Marketing spotlight 2021/22

Getting more Australians to ‘add a dash of passionfruit’

Hort Innovation is responsible for investing the passionfruit 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 Passionfruit marketing campaign was designed to drive awareness and inspire consumers while they plan their grocery shop. This encouraged planned purchase, primarily amongst Australians aged 35-55, reaching the ‘independent singles’ target audience. Compelling content was created, aiming to cut through cluttered social feeds via an ‘always-on’ strategy for the duration of the campaign.

Content creation and recipe development

To create increased awareness and consideration for Australian passionfruit, food photographer Bonnie Coumbe was commissioned to create and capture recipes designed to excite and inspire consumers to enjoy Australian passionfruit. Three new passionfruit recipes were created to lean into the ‘drinks and dessert’ occasion, including passionfruit and white chocolate chip cookies, passionfruit mule (alcoholic and non-alcoholic options), and a no-bake passionfruit cheesecake. These recipes were accompanied by high-quality imagery to highlight how delicious passionfruit can be.

Social media

The ‘always-on’ social media campaign was designed to increase awareness and consideration of Australian passionfruit and encourage purchase amongst target audiences on Facebook and Instagram, with an increase in advertising spend during seasonal peaks to support supply.

Brand partnership

Australian Passionfruit benefited from a first-time partnership with News Corp, with home page takeovers, simple usage applications and recipes on Taste.com.au, Australia’s top food website.

The partnership has resulted in 212, 0000 impressions across the site and 2,888 pageviews. The partnership consisted of one Taste TV package with pre-roll, a social video and surrounding media and recipe recommendations.

The high engagement rate is due to passionfruit being a trend and favourite taste profile with Taste audiences. The recipe has received the highest amount of views on Taste TV and engagement rate as a social video, with a 1.09 per cent click-through rate.

The campaign was designed to educate audiences about Australian passionfruit by sharing facts about the fruit, highlighting the health benefits, selection and storage tips and inspiring audiences by displaying delicious ways to eat the fruit year-round.

There were 70 posts shared on the Australian Passionfruit social media channels during the campaign. The posts with the highest engagement rates were the ‘tropical breakfast popsicles’ on Instagram, which achieved 1,514 engagements and an engagement rate of 16 per cent and the ‘passionfruit ripple cheesecake’ on Facebook which achieved 11,440 engagements and an engagement rate of 10 per cent.

One video post was shared to showcase how passionfruit could be used. It achieved 3,968 engagements (including video views), 38,544 impressions and a reach of 32,406.

The social media campaign achieved:

• More than 3.4 million impressions across Facebook and Instagram (higher than the KPI of 3.1 million impressions)
• More than 95,000 engagements across Facebook and Instagram, surpassing the KPI of 90,000 engagements
• Average engagement rate on Facebook of five per cent and 10 per cent on Instagram (surpassing KPI of > four per cent for Facebook and >10 per cent for Instagram)

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.