Case study
Building trust and starting conversations through an annual thought leadership campaign
Pan-European media coverage
Enhanced credibility & multiple conversations started by the report
Hundreds of relevant downloads on a small ad budget
Objective
Croda Agriculture combines chemistry and biological expertise to develop novel crop protection and seed enhancement products.
A company developing new innovations relies on the market’s trust that it can turn emerging technologies into products that are valuable and safe.
To help establish that trust, Croda needed to be a credible voice in the conversations shaping its industry.
Approach
Since 2022, Memetic has supported Croda Agriculture on an annual thought leadership campaign. Each positions Croda at the heart of a key industry topic, show it can be trusted in this emerging areas of agricultural innovation, and starts strategic conversations with potential customers and partners.
Each year a theme is identified that is both urgently important to the industry and sits close to Croda's own expertise and product range. Themes to date have included, Microplastics in seed treatments, Formulating Biologicals, Mitigating Abiotic stress, Regenerative Agriculture, and How AI is transforming Agricultural Innovation.
Interview-led for original insight
Each paper is built on conversations with six relevant experts, drawing out their insight and lived experience of the topic. Memetic supplements this with additional research and examples, and weaves it all into a rich, compelling narrative.
The result is original material that exists nowhere else, making it valuable to the industry and its media. It also gives each contributor a stake in the paper, motivating them to amplify it to their own audiences.
From content to campaign
Each paper forms the foundation of an integrated campaign, using a variety of tactics to ensure the insights reach a wide audience, multiple times, through multiple channels to maximise engagement.
Tactics include:
PR launch to agricultural media
Thought leadership blogs hosted on Croda's own site
Paid LinkedIn campaign
Ongoing organic social posts, using bespoke designed tiles with paper insights and interviewee quotes
Email campaign to existing customers and prospect database
Printed copies distributed at industry events
Results
Global specialist media coverage. Consistent coverage of our papers each year in titles around the world including Agribusiness Global, Seed Today, Seed World, Seed Quest, Gabot (Germany) and Biojournaal (Netherlands), as well on respected industry sites such as the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) and the IPM Institute.
750 downloads for under £500. A sub £500 LinkedIn ad campaign consistently yields strong downloads, click rates and new followers, with the Regenerative Agriculture paper alone receiving 750 downloads – less than £1 per lead.
Organic performance ahead of benchmark. Email open rates, social clickthroughs and organic downloads comfortably outperform sector averages every year.
Conversations started. Reputation enhanced. Anecdotes abound that papers are well received. A major global AgriTech business told Croda that “the whitepaper is circulating widely inside our organisation”, and that Croda was regarded as “THE thought leader in the industry” on this topic.
Four consecutive years of renewal. Croda has commissioned the programme every year since 2022 – a measure of the value it keeps delivering.
“Memetic really gets the topics and knows how to weave lots of complex ideas into a really engaging and insightful story. With such high quality and original reports, everything else naturally follows – the media coverage, the social and advertising effectiveness, and ultimately the right conversations with customers.”
— Marion Smorenburg, Corporate and Marketing Communications Manager, Croda Agriculture
Why it matters
Through engaging but responsible communications, Memetic is helping Croda Agriculture build trust in the innovations that will make farming more sustainable and resilient, from biological alternatives to conventional chemistry to crops better equipped to withstand a changing climate. By grounding every paper in genuine expert insight rather than hype, the programme gives the industry a credible, evidence-based voice on some of the most pressing questions in food production.
As the programme continues, it will keep opening up the conversations, and supporting the uptake of new technologies that the sector needs to feed a growing population while protecting the soils, ecosystems and climate that agriculture depends on.
