Marketing snapshot - Hortlink 2016, winter

This Hort Innovation Avocado Fund marketing snapshot has been taken from Hort Innovation’s Hortlink 2016, winter edition.

Social media

The past months have been focused on extending the social media presence of avocados beyond the highly successful Perfect Match campaign, which was rolled out earlier this year.

Throughout winter the focus of social media is on changing consumers’ attitudes about using avocados in the colder months – a season where they may struggle to find ideas about how to use the product. This led to the development of key winter favourites recipes with avocado as the hero including Avocado, Potato and Parsnip Mash with Roasted Salmon, a healthy Avocado Eggs Benedict with Leg Ham and Wilted Spinach and Avocado Pasta Spaghetti.

Existing content was also repurposed including Ben’s Menu, Perfect Match, Chefs Love Avocados Café series and Mash Up, to extend the Australian Avocados online presence and keep avocados at the top of people’s minds.

Mexican Month was launched in May, to tap into Australian’s love of Mexican food and the growing popularity of the cuisine. The campaign was developed in line with the overall content strategy of creating more moments and occasions throughout the year to demonstrate the versatility of the product and inspire people to try something new.

The campaign centred on the avocado challenging other key Mexican ingredients in a wrestling-type match to create delicious dishes. Short animations were able to develop characters and reveal recipes in an interesting and entertaining way, with recipes developed including Avocado and Grilled Chicken Tacos, Avocado and Jalapeno Poppers, Avocado and Black Bean Quesadillas and an Avocado Nacho Salad.

The campaign reached over 550,000 people in May with more than 250,000 consumers engaging with the content. Overall, the video content series saw engagement rates hit 27 per cent – well above the benchmark of five per cent and demonstrating the value of creating entertaining social media content for the audience.

Social media content also focused on delivering great recipes, leveraging relevant events including World Health Day and sharing video content such as Ben’s Menu, a mini cooking series hosted by former MasterChef contestant Ben Milbourne. In April alone, the content reached over 300,000 and of those, over 130,000 people liked, commented or shared the content.

Media update

In the last few months media has continued to increase awareness of avocados and ensure it remains a staple of the weekly shop. This has been achieved through delivery of our content on TV with support from other digital channels.

Television campaign

The TV campaign has strengthened the emotional connection with avocados by creating buzz around the ‘avocado feeling’ – that delicious whole-body feeling that can only come from eating a delicious avocado. The advertisement also encourages people to access content via channels including the Australian Avocados website and Facebook page.

Due to industry advice and crop forecasting, media spend was strategically shifted from February 2016 to April 2016 in preparation for more product coming into the market. The campaign ran from April 10, 2016 for three weeks in order to avoid the clutter of advertising around the Easter period and was widely shown across a range of channels, appearing alongside 70 per cent of the top 10 highest-rating programs for our key audience of grocery buying females aged 25 to 49 years. These programs included Seven News, Home and Away, The Project and the My Kitchen Rules finale, which was the highest-rating program during the campaign period. As a direct result, the TV ad reached 40 per cent of our target audience nationally.

Online campaign

Following the success of the Perfect Match campaign on social media, the four-part video series was aired across the most relevant websites for our target audience of female grocery buyers for a total of nine weeks from May 1. This campaign reached 300,000 unique people across desktop, mobile and tablet devices, and current results have shown that the audience is enjoying the content, with people viewing more than 65 per cent of the Perfect Match videos – a strong indication that the content is resonating, particularly in a cluttered online world where concentration levels tend to dwindle.

What’s next for the media spend?

The 15-second television advertisement ran for another three weeks from July 17 across the Seven, Ten and SBS Food networks. To add another layer of exposure to the campaign, the advertisement will also be used as online pre-rolls which play before online videos on YouTube and other website videos. The combination of TV and online advertising will be seen by 45 per cent of our audience at least twice on TV and 900,000 people at least twice through online pre-rolls, widening the reach of our avocados message even further.

Website and e-newsletters update

The website and e-newsletters (EDMs) are another important part of the overall Australian Avocados digital program, with each channel working to deliver a consistent and coherent message to avocado consumers. Throughout the year key learnings have been gathered which will serve to sharpen the focus going forward.

Over the last few months we’ve been able to understand our audience’s online behaviour from ongoing, in-depth analysis of the current website. With 85 per cent of visitors to the website being new users and 53.4 per cent of users finding the website through search engines, our focus will be on driving repeat visits by intercepting people when they are searching for avocados. This will cement Australian Avocados as the number one authority for all their avocado needs.

When it comes to content, the recipe section has proven to be the most popular web page, making up 42.45 per cent of activity, followed by the Daily Spread news articles, How To section and Nutritional Information section. With this in mind, content developed on each website page will be tailored based on search activity and developing the technical side of the site to improve its search ranking on Google and other search engines. Creating relevant content that is easy to find will increase our audience’s time spent on the website and engaging with the Avocados Australia brand.

With a total of five consumer EDMs, two health professional EDMs and two food professional EDMs distributed to date reaching a total database of over 14,000 subscribers, the focus of these EDMs has been on testing the overall effectiveness of different content and distribution patterns and monitoring the performance of the EDMs as a result.