Marketing snapshot - Hortlink 2017, edition 3

This Hort Innovation Avocado Fund marketing snapshot has been taken from Hort Innovation’s Hortlink 2017, edition 3.

Hort Innovation invests the avocado marketing levy into a range of activities to drive awareness and consumption, under the Hort Innovation Avocado Fund.

Online activation has been the name of the game for the most recent activity in the marketing program. This activity kicked off in March with a digital campaign, which saw the deployment of television commercials pushed through online channels, resulting in a huge reach and solid amplification via social sharing.

In a more targeted approach, the new mobile avocado ads were launched and led consumers to the ‘Love Avocado’ branding if they were searching similar content – reminding them to keep avocados top of mind when grocery shopping.

Digital activity

Australian Avocados reached a massive audience of over 1.117 million people during its recent digital video campaign. The 13-week digital video campaign saw the industry’s 30-second TV commercials deployed across various websites, such as news.com.au, as well as catch-up TV services including tenplay.com.au.

Digital activity also included a partnership with popular online media site Buzzfeed, which ran for two months and finished in June. As reported in the last edition of Hortlink, this activity was targeted to female grocery buyers aged 25 to 54, and involved two avocado-themed articles posted to educate and inspire readers:

• The ultimate how-to guide for avocado lovers, providing a fun, illustrated guide to choosing, using and storing the fruit.
• 18 delicious ways to use avocado… that don’t involve smashing it on toast, which featured a range of innovative and delicious sweet and savoury recipes, such as avocado brownies with avocado ice-cream, and warm Moroccan avocado and vegetable salad.

Combined, these articles received a total of 90,874 views. Proving just how engaging and the content was, over 5500 of these views were essentially free, thanks to people being inspired to share the content on their own social media accounts.

In addition, there was an animated reel based on the ultimate how-to guide article that was shared on the Buzzfeed Australia Facebook Page. This video was viewed by nearly 100,000 people, and resulted in 14,623 clicks to the Australian Avocados consumer website.

In total, the industry partnership with Buzzfeed resulted in over 168,000 views to Australian Avocado content.

Social media 

The ‘always on’ approach to Australian Avocados social media has continued across both the consumer-facing Facebook page (www.facebook.com/AustralianAvocados) and Instagram account (@AustralianAvocados) with fans continuing to be engaged with and inspired by avocado content. Since May, Australian Avocados content on Facebook has reached over one million people per month.

Mobile

From mid-March to mid-June this year, mobile phone ads proved a successful component of the industry’s marketing activity. This involved the placement of ‘Love Avocado’ ads on mobile devices, targeted to people who were viewing or searching for avocado-specific and avocado-related content online (for example, ‘healthy lunch ideas’) who were also in the industry’s current target market – main grocery buyers, aged between 25 and 49 – with a proven interest in food, health, lifestyle and similar topics. Over one million people were reached over the campaign.

MyFoodBook

Avocado fans are loving the avocado content on MyFoodBook (www.myfoodbook.com.au), a recipe and cookbook community that includes more than 200,000 subscribers, and promotes recipes to more than 2.8 million people each month. Australian Avocados activity has involved a number of recipes being included on the website, with the Avocado, Garlic and Cheese Pull-Apart Bread recipe performing particularly well.

The Betoota Advocate

Australian Avocados has worked with popular satirical news website The Betoota Advocate (www.betootaadvocate.com) to publish two articles about avocados. The partnership was used to leverage the publication’s voice and social influence for avocados, and to enter recent consumer driven conversations around avocado affordability and bruising.

The first Australian Avocados article, published in early July, was a timely and witty response to the recent rhetoric around avocados and housing affordability. You can view the article, ‘First Home Buyer Hospitalised With Avocado Deficiency’, here.  The second article was to address one of the key purchase barriers of avocados identified by consumer research: nervousness about buying an avocado that is bruised or otherwise blemished inside. The goal was to educate consumers about correctly handling avocado, in a way that acknowledged the concerns but combatted the negativity. The resulting article, published in late July, was titled ‘Husband Blames Farmers For Bruised Avocados At The Bottom Of His 20kg Grocery Run’, and can be viewed here.

The Betoota Advocate campaign was a great success, with more than 1.8 million views of the avocado articles. Just over one million of these views were on The Betoota Advocate’s Facebook page, with 12,500 people clicking through to read the full articles on the publication’s website.

Total views of the articles on the website were close to 33,900, with the average time spent on the website being 1 minute and 15 seconds. This time shows that the people who went to the webpage took the time to read the articles in their entirety.