A recent Australian PR and influencer campaign has exceeded expectations reaching more than 4 million consumers, unearthing the power of the macadamia beauty story to reach female consumers and proving the appeal of our brand and product for influencer collaborations.
Created to increase awareness of Australian grown macadamias and drive purchase and consumption, the campaign shone the spotlight on macadamias as a premium nut choice focusing on key qualities of provenance, health and beauty benefits, and creativity.
As the domestic market for our product, Australia is well-established with consumers who are familiar with many of the fundamental elements of our brand story. This campaign aimed to deepen our relationship with Australian consumers by helping them to discover the unique and lesser known aspects of our product.
Traditional PR and influencer marketing prove a potent mix
The campaign achieved excellent media coverage via a carefully crafted and executed PR strategy. Blog posts, recipes and images formed a schedule of tailored pitches to key media outlets to promote Australian Macadamias’ purity, provenance, creative potential, therapeutic benefits, and ability to elevate dishes and occasions.
The activity exceeded all expectations, with 21 pieces of coverage achieved (175% of target) and reach of more than 3.2 million exceeding 200% of target. Stories and recipes appeared across a host of different online and print media, including The Land, Australian Good Food Guide, body + soul, and 9kitchen.
A tactical influencer marketing strategy was implemented in parallel with the PR campaign, designed to drive awareness and credibility through carefully curated partnerships and engaging social media content amplified across owned, earned and influencer channels.
Influencer marketing has become a highly valued element of many brand marketing strategies, particularly in the last two years. A survey conducted at the end of 2018, revealed 80% of marketers find influencer marketing effective, with 89% saying influencer marketing return on investment is as good or better than other marketing channels.
Australian Macadamias was an early adopter of this tactic, having successfully employed influencer marketing in our global consumer promotion for many years now. This experience has enabled us to refine our approach and execute highly successful campaigns locally and internationally.
For this campaign, we adopted a two-tier approach that resulted in more than 35 social media posts (450% of target) and reach of more than 850,000 which exceeded 300% of target.
The first tier saw us partner with vegan and food influencer Ellie Bullen of Elsa’s Wholesome Life. An Australian dietitian, nutritionist and best-selling cookbook author, Ellie blogs about all things health, travel and lifestyle, and creates delicious and wholesome recipes that she shares with her 689,000 Instagram followers.
We hosted Ellie on a macadamia farm famil in the Northern Rivers growing region, to fully immerse her in the growing and harvesting process. Ellie was extremely receptive to this experience and created a plethora of engaging content that she shared on Instagram generating strong interest and engagement among her fanbase. We were able to amplify this content across our own channels also.
Tier two of the influencer campaign saw a host of fresh social media content produced as a result of collaborations with a selection of food and nutritional influencers – The Brown Paper Bag, Alice in Healthyland, Nadia Felsch and Healthy Luxe – with a collective Instagram audience of over a quarter of a million. We gifted each of them a selection of macadamia products, which inspired the creation of numerous blog posts and social media content that introduced new audiences to creative macadamia recipes and applications. Ideas included vegan truffle cheese, macadamia and coconut curry, chai spice almond macadamia cookies and salted caramel macadamia cashew fudge.
Beauty messaging strikes a chord
While strong coverage was achieved across all our key messaging platforms, beauty benefits proved particularly popular, perhaps as this is a lesser known feature of macadamias. Journalists at many of the targeted media outlets were genuinely surprised and interested to learn about the role macadamias can play in daily beauty, making it a powerful media hook.
This signals how eager our Australian audience is for fresh insights about macadamias and their readiness to embrace new ideas and applications. Rescu and Girl.com.au ran stories on how macadamia oil can get your skin, nails and hair through the colder months, complete with a DIY body scrub recipe, while BEAUTYcrew hailed macadamia oil as ‘the skin care hero you’ve been looking for’.
Stage set for further success
Partnering with influencers who genuinely love and consume macadamias every day meant the content they created was authentic and resonated strongly with their audiences.
The campaign’s results and consumer feedback on social media demonstrates how well the content was received, however of equal importance was how positive the feedback from the influencers themselves was, with all expressing delight at being associated with our brand, and several voicing interest in future collaborations.
Future PR may see the net cast even wider, with potential to target more beauty editors and influencers in order to capitalise on the interest we’re currently seeing in this space.
It’s exciting to evolve the Australian Macadamias brand narrative for our local fans and connect them with even more of the benefits our product has to offer. We look forward to sharing details of future coverage as it happens.
