The Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA-headquartered Global Seafood Alliance (GSA) has announced the preliminary results of its first consumer marketing campaign, “Healthy Fish, Healthy Planet, Healthy You!” Conducted in October to coincide with US National Seafood Month, the drive was designed to build consumer awareness of the Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) certification program and promote sales of BAP-certified seafood products.
Campaign tactics included an “Are You AquaCultured?” social media campaign, targeted influencer engagement, the creation of new consumer messaging and a consumer website, and national and regional consumer media outreach. Public relations efforts resulted in a significant increase in media mentions for BAP, with top stories including a live interview on Good Day Seattle, multiple TV broadcast segments with dietitian Mia Syn, and articles in The Washington Post and Food Tank, among others.
Eight retail and foodservice partners signed on for GSA’s consumer campaign, including Cub Foods, Giant Eagle, Iberostar Hotels, Hannaford, Lidl, Publix, Secret Island Salmon and WinCo Foods. They participated by creating their own content about BAP, posting and sharing the content on social media, promoting BAP in stores and on their websites, and working with campaign influencers who created recipes and posted them on Instagram using BAP seafood purchased from campaign partners. The “Are You AquaCultured?” social media campaign saw enhanced consumer engagement with many of the top posts including approachable seafood recipes.
Using these tactics, GSA saw a 160% increase in media mentions to 7.3 billion for BAP in 2022 compared to the same time period in 2021. The social media campaign had a reach of 1 million, with more than 170,000 engagements. The influencer posts alone had nearly 340,000 impressions.
