Brand versus direct response for agricultural machinery: how I split the budget

Written by Michael Nadalin, CEO and Founder · 05 Oct 2026 · 6 min read

Why this is the wrong fight to have

I get asked this most months. A dealer principal or a manufacturer's sales manager has a fixed budget and two people in his ear. One says brand, because farmers buy from names they know. The other says direct response, because you can count the leads on Monday.

They are both right, and that is the problem. Each one is describing a different job.

Direct response harvests demand that already exists. Someone is searching for a 12 metre air seeder or a used self-propelled sprayer this week, and your Google Ads either show up or they don't. Brand creates the preference that decides who gets the call when that search happens. In agricultural machinery, where a purchase can be $80,000 or $800,000 and the buyer thinks about it for a year, you cannot run on one without the other for long.

My position is simple. Direct response gets the larger share, brand gets a protected share, and the brand share never goes to zero. Not even in a bad year.

The split I actually start with

For most dealers and smaller manufacturers I start at 70 percent direct response and 30 percent brand. It is a starting point, not a law, but it is right more often than it is wrong.

The reason for 70 is cash. A dealership needs farm equipment leads coming in this quarter to keep the sales team busy and the floorplan moving. The reason for 30 is that every direct response campaign I have run performs better in a district where people already know the name. Cost per lead drops, and the leads are less inclined to shop you against three others purely on price.

Where does it shift? If you are new to a region or launching a brand nobody has seen in the paddock, I push closer to 50/50 for the first 12 months, because you are trying to harvest demand you have not earned yet. If you are the established dealer in town with 30 years of history, you can run 80/20 and let your reputation do some of the brand work for free.

Move the split with the season, not with your mood

Agriculture marketing has a calendar that most city agencies ignore. Farmers are not in the market evenly across the year, and they are definitely not reading your ads from the header cab at 11pm in November.

In a winter cropping district, seeding gear gets researched over summer and ordered well before the autumn break. Sprayers get attention ahead of the in-crop spraying window. Harvest gear decisions are often made straight after harvest, when the frustrations with the old machine are fresh, and again in the run up to 30 June when tax is on everyone's mind.

So I weight direct response heavily into the decision windows and lean on brand in the months before them. The brand money spent in the quiet months is what makes the direct response money work in the busy ones. Cut it and you will not notice for a few months. Then your cost per lead creeps up and nobody can explain why.

What a lead should cost, and why the cheap ones fool you

Rough bands from campaigns I have run, so you have something to measure against. These move a lot by product, price point and region, so treat them as ranges and not promises.

Meta Ads lead forms for machinery will often land between $30 and $90 a lead. Google Ads search on specific category or model terms usually sits higher, somewhere around $80 to $250, because there are fewer searches and more dealers bidding on them. For high value gear like headers and large tractors, a genuine sales-qualified lead can cost several hundred dollars, and that is still cheap against the margin on one machine.

Here is the trap. The $30 lead looks like the winner on the report. Then the sales team rings twenty of them and finds hobby farmers, students, tyre kickers and people who thought they were entering a competition. The $200 search lead who typed in an exact model and asked for a price on a trade-in is a different animal.

I rank lead sources on cost per sale, not cost per lead. That one change usually reshuffles the whole budget.

Track to the sale or you are guessing

None of the above works if your reporting stops at the form fill. Most machinery businesses I walk into can tell me how many leads they got last month. Very few can tell me which campaign sold the three tractors.

The fix is plumbing, and it is not glamorous. Every enquiry goes into the CRM with its source attached. The salesperson marks it qualified or not within a day or two. When a deal is won, the sale value is recorded against that same record. Then that result gets fed back to Google and Meta so the platforms start chasing people who look like buyers, not people who like filling in forms.

Expect a lag. On agricultural machinery I typically see weeks to several months between first enquiry and a signed order, and longer on big ticket gear. So judge a campaign on leads and qualification rate in the first month, and on sales only once enough time has passed for the deals to close.

How I judge the brand share without kidding myself

Brand is harder to measure, and that is exactly why it gets cut first. I do not pretend it can be tracked like a search campaign. I do hold it to account with a few signals that move slowly but honestly.

Give it two full seasons before you call it. If none of these have shifted after 12 to 18 months, the creative or the placement is wrong and I change it. I do not hand the money to direct response and walk away, because that is how a dealership ends up paying more every year for the same number of leads.

One last opinion. Your best brand asset is footage of your machine doing real work on a local farm, with a customer the district recognises. It beats a polished manufacturer video every time. Shoot it on a phone if you have to.

Written by

Michael Nadalin

Founder, Market Lead & Harvest Lead

Michael is the founder of both Market Lead and Harvest Lead, building lead and sales systems for agriculture and machinery businesses across Australia and the USA.