Marketing spotlight 2021/22

Inspiring consumers to love lychees

Hort Innovation is responsible for investing the lychee marketing levy into a range of activities to drive awareness and consideration. Here’s a quick look at some of the activities and achievements in 2021/22.

In 2021/22, the Australian Lychees marketing campaign was designed to drive awareness and inspire consumers while they were planning their grocery shop while lychees were in season. The campaign encouraged planned purchases, primarily amongst Australians aged 35-55, targeting ‘independent singles’. This was achieved by creating compelling content designed to cut through cluttered social media feeds via an “always-on” approach strategy for the campaign’s duration.

Content creation and recipe development

To create awareness of the lychee season, food photographer Bonnie Coumbe was commissioned to create and capture recipes designed to excite and inspire consumers. All content featured a ‘summer entertaining’ occasion to highlight a key eating occasion and encourage consumption. Simple and exciting ways to try Australian lychees while the fruit was in season included:

• Two new lychee recipes, accompanied by quality imagery, “lychee and pork skewers” and “lychee and mint mojito.”
• A stop motion video driving awareness of the lychee season, titled “Unwrap an Australian lychee”.

Social media

The “always-on” social media campaign was designed to increase awareness and consideration of Australian lychees and encourage purchase amongst the target audience on Facebook and Instagram from November until February, coinciding with the peak lychee season.

Educating consumers about lychees was prioritised, with content featuring facts about the fruit, selection, storage tips and ways to enjoy lychees while in season. There were 34 posts shared on the Australian Lychees social channels during the campaign. The post with the highest engagement rate on Instagram featured a lychee martini, which achieved 1,507 engagements and an engagement rate of 20 per cent. On Facebook, the post with the highest engagement rate was a grower post which achieved 2,106 engagements and an engagement rate of 7 per cent.

Four of the posts during the campaign were videos, with the most popular being the newly created “how to unwrap a lychee” video, which achieved 6,294 engagements (including views), 103,436 impressions and reached 79,616 people.

The social media campaign achieved:

• More than 1.2 million impressions (1,264,408) across Facebook and Instagram (higher than the KPI of 980,000 impressions)
• More than 15,000 engagements across Facebook and Instagram (15,343), doubling the KPI of 7,000 engagements
• Average engagement rate on Facebook of 4 per cent and 9 per cent on Instagram (achieved KPI of >4 per cent for Facebook and >5 per cent for Instagram)

Brand partnership

Australian Lychees benefited from a first-time partnership with News Corp, with home page takeovers, simple usage applications and recipes on Taste.com.au, Australia’s #1 food website. The brand partnership resulted in 107, 100 impressions across the site and 4,974 pageviews.

In 2021/22 the Hort Innovation Marketing function underwent a significant shift in their approach to investing marketing levies. You can read more about this in the 2021/22 Hort Innovation Company Annual Report at  www.horticulture.com.au/annual-report-portal.