Marketing snapshot - 2020/21

Hort Innovation is responsible for investing the lychee marketing levy into a range of activities to drive awareness and consumption of the fruit, under the Hort Innovation Lychee Fund. Read on for a snapshot of activities and results from the 2020/21 marketing program.

During 2020/21, Australian consumers were encouraged to ‘add some pop to your summer celebrations’ through purchasing and enjoying Australian lychees.

Recipe development

To inspire consumers with new and exciting ways to consume Australian lychees, content creator Marie Duong (@eatswithmarie) was engaged to create six new recipes with accompanying videos and beautiful imagery for use across the lychee marketing campaign. This content was shared across the Australian Lychees social media accounts, as well as Marie’s own Instagram account resulting in an additional 98,456 opportunities for Aussies to see the lychee message. The recipes were also leveraged through the public relations media outreach and digital mobile media campaign.

Public relations

To inspire lychee purchase, new and existing content (such as recipes and images) were leveraged to secure media coverage in top-tier media titles. 23 pieces of coverage across traditional and social media resulted in over 5.8 million opportunities for Aussies to be inspired to eat more lychees.

Social media

Social media activity is a great tool to reach consumers in a cost-efficient way. The Aussie Lychee Facebook page (www.facebook.com/aussielychees) and Instagram (@aussielychees) featured curated content (publisher credited) that aimed to inspire the target audience to put lychees on their shopping lists.

Over 2.9 million impressions (opportunities to see the content) were achieved across Facebook and Instagram combined during the campaign, ultimately increasing top of mind awareness and consideration of Australian Lychee during season.

Digital mobile media

The objective of digital mobile media activity was to reach new consumers, by prompting consumers to pick up Australian lychees on their shopping trip. This advertising format is able to target specific shoppers at specific stores, which translates to greater spend effectiveness.

Media advertisements were rolled out with Shopfully, a mobile catalogue application, which has over 1.9 million active monthly users. With traditional sampling not an option due to COVID-19 restrictions, digital mobile media was an effective way to reach shoppers.

Shopfully users received information about Australian lychee through proximity notifications when a shopper is near a store, banners when they are on the Shopfully app and pop-ups that appear when viewing catalogues in the app.

The campaign was live from mid-January 2021 until the end of February 2021, targeting shoppers at Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, Harris Farm and IGA.

Digital mobile media activity resulted in over 173,000 opportunities to see the lychee-inspired content and the click-through rate across all three advertisements remained in line with or greater than industry benchmarks.

There was a strong average walk-through rate into store of 38.7 per cent for the campaign. The walk-through rate is a measurement of how many people entered a retailer once receiving a branded communication from Australian lychees – demonstrating that the mobile advertisements are driving people to store.