Marketing Plan For Poultry Farming (Broiler Coccidiosis Vaccine Case Study)

A relentless and almost obsessive focus on your customer’s success is the best strategic decision you can make. Here’s how I learned this lesson in real life when I was in charge of marketing a brand of coccidiosis vaccines for broiler chickens.

In the late 1990s, a pharmaceutical company was trying to get its line of poultry coccidiosis vaccines up and running in the USA. Integrators had already adopted the breeder version, but the broiler vaccine was a much harder sell. Many companies had tried it in the past, and most of them abandoned it after observing undesirable side effects, poor flock performance, or both.

On top of that, the 1980s were the golden age of in-feed anticoccidial drugs, and those products still worked extremely well back then. Basically, nobody was clamoring for a broiler coccidiosis vaccine, and it felt like it would be impossible to change the situation.

Basically, nobody was clamoring for a broiler coccidiosis vaccine, and it felt like it would be impossible to change the situation.

The only glimmer of hope came from Batesville, Arkansas, a small town in the southwest of the USA. There, a daring poultry nutritionist, a forward-looking researcher, and a pragmatic live production manager for a local poultry integrator were breaking new ground.

Working together, they discovered that using the broiler coccidiosis vaccine for two or three consecutive flock cycles in the same barns restored sensitivity to the anticoccidial drugs that were losing their punch against the protozoal parasites that cause coccidiosis in chickens. They devised a prevention protocol that ensured good performance year-round by rotating between anticoccidial drugs and vaccination.

Focusing on Small Details for Positive Customer Experience (Broiler Coccidiosis Vaccine Case)

I joined the pharmaceutical company in early 1999. I started working on a strategy to make that success story better known while at the same time learning as much as possible about the conditions that created the success and to try and make it repeatable in other places. Over a period of twelve years, my colleagues and I focused on every aspect of broiler production, vaccine application, disease control, chick rearing, and everything else that could have an impact on the performance of vaccinated flocks.

We hired a team of salespeople with practical experience in broiler production and a team of veterinarians with experience in poultry health. We ran controlled studies in collaboration with at least four universities, the USDA’s Research Service (ARS), and two contract research organizations. We collaborated with nutritionists who made recommendations to adjust the diets of vaccinated broilers. All of this and much more we did with a single goal: make sure every customer was as successful with their coccidiosis vaccination program as that first company in Batesville was.

A Marketing Campaign Centered on Target Market for Poultry Business

In addition to the efforts on the technical side of the equation, we deployed an aggressive marketing campaign that centered on gathering and spreading customer success stories. Starting with the three pioneers (the researcher, the nutritionist, and the production manager), we created a series of stories that detailed every aspect of the work needed to achieve success with coccidiosis vaccination. That initial success story inspired other integrators to give a second look at the idea of vaccinating broilers. By the early 2000s, it was clear that anticoccidial resistance was gradually eroding the efficacy of anticoccidial drugs, and a larger number of integrators decided to try vaccination to restore sensitivity and performance to their flocks.

Just as we used every technical tool available to ensure a successful vaccine outcome, we also used every marketing tool available at the time to spread the news and educate our target audience on the success that other companies were enjoying with the vaccination/anticoccidial drug rotation strategy. They included live events featuring customer testimonials as the main attraction, written articles distributed as press releases to the industry publication, oral and poster presentations at scientific conferences, newsletters (e-mail and printed), a website dedicated to the topic of poultry intestinal health (the first one ever), and advertising in several industry publications.

We used every marketing tool available at the time to spread the news and educate our target audience on the success that other companies were enjoying with the vaccination/anticoccidial drug rotation strategy.

This concerted campaign started in 1999 and lasted for more than a decade. In that same period, the digital revolution was gaining speed, and we adapted to take advantage of the new tools that were being developed. When we started, social media still didn’t exist. Still, we found many other ways to connect with our target audience to reinforce the message and bring new techniques, recommendations, and testimonials.

Success Breeds Success

More than 24 years have passed since my colleagues, and I started this incredible adventure of making broiler vaccination against coccidiosis an accepted practice. This story may sound exaggerated for those who started working in the poultry industry after the practice became common. However, for the old-timers who are still active, it may bring back memories of how difficult it was to convince every veterinarian, nutritionist, and production manager that vaccinating broilers against coccidiosis made sense and could be a good thing for them.

For me, this story encapsulates the wisdom that success breeds success. If it were not for the three pioneers and the small integrator from Batesville, it is likely that coccidiosis vaccines for broilers would not exist anymore. But because they were successful and willing to share their success recipe with the industry, nowadays, more than five billion broilers are vaccinated annually in the USA alone.

Now, it’s your turn to make customer success the center of your marketing strategy. Not sure how to start? Let’s talk.

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