Gift Fruit Shippers Review Seasonal Strategies

On Sept. 30, the Gift Fruit Shippers Advisory Council (GFSAC) held a planning meeting to review and approve marketing activities for the 2025–26 gift fruit shipping season.

LAST SEASON

Before sharing the recommended strategies for the coming season, Florida Department of Citrus (FDOC) Global Marketing Director Katelynn Long gave a presentation on the previous year’s important milestones and successes.

“Last year, we focused on increasing awareness of gifting Florida citrus and driving our target audience to a revised, user-friendly landing page,” said Long. “These tactics were intended to drive sales from November to February and resulted in over 16,000 clicks to PickFLA.com.”

Last year’s campaign included organic and paid social media content, promotions in collaboration with influencers over the holidays, a satellite media tour segment to encourage last-minute holiday purchases and native article placements with Flamingo Magazine and NewEngland.com. Overall, the program resulted in 244 million impressions and 33,000 engagements.

THIS SEASON

From these successes, the FDOC marketing team recommended ways to expand on that success for fiscal year 2025–26. Three core recommendations included:

• Campaign Timing: Focus on an earlier launch timeframe to ensure that holiday messaging is the focal point of the campaign.

• Social Media: Expand the promotion to an additional social media platform, the existing Pinterest page, and allocate more marketing dollars toward paid social media to expand reach and encourage website traffic.

• Website Traffic: Now that a more user-friendly landing page has been established, focus efforts more on quality traffic to the website through targeted promotions like paid search that results in clickthrough activity and engagements versus impressions.

These revised tactics are all with the end goal of driving sales for Florida citrus gifts, positioning them as a thoughtful, healthy, delicious and convenient.

The GFSAC unanimously approved the FDOC’s recommendations for fiscal year 2025–26.

Source: FDOC