Content Marketing and Media

Avalanche is a New Zealand owned and operated company that was founded in 2001 by owners Stefan and Paul. Avalanche was originally established to supply coffee to cafes and restaurants, however over the years it became apparent the demand for a great tasting and affordable instant coffee which was easily accessible to the everyday consumer.    The full Avalanche range of products is now available in supermarkets across the country. In recent years, Avalanche expanded to Australia where it made the news for selling out stock ‘overnight’ in both Woolworths and Coles supermarkets. The huge success was thanks in part to a social media influencer that posted an image of Avalanches 99% Sugar free hot chocolate on her Instagram page. (Nadkarni, 2019)   https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/113980565/overnight-fame-for-kiwi-hot-chocolate-company-after-instagram-post   The Product   What is unique to Avalanche is that alongside their regular coffee and hot drink offering...

After consultation with the Avalanche sales team, the Marketing Objectives set for this campaign are:   1.       Increase Brand Awareness   2.       Increase Leads Generated 3.       Increase Customer Conversion   ‘If you develop your company's goals and objectives to meet these requirements, then your marketing plan will have a good chance for success’ (Woodruff)   To better flesh out these objectives the SMART acronym can be employed at this stage of the strategy.   The acronym SMART stands for  S pecific,  M easurable,  A ttainable,  R elevant and  T imely. The table below breaks down the three Marketing objectives and what Avalanche hopes to achieve.     Marketing Objectives   Increase Brand Awareness Increase New Lead Generation Increase Customer Conversion Specific Use a brand awareness campaign to increase followers on Instagram Use advertisi...

I t is important at this stage to identify exactly who the target market is in order to tailor content specific to the buyer and ultimately achieve the marketing objectives.    “A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across the organisation. As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business." (Kusinitz)   The Buyer Persona Matrix    T he following buyer persona matrix has been collated based off assumptions and second hand research of existing social media pages for both Avalanche and its competitors. It is only then that the buyer persona can be used to justify different content strategies on different social media platforms. Figure 2.  Image created by Author Connection between Buyer Persona and Product   As is evident in the above diagram the persona of Joanne would likely be interested in sugar free product...

The Buyers journey consists of three main stages, these include: 1.       Awareness 2.       Consideration 3.       Decision/ Purchase Awareness  At this stage the buyer persona has a problem in that while Joanne enjoys a Chai Latte from her local cafe, she often is time poor. Joanne also has the problem of needing a healthy alternative to the sugar filled brands already in the market place. The content goal at this point is to make Joanne aware of the Avalanche brand and more specifically the Sugar Free Chai product Avalanche has to offer. Consideration At the consideration stage it is important for Joanne to know that she can trust the brand and looks to see whether the brand has a good reputation as far as taste and quality is concerned.  At this stage Joanne is also wanting to know the nutritional information of the product and whether it really    f...

When developing the buyer persona, research is usually used to gather supporting evidence that reflects the attributes of the buyer persona  and to then determine if that persona is suitable for the product being offered.   First hand data can be obtained through Email profiling, like Mail Chimp and survey websites like Survey Monkey, this is sometimes referred to as ‘primary research’. This type of research can be very effective at pin pointing specific buyer persona attributes. The downside to this type of research is it can be timely and cost more, which may not be a viable option when a business has a small marketing budget. (thehartford.com) Second hand research can be done by looking at Google analytics and Facebook insights which is often referred to as ‘secondary research’.  For the purpose of this campaign, Instagram was used to source data by looking at high performing Social Media posts of Avalanches main competitors to determine why those posts were doing...

Curated Sources Example 1. When using Buzzsumo.com and entering the keywords ‘how to relax’ the following article comes up, which fits perfectly with the buyer personas values (Family orientated) and pain points (stress/ lack of time). The article fits in to the buyers journey at the  Awareness stage  in that it suggests a solution to Joanne’s problem of being short on time. Figure 5.  Screen Shot by author from: https://www.mabelandmoxie.com/Here's+How+To+Be+More+Efficient+At+Home+So+You+Can+Actually+Relax+With+Your+Kids Example 2. The second curated source used was the website ‘Flipboard’. On entering ‘Reduce Sugar’ as a key word,  the following article appeared. This piece of content would be of interest to our buyer persona as it explains why eating too much sugar is bad for your health. Health and wellbeing is one of the value attributes of the buyer persona.  An article such as this would be effective in the  Consideration stage  of the buye...

Chosen Platform – Facebook   Looking at our overall objectives, Facebook is the most obvious choice of platform to run a digital campaign.    The following table outlines content which is aimed at our buyer persona through her buyers journey, with the objective of ultimately selling more product for the company, therefore ensuring the campaign is in fact transactional.