Marketing snapshot - September 2018

Hort Innovation’s investment of the nursery marketing levy, through the Hort Innovation Nursery Fund, is all about the 202020 Vision – the movement to increase urban green space by 20 per cent by the year 2020. Here's a look at some of the most recent activity…

Plant Life Balance app

The Plant Life Balance (PLB) campaign is about to celebrate one year in the market since launching with the new app late last year. The app downloads continue grow week on week with close to 51,000 downloads counted to date.

Watch a quick video on the app here, and find it in the app store on your smartphone (it’s available for both Android and iOS). You can also see the consumer-facing Plant Life Balance website here.

Inspirational plant looks

Eleven stylised plant looks were launched to inspire the target audience and to maintain interest and engagement with the Plant Life Balance app and website. The 11 unique looks were developed in partnership with The Planthunter and are a combination of indoor and outdoor spaces (backyard, balcony, courtyard and inside). Each unique look provides inspiration on how to create beautiful plant styles in your home and with over 130 plants to choose from.

Campaign reach

Since launch, the national PR and media campaign leveraged the science, the new looks and the app, as well as ambassadors Jamie Durie, Georgina Reid and Chantelle Ellem (Fatmumslim) across major metro, broadcast, lifestyle, health/wellbeing, technology and homes/gardening, marketing and industry titles. The campaign saw media partnerships with Domain, Concrete Playground and Pedestrian TV. The program achieved 700+ media clips with over 60+ million in reach. The program grew the PLB Instagram page to over 10,000 followers whilst reactivating the Facebook page, growing the community to over 32,000.

Independent retail nursery support

There has been great in-store take up from independent nurseries which was helped in large part by the retail roadshow tour held across the country. Free packs were developed for in-store promotion, with branded bunting, plant tags, shelf wobblers, posters, staff badges and ‘cheat sheets’ for sales staff. These are free to any retail nursery who wants to get behind the campaign. To date, over 100 accredited independent retail nurseries and over 160 accredited individuals from these stores have snapped up the kits, to become Plant Life Balance accredited.

How-to guides

The program also developed three how-to guides to further support and help amplify the campaign in-store. The guides included How to Create a Live App Experience, How to Run a Social Media Competition and How to Use Social Media Channels to Increase Sales. These were distributed to all nurseries on the campaign database. Contact hello@202020vision.com.au for more information, as well as info on the latest digital campaign assets.

Bunnings

A successful partnership was negotiated with Bunnings, enabling the campaign to push PLB messaging through the largest retail nursery network in Australia. To date, Bunnings have downloaded the PLB app onto 9000 in-store iPad devices, to be used to communicate with customers to help drive sales of green life. To activate this partnership, the PLB team was invited to attend and accredit Bunnings staff in July and August at Bunnings Expos nationally in Western Australia, Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales. The Bunnings Expo offered four key opportunities: to explain the core campaign messages to Bunnings staff; to do live demonstrations of the app; to provide a live tutorial on the simple science behind the app; and to provide Plant Life Balance accreditation. To date, 800 Bunnings Greenlife staff and 200 Bunnings stores have become PBL Accredited.

Industry events

The PLB team worked closely with the state nursery and garden industries to engage with industry and amplify the PLB campaign through event activations at the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show, The West Australian Flower and Garden Show (Perth), Green Expo (Gold Coast) and the Royal Adelaide Show.