Why This AgTech Company Spends 70% of Marketing Budget on Events

The Front Lines

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Jessica Davies.

Head of Marketing · Aerobotics

Jessica is Aerobotics' General Manager for Agricultural Investors focusing on providing investor-growers and lenders intelligent tools for farmland diligence and management.

Guest

Jessica Davies

Head of Marketing

Company:

Aerobotics

Location:

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

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In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Jessica Davies, Head of Marketing at Aerobotics. Aerobotics operates in the highly specialized agritech space, using drones and smartphones to measure trees and fruit for the global fruit and nut industry. From her base in Cape Town, South Africa, Jessica leads marketing for a SaaS company that serves a finite, geographically distributed customer base across California, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and Latin America. Her unique background as an actuarial scientist turned marketing leader brings a data-driven approach to marketing in a niche B2B industry where personal relationships and industry events drive conversions.

Topics Discussed:

Marketing to a finite, niche B2B market with known customer counts
Balancing SaaS scalability with agricultural industry relationship requirements
Event-heavy marketing strategies for geographically distributed customers
Visual storytelling and authentic branding in agricultural technology
Building marketing teams for distributed sales organizations
Account-based marketing approaches for defined target audiences

Seven takeaways from this conversation.

Actionable for Agtech marketers

Embrace Market Constraints as Strategic Advantages
Aerobotics operates with a known, finite number of potential customers worldwide. Rather than seeing this as limiting, Jessica leverages this constraint by focusing entirely on identification, outreach, and value demonstration to specific target accounts. This approach eliminates wasted effort on broad-funnel tactics and allows for highly personalized marketing strategies.
Design Marketing Mix Around Industry Relationship Dynamics
Despite being a SaaS company, Aerobotics invests heavily in events because agriculture operates on personal relationships. Jessica's team aligns their calendar around regional fruit events and global trade fairs where their customers congregate. This shows how successful B2B marketers adapt their channel mix to match industry buying behaviors rather than forcing generic SaaS playbooks.
Use Visual Assets as Primary Selling Tools
At events, Aerobotics deliberately scales back information density and instead relies on high-quality visuals of the fruit their customers produce. Jessica's approach of "letting the imagery sell itself" with real fruit and trees at trade show stands creates authentic differentiation in an information-heavy industry environment.
Structure Teams Around Geographic Distribution Challenges
With a distributed sales team serving customers across multiple continents, Jessica's marketing team includes dedicated sales enablement focused on creating region-specific and crop-specific materials. This recognizes that even within the fruit industry, citrus growers have different needs than apple growers, requiring tailored marketing support.
Apply Digital Targeting to Traditional Industries
Jessica identifies farmers on LinkedIn where they're actively promoting their businesses, and uses Facebook and Instagram with region-specific targeting since growing areas have distinct crop profiles. This demonstrates how sophisticated digital targeting can work even in traditional industries when you understand where your audience shows up online.
Prioritize Conversion Over Top-of-Funnel in Finite Markets
For 2025, Aerobotics is shifting focus from pipeline generation to pipeline conversion, recognizing they've already identified and reached most of their addressable market. This strategic evolution from awareness to conversion optimization is crucial for B2B companies operating in defined markets.
Leverage Cross-Functional Background for Marketing Leadership
Jessica's actuarial science and banking strategy background brings analytical rigor to marketing measurement and business alignment. Her advice to align marketing objectives with CEO and sales goals reflects how non-traditional marketing backgrounds can strengthen strategic thinking and cross-functional collaboration.

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