases, etc. between grapes in different regions such as Qinhuangdao, Hanzhong, and Dali. The demands for information and related products are also different. Therefore, agricultural apps, whether they are information apps or e-commerce apps, must be designed with full consideration of regional characteristics.

The combination of regional characteristics and industry specificity of agriculture has formed a criss-crossing network - divided into both regions and subcategories. As far as Lao Zhang knows, Tiantianquan’s APP has realized information design in different crop directions, and Nongyishi has achieved question-and-answer design for crop segmentation and region parallelism.

Yimutian is a bulk trading platform for agricultural products. From the beginning, it has attached great importance to the design of agricultural subcategories. As it has begun to develop in a social direction, Lao Zhang suggested incorporating more regional design strategies.

The emphasis on integrating industry characteristics is to allow industry users to obtain information and products more conveniently. The more convenient it is to use, the more they will want to continue using it, and the number of APP uninstalls will decrease. You should know that the installation cost of APP is much greater than logging in on the PC, so by constantly combining it with industry characteristics, you can continuously reduce promotion costs.

The Internet is all about connections, one + one + another. Only by fully combining the characteristics of the industry can it be possible to integrate more resources and jointly promote development. To put it bluntly, it is to design a function to meet the needs of a group of people, and then this group of people will bring more impetus and reduce the platform's own promotion investment. For example, WeChat public accounts meet the needs of many companies for free "group text messaging", so many companies have asked their employees to use WeChat more often - to forward more of the company's own advertisements. You should know that Tencent's eldest son QQ was explicitly banned by many companies.

3. Incentives for Agricultural Apps

To increase user activity, we need to stimulate them with fame or profit. Benefits, in a broad sense, refer to solving users' real needs, resolving various problems, obtaining economic benefits, etc. In addition to profit, there is also fame, including various levels and titles, such as the star, moon, sun and crown levels of QQ, the various titles in Baidu Tieba - Tieba allows the bar owner to set the membership level titles of the bar, and of course various vanity - in the virtual environment of the Internet, satisfying the vanity of some people that cannot be obtained in reality - please refer to the profit model of various Internet celebrities on the live broadcast platform .

For the membership levels of agricultural APPs, we must fully integrate the characteristics of the agricultural industry. For example, for members such as agricultural technicians and agricultural input merchants, we can set up national, provincial, and municipal agricultural technicians (agricultural input merchants). Each level can also be divided into AAAAA, AAAA, AAA, AA and other small levels. For farmers, they can be subdivided by crops, such as Yan'an AAAAA apple growers, Henan 4-star peanut growers, Xinjiang Golden Diamond tomato growers, etc.

These levels correspond to corresponding points and points acquisition rules, which express the quality of members in a figurative way for related parties to choose.

For agricultural apps that are platform e-commerce apps, or apps that plan to engage in platform transactions in the future, more attention should be paid to hierarchical design. You can think about it, now that Taobao has the heart, diamond, and crown levels for stores, doesn’t it make it very convenient for buyers to judge the quality of stores?

In addition to membership levels, agricultural apps can also authorize system honors as a reputation incentive for members. For example, we invite agricultural technicians from scientific research institutions or well-known enterprises with official expert titles to encourage these external personnel to actively interact with members and improve the technical strength of the platform.

The identity of the group leader of the regional exchange group mentioned above is equivalent to becoming the leader of a certain type of crop in the local area. Perhaps a certain member was originally a local leader, but there was no form to identify and express him. However, a title such as the group leader of the Yantai Apple Technology Exchange Group became his identity, which is an honor that cannot be bought with money.

Why should we attach importance to integration with the industry? To put it in a more high-sounding way, it is to improve the user experience, but in fact it is also to reduce the promotion cost - if the user experience is good, the activity and stickiness will increase, and the churn rate will naturally decrease. There is no need to repeatedly attract users. You must know that users are very expensive, and those who do agriculture are often poor (even if they are not poor, saving money is a must). With this said, will everyone pay more attention to this?

4. Farmers’ social interaction

Socializing is one of the most important behaviors of netizens. In fact, farmers have a stronger potential demand for Internet socializing, especially new farmers who hope to get to know more agricultural technicians to obtain more direct agricultural technical support. They also hope to get to know more agricultural product sales personnel to help them better complete agricultural product sales. In 2012, Lao Zhang sold out more than 8,000 kilograms of Wenxian yam produced by his own family in just over ten days, thanks to referrals from a large number of classmates and colleagues.

Most of our social interactions begin with innate relationships based on geography and blood ties, and acquired relationships with classmates and colleagues, among which acquired relationships have the greatest variability. According to data released by the China Internet Network Information Center, among social media users, those with secondary education are the largest, with 35.8% and 31.3% of netizens with junior high school and high school/technical secondary school/technical school education respectively, and 12.4% of netizens with a bachelor's degree or above. The higher the academic qualifications, the greater the number of classmates and alumni you will have, and the more colleagues you will come into contact with at work and the more social activities you will participate in. Most of my country's farmers have only junior high school, high school/technical secondary school/technical school education, so farmers have greater potential demand for Internet social networking.

According to Lao Zhang's understanding, there is currently no APP with farmers' social networking as its main application, which is precisely a huge space. Apps like Yimutian, Nongguanjia, Nongyishou, and I Can Plant have begun to gradually increase the design of social functions. I hope they can do better and better on the social path.

Why design social features? In fact, it is still to reduce the promotion cost. Because social interaction is an instinctive need, data also shows that the stickiness of social apps is second only to news apps and far greater than e-commerce apps. Information and goods are often sought only when they are needed. With social functions, users have one more reason to open and log in to the APP, and the information and goods on the APP have more opportunities to be displayed, and these display costs can be ignored, so social functions will greatly reduce the promotion costs of information and goods. The reason why WeChat has become the largest traffic portal for mobile Internet is precisely because of this. Therefore, for agricultural apps, even if it is to save promotion costs, we should pay attention to the design of social elements.

There are many regional agricultural exchange groups on WeChat, such as the ** Province melon exchange group. Therefore, agricultural APPs should add group functions when designing social functions (currently, Nongguanjia has already achieved this). When designing the groups, Lao Zhang suggested that the system generate mainstream agricultural product trading groups in various regions. For example, a yam exchange group could be set up in Wen County, Henan Province, with local agricultural supply merchants, agents or agricultural technicians competing for the position of group leader. This would not only provide local industry exchanges, but also help agricultural supply merchants/agents/agricultural technicians integrate local planting resources and gradually cultivate local partners.

5. The importance of Doudizhu in agricultural APP

Is the importance of Landlord in agricultural APP also that it can reduce promotion costs and save money?

right! All our efforts are to acquire more users at a lower cost and then make more money! You can't be a hooligan.

Let’s first look at the report from the Internet Center.

Online games are the Internet applications with the smallest usage gap between urban and rural netizens. As of December 2014, the number of online game users among rural netizens reached 96.37 million, a significant increase of 16.8 percentage points from the end of last year [the second largest increase among all Internet applications]. The online game usage rate among rural netizens was 54%, an increase of 7.3 percentage points from last year, and only 3.3 percentage points lower than that among urban netizens.

It’s not that farmers didn’t like to play online games before, but that the conditions were not met. The data for 2015 has not been released yet, but what is certain is that the growth rate will increase because the entertainment environment in rural areas is so different from that in cities! This is why entertaining TV shows like If You Are the One have much higher ratings in fourth- and fifth-tier cities and rural areas than in first-, second- and third-tier cities.

When designing games in agricultural apps, Lao Zhang suggested that only one Landlord game would be enough. There are four reasons:

First of all, we are not specialized in online games. Our main purpose is to attract users and increase stickiness. Fighting the Landlord is one of the most widely used games. People from all over the country, both inside and outside the Great Wall, play it. There is no need to learn how to play it. You can just open your phone and you can play it. It is not like elimination games or connect the dots games, which are also simple, but farmers still have to learn how to play.

Secondly, Landlord is a small group game that requires the least number of participants and has higher fun, unlike those large-scale battle games that require a lot of people to play.

Third, Dou Dizhu has low operating requirements for the participants. Games like collision and avoidance require high operating sensitivity, while farmers are relatively older and are not as skilled in using touch screens as young people. Besides, mobile phone screens are small after all, and the game interface is too large, so Dou Dizhu is the most suitable.

Four, because among all the online games, Lao Zhang only knows how to play Landlord, haha!

Unlike other games, when designing games (Dou Dizhu) on agricultural apps, the regionality and specificity of agriculture must be taken into consideration in order to further save more promotion costs.

The sense of accomplishment brought by defeating acquaintances is far greater than that of defeating strangers, so the design must be regional, and it must go deep into counties, townships, and villages. The closer the distance, the greater the sense of accomplishment.

The design that incorporates agricultural specificity is entirely out of social needs. Farmers often lack initiative. Although they know they need to get to know more colleagues, they lack the opportunity and the courage. By adding specificity to the design of the Landlord, those who grow apples have an apple label, and those who grow vegetables have a vegetable logo. This makes it convenient for farmers to "hook up" with their peers and use the Landlord as an opportunity for them to interact with each other.

People are lazy. As the saying goes, one only regrets not having enough knowledge when he or she needs it. Only when he or she encounters difficulties do he or she realizes that he or she needs certain knowledge. The same is true for farmers. Therefore, the design of the game is to make farmers install our APP when they do not need information or purchase agricultural supplies. By playing games, they can strengthen their impression of our APP. In this way, when they need information and agricultural supplies, they will naturally think of our APP first.

In addition, the social interaction promoted by Landlord will further enhance farmers' stickiness to our APP. Will this significantly reduce the cost of promotion?

6. The Importance of Video in Agricultural Apps

"What? Videos are needed on agricultural apps? That would consume a lot of data. Are farmers willing to do that?" Pictures show the truth:

First of all, I would like to thank iQiyi for providing us with the video playback data on mobile phones and PCs. No other video platform has this function.

Are all these mobile phone broadcasts viewed using WIFI? In response to this, Lao Zhang did not refute, but only said two points. First, you must know that there are definitely fewer WIFIs in rural areas than in cities, at least there is no public WIFI; second, those who have WIFI at home must have broadband, and those who have broadband must have a computer. So if you have a computer but still use a mobile phone to watch videos, it is usually not very logical, right? Farmers certainly don’t need to secretly use their mobile phones to connect to the work WIFI to watch Korean dramas at home like we do, right? So Lao Zhang boldly guessed that the vast majority of farmers are using their mobile phone data to watch videos!

Why are farmers willing to pay to watch videos? I don’t know if there are any farmers willing to spend their mobile data to watch Korean dramas, but at least the data shows that they are willing to spend money on agricultural technology videos.

There are four reasons for the analysis:

First, these farmers are very lacking in agricultural technology. Many of them have only graduated from junior high school, high school, or even elementary school. If you ask them to read agricultural books, they may not be able to understand them and may not even recognize some of the words.

Second, besides participating in promotion meetings organized by agricultural input dealers, what other ways can farmers learn practical agricultural technology? It seems not.

Third, video presentation is more effective. We can indeed learn some agricultural techniques through the Internet, newspapers, books, and promotion meetings, but none of them are as vivid as videos.

Fourth, farmers can use their mobile phones to make comparisons in the fields.

Let’s look at the data from the Internet Center: as of December 2014, the number of rural Internet video users was 109 million, with an annual growth rate of 12%. Unlike the decline in online video usage among urban netizens, the online video usage rate among rural netizens increased by 5.9 percentage points compared with last year.

Let’s take a real example. Take a look at the screenshots of the Nong Guanjia video.

[You can question these data, but you cannot deny them, even if there is a possibility of data manipulation]

All these show that the demand for videos on agricultural apps is absolutely real and will gradually increase. It costs a lot of money to build a video platform, so we can cooperate with third-party video platforms. Even if the third-party video platforms add advertisements in the videos, it doesn’t matter. Farmers don’t mind those tens of seconds. Moreover, if the installation volume of our APP is large enough, we can negotiate advertising revenue sharing with the video platform, which is another source of income, hehe.

After integrating the video function, farmers will be able to obtain better information, the user retention rate will be higher, and promotion costs can continue to be saved.

The value of video can be further extended! Farmers need high-quality agricultural technology videos, so let’s find more or record them ourselves. When recording, I inserted some advertisements of cooperating companies, collected some sponsorship fees, and gradually turned it into Wangnong TV.

If you don’t want to record it yourself, then encourage agricultural input dealers to record various promotion meetings and product technology meetings and upload them! However, the quality of such videos cannot be guaranteed, and the key is that we cannot receive sponsorship fees from companies. What’s even more frightening is that if your video quality is not good and farmers don’t like it, they will be lost! You know, farmers use their mobile data to watch videos! Save some money for the farmers, make some videos of better quality, and earn some corporate sponsorship fees. The most important thing is that this can also pave the way for e-commerce...

7. Design of commodity trading in agricultural APP

We spend a lot of time and effort just to make money, but earning only from advertising fees and value-added services is always a little too little! So you still have to consider making money from trading. Farmers’ rigid demand is agricultural supplies, so we must first consider how to let farmers purchase agricultural supplies on our APP.

According to a report from the Internet Center, farmers’ trust in the Internet is far lower than that of urban netizens. This has nothing to do with education or income, but is mainly because they use it less! Lao Zhang bought a second-hand mobile phone on Taobao in 2004 and was very nervous when he didn't receive the goods.

If you have a lot of money, you can invest a large amount in publicity to directly cultivate farmers' trust in the APP. Learn to spend money to buy time - the main reason why Nongyi.com burned more than 50 million in 2015, to cultivate farmers' trust in a short period of time.

If you don't want to spend so much money (or maybe you don't have that much money), then you can only spend more time and effort. Through previous information and social interaction, you can slowly build up farmers' trust in our APP and encourage them to place orders.

Pesticides are special commodities that require a combination of materials and technology, so technical support must be taken into consideration. To put it bluntly, farmers must know what pesticides they need to buy and how to use them to avoid problems, so the design must combine information and social interaction... Due to the length of the article, I will not go into details here.

Any e-commerce website, whether it is a platform-based or self-operated one, will always have an insatiable desire for traffic! The above design will greatly reduce traffic costs. It should be noted that traffic expenditure has always been one of JD.com's largest expenditures.

8. Promotion activities of agricultural apps

1. Purpose

Lao Zhang believes that the purposes of Internet-based promotional activities are nothing more than four: attracting new members (increasing the number of member registrations), increasing activity (increasing the number of active users), sales promotion, and new product introduction (promoting new products or new businesses). There is no traditional publicity and promotion activities that always emphasizes brand awareness, because brand awareness cannot be measured.

When considering these four indicators, we should pay attention to the balance, that is, to ease the 28 principles as much as possible. For example, an event was held, which brought in 100,000 new members, 10% of whom placed orders, that is, 10,000 valid members, and a total transaction volume of 1 million. However, the five members with the highest payment amount accounted for 60%. In this case, the event as a whole cannot be considered good. It is simple: the customers are too powerful to be able to control the store. The trading data of various products should also pay attention to the relaxation of the 28 principle.

2. Activities

I won’t talk about various ways of spending money. Today we are mainly talking about how to save money, so we need to talk more about soft methods and organizing activities!

A good marketing campaign can often achieve the goals of attracting new customers, increasing activation, and promoting sales or new products at the same time. For example, during the National Plant Protection Conference in 2015, Nongyi.com held the second Singles' Day for agricultural supplies e-commerce. During the event, not only did the number of member registrations increase by more than 100%, but the conversion rate also exceeded 40%. Coupled with the active orders from old members, sales of 13.47 million yuan were achieved in just 48 hours, and several new products also achieved transactions of hundreds of thousands of yuan.

Case presentation. Among agricultural inputs, building demonstration fields is the most commonly used and effective means of promotion. Organizing observation meetings, inserting signs in the fields, etc. are all methods of case publicity. With the help of the Internet, in addition to wide dissemination, competitions can also be held to make case presentations more interesting.

Encouraging members to evaluate products after a transaction is completed is also a way of promoting products through personal experience, which is especially meaningful for new products. Some online shop owners, after launching new products, often look for some friends or old customers to "brush" a few real orders and real reviews in order to help increase sales of the new products.

Based on the social interaction and games mentioned above, you can organize a Landlord Fighting Competition to see who is the best landlord and the best farmer. First there will be the village preliminary round, then the township semi-final, then the county, city, provincial semi-final and the national final, all in one go for half a year! By making the activities fun and providing material (spiritual) incentives, more people can be attracted to download the APP and register as members in a short period of time. Through multiple rounds of competitions, members can get used to the operation of the APP in a short period of time and be guided to use more other functions.

Common promotional activities include selection, competition, voting and solicitation. Our agricultural APP can organize Apple King Competition, Best Farmer Competition, Best Agricultural Supplies Supplier Selection, etc. In a word, any theme that can attract farmers can be used, and offline activities can be held and extensive publicity can be carried out online.

3. Dissemination

Whether it is information, social functions, products, or activities, they all need to be spread so that more people can know, see, and use them, so communication is the core of promotion.

With the continuous development of various communication channels, there are more and more communication methods to choose from, but they are also becoming more and more difficult, which is the so-called decentralization.

A. Media

Most media have very limited influence on farmers. Due to distribution issues, almost all paper media cannot have enough influence in rural areas; television media cannot have a more in-depth impact on farmers due to the exclusivity, instantaneousness and singleness of television carriers, and can only increase their popularity; radio currently mainly covers the elderly, and car radio has a limited impact on farmers.

In a word, currently no media can do a good job in agricultural communication, and in the Internet age, the first role of the media is no longer the information disseminator, but the information release source! Commercial websites have huge traffic, but they do not have the right to edit news, so they can only forward information from the media. In addition, the media has relatively strong credibility, so media promotion in the Internet era is more of a combination of media + Internet.

Enterprises can fully promote the forwarding of media information on the website later. For example, Nongyi.com cooperated with Nonglin TV to launch "Nongyi.com Nong", a column that combines public welfare and commercial functions. The video of each episode was uploaded to Tencent Video and widely disseminated through WeChat and QQ. Some episodes were even included in the premium video library of Tencent Video, thus obtaining more free traffic.

B. Network communication

The continuous development of the Internet has brought more ways of communication. I won’t waste too much time talking about common online communications, but I would like to emphasize one point: the importance of mobile phones, especially WAP websites (mobile websites).

Smartphones are an important Internet access tool in rural areas and are also the installation carrier of APPs. Therefore, if permitted, it is recommended that each APP has a corresponding WAP website. In this way, you can continuously and more quickly obtain more traffic from search engines and various promotions.

WAP websites can be opened directly by mobile phones, and their convenience is far greater than APP. Therefore, WAP websites should become an experience, a preview, and a buffer for APP. After users see the WAP website first and understand the value of the website, installing the APP becomes a natural process. You can also use WAP+WeChat public account to further obtain stable traffic while reducing the direct installation cost of the APP.

For information-based agricultural apps, the importance of WAP websites is even more prominent. Since these websites do not have more sources of income for the time being, or are burning 100% of their money, saving on promotion costs is even more important. In addition, the large amount of content on information websites is the favorite of search engines. After having a WAP mobile website, just by doing a good SEO , you can get more free traffic than social and e-commerce WAP sites.

In fact, for shallowly interactive agricultural websites, WAP websites can fully meet business needs and thus become the main Internet carrier. For example, Nongyi.com has attached great importance to mobile Internet since its launch, and has successively launched Android APP, Apple APP, and the industry's first touch-screen H5 platform (i.e. WAP mobile website). Correspondingly, the proportion of mobile phone transactions has continued to rise, and WAP accounts for more than 70% of all mobile phones (WAP+Android+IOS).

C. Personal communication

The internet celebrities who are particularly popular nowadays are individuals who have gathered a large number of followers and become a new source of traffic and disseminators. In fact, each of us has more or less traffic due to social interaction, and the Internet has organized and utilized this traffic better. For example, Moments has become the first source of reading for public account messages. A message sent by a big V with tens of millions of fans will be read by hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Another point about personal communication is that offline, people will inadvertently spread a lot of information during gatherings and interactions, and this is particularly important for agricultural apps.

As we mentioned above, no media can better cover rural areas, and the Internet penetration in rural areas is insufficient, so personal communication has become a slower but more lasting way.

Rural areas are an acquaintance society, and farmers are often greatly influenced by the people around them. Therefore, agricultural apps should pay more attention to social networking, only in this way can they better promote personal communication. When conducting personal communications to farmers, you must choose good seed farmers. Village cadres, planting experts, shop owners, college students in the village, returning migrant workers, etc. are all the best seed farmers, and you must find ways to capture them.

There is another group of people that cannot be ignored, college students from rural areas. These people have a good acceptance of the Internet and are easy to capture, so it is also a good idea to let them spread our APP to rural areas. Of course, when planning for this type of people, you have to find a good entry point, otherwise the effect will not be very good.

D. Product Communication

In Lao Zhang's eyes, products are the best advertisements, and products are also the best publicity and connection. Therefore, for agricultural APP, it is entirely possible to consider how to use agricultural products to achieve faster and better dissemination. Select some agricultural products with wide application and low value, print the promotional content of the APP on the packaging, sell them at a lower price, or even distribute them for free in rural areas (limited to members).

As for how to sell agricultural products at low prices or distribute them for free, you can consider finding partners, or directly hiring people (to supervise the distribution). At this point, what if the partner or hired person takes the agricultural products for themselves and sells them at a higher price? Lao Zhang said that as long as he could sell it at a higher price, it would be fine. In short, as long as the product finally reached the farmers, the publicity would be effective. Besides, if the water is too clear, there will be no fish, so there will always be a few fish that slip through the net.

E. Self-published newspaper

We have to admit that paper reading materials are more durable than TV and radio, more convenient than the Internet, contain more information than outdoor advertising, and are more diffusible than live events. So after the advent of radio, television and the Internet, newspapers and books still exist.

The main reason why newspapers have not formed a strong influence in rural areas is due to distribution and price issues. The current logistics can completely cover the county. As long as the delivery from the county to the village is opened up, free newspapers can completely penetrate the rural areas and become the best promotion tool for agricultural apps.

How to solve the distribution problem? In fact, it is entirely possible to achieve this goal with the help of agricultural supplies distribution channels. Of course, the prerequisite is that this free newspaper must have a certain degree of readability and interest. Free newspapers + agricultural apps are very likely to become the perfect combination - free newspapers pave the way in rural areas, and agricultural apps harvest traffic from behind, maximizing the value of traffic through operations.

9. Offline support

Whether it is an information app, social networking or e-commerce, whether from the perspective of promotion or operational needs, we must attach importance to offline construction. Agriculture must go both online and offline. However, Lao Zhang does not recommend building an offline support system by yourself. It is not a matter of money, but mainly for the purpose of better integrating resources. As the saying goes, if we work together, we can earn together.

For agricultural supplies e-commerce apps, especially pesticides, the goods themselves are standardized products, but they are differentiated products when used. This is completely opposite to clothes - clothes are differentiated products in themselves, but they are standardized when used, and they are all worn! So in theory, agricultural supplies can be self-operated (like Nong1 and JD Seeds), but if there is no offline support, then the product will not be used well, which will suppress farmers' desire to purchase independently.

When designing online and offline models, you can consider this: what do you have and what do you lack, then choose target partners, and then consider what these target partners have and what they need. If what the target partners need is exactly what you can satisfy, then it's OK! What we must be careful about here is not to fantasize about some demands, or be confused and guided by some false demands or superficial demands, otherwise we may deviate from the direction fundamentally.

This offline support point is not only a transit warehouse for goods, but also a supplier of after-sales services, a collector and publisher of information, a undertaker and diverter, and more importantly, the "backbone" of local farmers. To put it simply, it is to become a regional comprehensive agricultural service provider, and the Internet is to give birth to such service providers more quickly and serve these service providers well, and together serve millions of farmers.

Whether it is agricultural APP or agriculture + Internet, it is a matter of close cooperation among all units of the enterprise. Plan a good plan, find suitable products, implement it perfectly with IT, and ensure that the warehousing and logistics and other support systems execute the process in place. Only in this way can the expectations be achieved. If any link fails in the middle, the entire effect will be greatly reduced.

After talking for so long, it all revolves around one question - how to let more farmers know about and use our APP. This is enough for information and social APPs, but for e-commerce, it is just the beginning. Whether users can easily find the products they want, believe in the products, have reasonable prices, no problems in the ordering process, get the products quickly after placing the order, and use them and have good results, all these have nothing to do with promotion, but directly determine the result of the promotion - transaction amount.

The Internet can match resources more reasonably and maximize the value of resources, so the Internet is of greater significance to my country's backward agriculture! There are also huge business opportunities here. Many companies and individuals have realized this and have conducted attempts and explorations to varying degrees.

Agriculture + Internet still has a long way to go. We must be more open-minded, cooperate with more people and units, and mobilize the inherent enthusiasm of all links, only then can we successfully complete an Agriculture + Internet project!