How I market a dealership through a drought year without going dark
Written by Michael Nadalin, CEO and Founder · 18 Sept 2026 · 6 min read
What a drought actually does to a dealership's market
I have run agriculture marketing through two dry runs now and the pattern held both times. Demand does not disappear. It moves.
New machinery goes first and it goes fast. Nobody signs a 450k order on a header while the crop in front of them is a write off. Trade values fall, the used yard fills up, and the sales board looks ugly by June. But the phone keeps ringing. It rings about different things. A grower who was going to replace a 2013 tractor now wants it rebuilt to get through two more seasons, and that job is worth 15k to 25k to your workshop. He decides in a fortnight, not in eighteen months.
The dealers who get hurt are the ones who read the sales report, decide marketing is discretionary, and switch everything off. Then the break comes, every competitor in the district turns their ads back on in the same week, and your cost per click doubles. You pay a premium to re-enter a market you already owned.
What I cut first and what I never touch
This is the order I work in, and I do not negotiate the top of it. Brand search on Google Ads costs a rural dealership somewhere around 0.80 to 2.50 a click and converts at several times the rate of anything generic. Turning that off to save a few hundred a month is the single most expensive saving available to you, because a competitor will bid on your name the day you stop defending it.
Generic terms are different. Something like tractors for sale in a regional term set will run 6 to 14 a click and, in a drought year, a lot of those clicks are people pricing a dream rather than buying a machine. That is where I take the money from.
Field days are the argument I have every time. I am not against them. I am against paying 8k for a site, a marquee and three staff away from the workshop in a year where the same 8k funds nine months of parts and service campaigns that you can actually measure to an invoice.
The workshop pays for the sales yard
In a normal year a dealership spends most of its marketing money chasing new machinery, because that is where the headline numbers are. In a drought year I flip it, and I tell owners exactly why. Parts and service leads come in at roughly 15 to 45 each on Meta Ads and local search. They close at a rate no new equipment campaign will ever match, and the money lands inside a month.
That cash flow is what keeps the rest of the account alive. It is also how you stay in the relationship. The grower who trusts your workshop through a bad season is the one who orders the new gear when the season turns, and he does not shop it around.
Here is roughly how I carve up a drought year budget for a single site dealership running somewhere between 4k and 12k a month.
The farming calendar does not stop for a bad season
This is the bit most dealers get wrong. They treat a drought as one long flat year. It is not. The machinery calendar still runs, the windows still open and close, and intent still spikes in the same weeks it always has. What changes is the size of the job, not the timing of it.
I build the year around those windows and I keep a low, steady spend between them rather than starting and stopping. Every time you switch a campaign off for six weeks you hand the learning back and pay to rebuild it.
Form fills will lie to you in a dry year
Lead volume often holds up in a drought. Lead quality does not. You get more people pricing machines they have no intention of buying, and if you optimise Google Ads and Meta Ads to raw form fills you will spend the whole year buying more of them.
So I stop counting form fills. I count quotes raised, and then I count invoices. On a 400k machine the cycle can run six to eighteen months, which is too long to optimise against, so the quote becomes the proxy conversion and the invoice becomes the truth check every quarter.
Getting this plumbed in is a two week job for most dealerships, and it is the highest return two weeks in the whole plan. Once the platforms know what a sales-qualified lead looks like in your district, they stop chasing the tyre kickers on your behalf.
What to do the day it breaks
Recovery is not gradual in agriculture. It is a switch. Forty millimetres across a district changes the mood inside a week and the order book inside a month, and the dealers who win the next twelve months are the ones who had the campaigns built before the rain fell.
That is the real argument for not cutting to zero. It is not loyalty to the ad platforms. It is that rebuilding an account from nothing takes six to ten weeks of learning and testing, and by the time you are back to where you were, your competitor with the warm remarketing list and the seasoned campaigns has already taken the first forty enquiries.
Keep the lights on. Spend less, spend differently, and spend where you can trace it to an invoice. Then be ready to move the day the forecast changes.
- Hold brand search and Google Business Profile at full strength
- Build the remarketing pool with parts and service offers
- Fix the CRM tagging and the offline conversion import
- Write and stage the recovery campaigns, then pause them
- Photograph and list every unit of used stock properly
- Unpause the staged campaigns the same week, not next month
- Lift the new equipment budget before the district does
- Hit the last 18 months of enquiries with finance and delivery timing
- Expect cost per click to climb 30 to 60 percent as everyone returns
- Judge it on quotes raised, not on the enquiry count
Two questions before you go
Two decisions I have watched dealership owners get wrong in a dry year.
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1. It is July, grain receipts are down badly, and the owner tells you to take 60 percent out of a 10k monthly marketing budget. Where does it come from?
Cut the slow, unmeasurable spend and protect the lines that trace to an invoice. Killing brand search is the worst option on the list because it is your cheapest conversion source and a competitor can buy your name the week you stop defending it. The even cut feels fair and performs worst of all, because it starves the parts and service campaigns that are the only part of the business still generating cash in a drought.
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2. Your Meta Ads report shows 140 enquiries last month at 22 each. The sales manager says almost none of them were genuine buyers. What is the first move?
Fix what the platform is being told to chase before you touch the budget. Moving to Google Ads just repeats the same mistake in a more expensive auction, because the problem is the optimisation signal, not the channel. Adding budget to a campaign optimised for the wrong outcome buys more of exactly what the sales manager is already complaining about.
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