Demand Gen for machinery dealers: getting in the shed before the search
By the time they search, they have already picked two dealers
I have run Google Ads for machinery businesses long enough to know the search is the last step, not the first. Nobody wakes up and types "new 12 metre air seeder" cold. That search is the end of a conversation that started eighteen months earlier, in a paddock, with a breakdown.
By the time a farmer types a model number into Google, he has usually already shortlisted two dealers. You are either one of them, or you are the third quote he uses to beat them down on price.
That is the whole argument for Demand Gen. Search lets you compete for the last two weeks. Demand Gen lets you own the eighteen months in front of it.
What Demand Gen actually is, and what it will not do
Demand Gen is Google's visual, audience-led campaign type. It runs on YouTube, Shorts, the Discover feed and Gmail, using images and video instead of keywords. It replaced Discovery campaigns, and it behaves nothing like Search.
Dealers get it wrong by treating it as Search with pictures. They write a stock clearance headline, point it at the homepage, then kill it in six weeks because the cost per lead looks bad next to Search. Of course it looks bad. You are comparing someone who put their hand up against someone who was sitting on the couch.
I run Meta Ads alongside it for the same reason, farmers are absolutely on Facebook. But YouTube is where machinery gets judged, and Demand Gen buys that inventory using the same audience data as your Search account.
- Puts machines in front of rural buyers who are not searching yet
- Builds the remarketing pool your Search campaigns close later
- Carries video, which is how gear actually gets assessed
- Targets by district, interest and behaviour, not by keyword
- Produce a cheap cost per lead in month one
- Replace a proper Search campaign on your brand and model names
- Work with a stock photo and a Contact Us button
- Show a clean last-click return, because the sale lands months later
Who I target first, and in what order
Start with the people you already know. Every dealer is sitting on a DMS full of customers who bought seven or eight years ago and are due. Upload that as Customer Match and talk to them like people who have already bought from you, because they have.
Then work outwards. The further you get from your own data, the cheaper the impressions and the colder the buyer. I fund the top of this ladder properly and only widen once the warm audiences are saturated.
Geography does more filtering than any audience setting. A radius around each branch plus the cropping shires you actually deliver to will beat clever interest stacking every time.
The creative that stops a farmer mid-scroll
The biggest lever on a machinery campaign is not the bidding, it is the footage. A farmer can smell an agency from four paddocks away.
The best performing creative I have run for farm equipment leads was shot on a phone at a customer's place, in the dirt, with the machine working behind the bloke talking. It beat the polished manufacturer video badly, and it cost nothing to make.
Name the district out loud in the first three seconds. "Riverina growers" or "Darling Downs" does more for relevance than any targeting toggle.
Track it to the delivered machine, not the form fill
This is the part dealers skip, and it is the part that decides whether the campaign survives its first quarter. If you optimise on form fills, Google will go and find you people who enjoy filling in forms. You will get a pipeline full of names and a quiet workshop.
Push the sale back into Google. Capture the click ID with the enquiry, store it against the contact in the CRM, then import the sales-qualified lead and the delivered machine as offline conversions. It is a day of setup and it changes what the bidding chases.
If you do not have sale data yet, set a value on the qualified lead. Gross profit on an average deal multiplied by your close rate will do. A rough number beats no number.
What the numbers actually look like
Here is the shape of it from campaigns I have run in Australian ag. Reach in a farming district costs roughly $10 to $18 CPM, which is cheap by city standards. Cost per enquiry on Demand Gen usually lands between $25 and $70. High-intent Search on model names and used listing terms runs $70 to $200, more on the big gear.
The enquiry is not the point. Watch what happens to a hundred of them.
Two questions before you go
Two calls I have watched dealers get wrong, both worth real money.
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1. Your Search campaign is producing enquiries at $95 each. Your new Demand Gen campaign is producing them at $38. The GM wants the Search budget moved across. What do you do?
Hold Search, and measure to the sale. Search is catching people already at the shortlist stage, so those leads qualify at roughly double the rate, and starving it hands your brand and model searches to the dealer down the highway. Pausing is the opposite overreaction, since the cheaper leads are doing real work earlier in the cycle. The only number that settles the argument is qualified leads and machines out the gate, which is why the offline conversion import matters.
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2. You sell headers into the Riverina and you have budget for one three-month Demand Gen push. When do you run it?
Six months out. Through harvest the machine is running and the farmer is in the cab from dawn, which is the worst possible moment to ask for an enquiry, and the shortlist was set months earlier anyway. Field day support is a nice bonus, but a fortnight is nowhere near enough time to move someone from never heard of you to shortlisted. You want to be in front of them while there is still time to talk to the accountant and the neighbour.
Want this system built for your business?
Harvest Lead builds lead and sales systems for agriculture and machinery businesses across Australia. Book a call and we will map your search demand.
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