How to write agricultural case studies when the client won't let you use their name

Written by Michael Nadalin, CEO and Founder · 21 Oct 2026 · 6 min read

Why won't my agricultural clients let me name them?

Of all the case studies I've wanted to publish, the ones with the client's name on them are a small minority. That's normal in agriculture marketing, and once you know the reasons you stop taking it personally.

A machinery dealer in a regional town doesn't want the dealer two towns over reading exactly how many farm equipment leads he pulled out of Google Ads last spring. A grower selling direct doesn't want his neighbours knowing his margins. A manufacturer can't upset its dealer network by suggesting head office is running leads around them. And plenty of farming families are just private. They don't want their name on a marketing agency's website, full stop.

So stop chasing the logo. A case study without a name can still do its job, which is to make a rural buyer think 'that's my situation, and these people have fixed it before'. Plenty of the named ones I've read never manage that.

What makes an anonymous case study believable?

Detail. A generic case study with a name on it is weaker than a specific one without. 'A client increased leads by 300%' tells a farmer nothing and he knows it's fluff. 'A used header and tractor dealer in the Wimmera, selling mostly to mixed croppers running 2,000 to 5,000 hectares' tells him straight away whether this is someone like him.

I describe the client so precisely that the reader can picture the yard, without anyone being able to work out which yard it is. Region at the state or district level, product category, customer type, team size, and above all the problem they had before we started. That last one does most of the work.

The structure I use every time

I keep it tight. Most ag business owners read these on a phone between jobs, so I don't let one run past a few hundred words. Same skeleton every time, so we can turn one around in an afternoon once the client approves it.

Which numbers can I publish without giving the client away?

Ratios and ranges. Clients will nearly always approve them, and they're more useful to a reader than a raw dollar figure anyway. I'll write 'cost per lead sat between $45 and $90 across Meta Ads and Google Ads' or 'roughly one in three enquiries became a sales-qualified lead'. I won't write the client's actual revenue, and I'd push back if they offered it.

This is also where most ag case studies fall over. They stop at form fills. Five hundred leads means nothing if the sales team couldn't close any of them. We track every enquiry to the actual sale in the CRM, so I can show the whole path from click to delivered machine. Even anonymised, a funnel like the one below tells a dealer more than a page of adjectives.

How do I get the client to sign off quickly?

Ask for anonymised from day one, and put it in the agreement. If you wait until the results are in, people get nervous and it drags on for months. If it's already agreed, the sign off is a five minute email.

Then send them the draft and tell them exactly what you've kept out. I've had only a couple of clients knock one back once they could see their district, their pricing and their name weren't anywhere in it. Some come back later and offer to be named, which is a nice bonus, but I never plan around it.

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.