When we launched our portal in the Fall of 2021, we gave ourselves a year to see if our mission was in line with producer interests and sentiments. We were greatly encouraged with the progress we were making throughout the next year. In 2022 we attracted more than 20,000 visitors, spending 1500 hours on the site, 4.5 minutes per visit; towards the end of the year site visits had ramped up to about 200/day. At that juncture, we reached the conclusion that the first phase of our mission had been “validated”, and that we would proceed with the next.
With the release of our revamped portal towards the end of January 2023, we gave more emphasis to why overseas buyers should procure directly from Prairie sources and get the grains they buy delivered to their own facilities in containers. We also dedicated a tab on the role our platform would play in assisting buyers: find the crop varieties they need, consolidate from multiple sources to meet their volume requirements, and look after their servicing/logistics arrangements for container-deliveries to be made to their doorsteps with crop-quality intact.
A couple weeks later we launched a Facebook-campaign to reach buyers across Asia Pacific, which proved very effective in penetrating Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. In the last 30 days, we attracted more than 20,000 visitors – as many visitors as we had attracted locally from the Prairies in all of 2022. Our average daily traffic is now up to 800 visitors, with an interim peak at above 1000, on average spending 3-4 minutes on the site, with 20% return rate – indications of fairly serious interest on the part of site-visitors, not just casual web-surfing.
We are grateful to our followers from Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam for showing interest in the Prairies. We are now fine-tuning our ad-campaign to entice you not only to visit but also sign-up, so that we can engage with as many of you as possible through e-mail or online-chats. These are just early signs of awareness and interest in the Prairies but in the coming weeks, our goal is to deepen this engagement, giving us a chance to understand your needs and tell you more about how you can procure the grains you need from our region.
In the hope of growing our following even further, this weekend we are extending our Facebook campaign to Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In the coming weeks we will expand our reach to China through WeChat, Japan through Line, and South Korea through Naver.
Once again, we thank our early followers from Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and hope that our reach will expand in the coming weeks, and that those of you who have already been on our website will sign-up or send us an e-mail so that we can deepen our engagement to better understand your needs and answer your questions.
Stay tuned – we will be updating you on our progress through weekly blogs!