Using a social media influencer can be incredibly rewarding for a specialty food maker; it can build brand awareness, brand loyalty, and even introduce your product to an entirely new audience. We asked specialty food makers for their tips on how to ensure the partnership is successful.
The Panel:
• Tarah Boyleston, marketing director, Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit
• Gracie Aaronson, Spool Marketing on behalf of Rumi Spice
• Sameer Malhotra, CEO and co-founder, Cafe Spice
• Vanessa Chang, marketing director, Cowgirl Creamery
• Caroline Cotto, co-founder and chief operating officer, Renewal Mill
• Devinne Zadravec, The James Collective, on behalf of Enzo Olive Oil
• Kelly Newsome, marketing manager, This is Fine Cheese
• Hannah Nielsen, marketing project manager, The Date Lady
• Suan Grant, owner, Suan Foods
Q: What are some best practices for engaging with social media influencers?
Tarah Boyleston, marketing director, Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit
The most important practice for engaging effective brand influencers is to put authenticity first. Do your research on the influencer. When you know their values and what their followers value, you can better create an authentic relationship that promotes your brand in a way that will connect with the influencer’s audience. At Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit, we always ask ourselves "How can we become an asset for the influencer?" and "How can we take the collaboration one step further to really engage our audiences?"
We often have brand influencers ask to visit our eatery in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. Rather than providing them simply with a great meal of hot and ready, handmade biscuits, we sometimes offer to ship them our packaged goods upon their arrival home if they enjoyed their visit. Providing an extra value beyond the initial ask helps earn brand loyalty and offers an extra piece of content for the influencer to share with their following. With this additional perk, we gain may not only inclusion in their Charleston Travel Guide, for instance, but we might also be featured in a gifting special about how to bring a taste of Charleston home with you!
Ultimately, brand partnerships start with great communication. The more you get to know what the influencer or brand partner’s goals are, the better the outcome will be for both parties.
Gracie Aaronson, Spool Marketing, on behalf of Rumi Spice
When working with social media influencers, our top priority is authenticity and it’s extremely important to ensure they are authentic to both their own brand and to ours. While metrics, demographics, archetypes, and location are all priority factors for vetting potential partners, we’ve found that authenticity is what truly helps a campaign succeed. In our previous partnerships with influencers, we’ve evaluated this in the content an influencer posts and their tone, as well as the brands they promote. Before engaging, we ask: Does the influencers’ content seem genuine and resonate with their followers? What does the influencer care about and what do they share with their followers? What brands does the influencer work with and is there a true connection with these brands?
At Rumi Spice, mission and purpose are at the core of everything we do. From day one, we've been committed to economically empowering Afghan farmers and supporting the Afghan women who help with our harvesting and processing through direct wages. When searching for influencer partners, we want individuals who genuinely connect with this purpose and can be credible to the work we do in using spice as a force for good. We look for influencers who care about our mission as much as our products. By placing authenticity at the forefront of these efforts, we’ve found our campaigns to be extremely successful.
Sameer Malhotra, CEO and co-founder, Cafe Spice
When vetting and working with social media influencers, Cafe Spice first and foremost looks for a natural fit. This means taking a deep dive into its audience to see if there is a strong crossover with our target customer demographics. Next, it is important to ensure that the influencer you are interested in partnering with is a genuine fan of your products. Cafe Spice's mission is to provide easy access to authentic, high-quality global cuisine, so making sure our partners showcase their authentic love for our meals is the highest priority. Once a partnership has been secured, we provide influencers with key message points and photography guidelines so that the posts showcase our meals in a way that is consistent with our other marketing messages. It is also a good idea to offer a giveaway for their followers to help engage their audience even further. Lastly, make sure to use the content they create across various platforms like all of your social media channels, website, and blog to get the most bang for your buck.
Vanessa Chang, marketing director, Cowgirl Creamery
Cowgirl Creamery has been fortunate in that we have brand influencers reaching out to us because they’re already fans of our story and cheese. And while we’d love to work with them all, as a small (and mighty) team we’ve learned to prioritize who we work with and how we work with them, during the past two years especially.
What’s worked for us are three things. First, being clear on expectations. Not just deliverables and timelines, but who we are and what we’re trying to share with an audience. Utilize these amazing content creators and connecting with their audience needs to be authentic to all parties involved and relevant to any campaigns. Some influencers intuitively "get us" more than others. Others really need a solid brief as a roadmap.
Second, we work with influencers who have an engaged audience. The scope of audience can always be impressive, but we’re looking for people who’ve provided real value for their audiences. Do they trust them? Do they look to them? Do they interact and click through?
Third, we work with influencers who aren’t always in our lane. We love working with cheese influencers, but also know that there are so many cheese lovers in other audiences and interest groups. So we love finding influencers who speak to cheese lovers as wine authorities, travel authorities, etc.
Caroline Cotto, co-founder and chief operating officer, Renewal Mill
Given that we're still small and scrappy, Renewal Mill has mostly engaged with influencers on a product exchange level where we offer free product in exchange for posts. We get a lot of inbound requests from micro-influencers, so we are fairly strict on who we partner with. First and foremost, we're looking for brand alignment; for example, our products are vegan and gluten-free, so we prioritize influencers that target those two main audiences. Similarly, many of our users are cooking for their families, so we like partnering with influencers who create content that shows them baking with their kids or enjoying our products with their family. Lastly, we like to have clear guidelines on the scope of these partnerships and a clear way to measure the impact. We're currently partnering with some influencers on a recipe campaign where we provided them all of the recipe ingredients they asked for free of charge and in exchange they have to create an in-feed post for Instagram, a recipe that can be shared on a blog post, and a Twitter post. Regarding measurement, we're actually working with a company called Shoutouts that incentivizes influencers to post by tying payment to performance. So micro-influencers can get a free Renewal Mill product through the app, and then they are paid incrementally at a rate commensurate with the number of likes they get. That way, we're only paying for content that performs well.
Devinne Zadravec, The James Collective, on behalf of Enzo Olive Oil
For growing brands, influencer marketing is an incredibly valuable outlet that can require very little upfront investment. Through our work with clients such as Enzo Olive Oil, for example, we've created an influencer strategy centered around gifting product to select influencers to drive brand awareness and real-life sampling. Trying the product first-hand is an essential part of building trust and loyalty within a brand's audience—when influencers have an opportunity to try Enzo olive oil and fall in love with the taste and quality, it's a win-win because any recommendations or content they share with their audience comes from a very genuine place. Of course, with gifting it is a standard best practice to operate with the understanding that product coverage is appreciated but not guaranteed—this also ensures that any content shared is truly because the influencer loved it and would use it in their own home.
Kelly Newsome, marketing manager, This is Fine Cheese
The first thing that we do is define our target audience and look for influencers that have sizable, engaged followings that align with our brand goals. Next, we look at the influencer’s content—is it high quality, what’s the tone, and what’s the perspective that’s being communicated? Lastly, we review not just the size of the audience and quality of engagement, but also what platforms that influencer is using. Depending on our objectives, we might choose to work with an influencer that is active on one or multiple platforms. Most importantly, we ask ourselves, ‘Will this influencer authentically promote our brand/product and does this brand/product make sense for the influencer’s audience?’ If the answer is no, then no matter how large the audience, we won’t pursue collaboration. Conversely, we will engage with micro-influencers with smaller, but highly engaged audiences that meet our strategic objectives and will authentically promote our brands and products.
Hannah Nielsen, marketing project manager, The Date Lady
When engaging effective brand influencers, we look for people who fit with our values as a brand and share the same passion for delicious food and healthy eating. It’s definitely a plus when they share our passion for dates! We find that it’s important to examine the target audience when considering a partnership with an influencer; are their followers’ potential customers? Would they have interest in our products? When we find an influencer that we feel would make a good fit, we typically like to send them a sample of our products. It’s important to us that the brand influencer is familiar with and enjoys Date Lady products. Followers and customers can sense inauthenticity if an influencer is promoting an item they don’t actually enjoy. Most importantly, we value influencers who value their audience and for that reason are considered a trusted adviser. They put out content that is valuable and keep their followers engaged, making our spend more likely to provide a good return on investment.
Suan Grant, owner, Suan Foods
For Suan’s, the most important factor in working brand influencers is authenticity. We want to work with people who truly love Suan’s and want to authentically share that love with their following. People can see straight through influencers who come off too "salesy" so we seek out influencers who have created authority in the food industry space by sharing how they enjoy Suan’s in their everyday lives.
We love to work with micro-influencers who may have a smaller following but have built trust with their audience. You don’t need to have hundreds of thousands of followers to make a difference! It’s always vital to choose influencers who truly engage with their audience. We always keep in mind that influencer marketing is a two way street. It should be a mutually beneficial relationship for both parties. Being a smaller, local company we may not always have it in the budget to compensate influencers the same way larger companies can, but we make it worth their while by gifting our products. This allows those who may not have been able to try Suan’s yet the opportunity to ensure they love our products before sharing with their audience.
Related: Maker Q&A: Industry Irritations; Maker Q&A: Standout Certifications.