Food Influencer Marketing Strategies: How to work with Food Influencers
Food influencer marketing: the next foodie fronteer? You can’t argue with the power of food influencers nowadays, not after the country of Iceland blamed a TikTok food trend for running out of cucumbers. With over 70% of consumers saying they’re more likely to purchase a product based on an influencer’s recommendation, it’s clear brands in the food and beverage industry should be working with them to promote their products.
But how do you effectively work with food influencers to achieve success? Luckily, we’re here to give you that secret sauce.
In this article:
How to find the right food influencers for your brand
How to work with food influencers
Food influencer marketing campaigns to copy
What is food influencer marketing and why should you use it?
Food influencer marketing is when food brands partner with social media influencers who have a passion for all things culinary - whether that's creating original recipes, exploring new cooking techniques, or recommending local eats.
The benefits of food influencer marketing are manifold. It increases brand awareness by showcasing products to a broader audience. It enhances engagement and brand community, as influencers share authentic and creative content that resonates with their followers. It builds credibility, too, as brands tap into trusted voices - ultimately resulting in increased sales.
In essence, partnering with food influencers allows brands to present their products in a unique light, fostering a deeper connection with consumers. And as consumers increasingly turn to social media for culinary inspiration and recommendations, food influencers weild ever more significant power in shaping consumer behaviour - ultimately translating into stronger brands and larger sales figures.
How to find the right food influencers for your brand
Finding the right influencers for your brand is essential to any food influencer marketing campaign. The truth is, there are many different kinds of food influencers, and they all offer something unique - from healthy everyday cooking ideas to sampling sweet treats or rating wacky culinary trends - and it's important to get the right "fit" - otherwise your campaign message can get lost.
Below are our top tips to help you find the perfect food influencer for your brand:
1. Research your audience
Before you start searching for influencers, you need to know who you want to reach. Are you targeting home cooks, foodies, or health-conscious consumers? Different influencers will appeal to different demographics, so understanding your audience is crucial.
Most marketing campaigns do start with a target audience, or potential customers, in mind. But many marketers get lost when trying to pin down exactly which influencers appeal to their target. A good tip? Start to behave like your target audience.
If, for instance, you're a vegan food brand, use a personal TikTok account to search hashtags like #veganfood. You'll soon see how large your audience is on the platform (meaning, you should be there too). Like and Comment on top videos and the algorithm will show you more of the trending content in this niche. Take note of additional hashtags, along with sounds, trends, and accounts you see. This is what your target market is consuming, too.
The next step? Check the comments section of these influencers. Who is interacting? Are they food influencer accounts, and does their offering align with your brand and what your target customer seems to engage with? If you answer "yes", this is a great route for finding more influencers in your niche - often with a slightly smaller follower count - which as we'll explore, can give you more bang for your buck.
Trust us, it can save your content falling on deaf ears.
2. Choose engagement over follower count
If you want to make a big splash on social, it can be tempting to swing for the biggest food influencers you can afford, to make the most of their large reach. But this isn't always the best approach.
Macro influencers with 500K+ followers are powerful for gaining visibility, but if you want to impact customer behaviour, leveraging influencers with smaller followings may do more to help you achieve your goal. In fact, a recent study found that the notion that “the more followers, the better” amongst food influencers is only more applicable when consumers peruse content for entertainment purposes. If they access the content for information purposes, a micro influencer could have just as much impact on consumer behaviour as a macro influencer.
Rather than looking at size of an influencer's following, examine their engagement rate. An influencer with a smaller, engaged following can be more valuable than someone with millions of passive followers. A food influencer marketing strategy that deploys a wide mix of nano influencers and micro influencers can feel more authentic, and can even prompt social media trends.
After all, it's engaging content that we remember. If your influencer can stop the scroll and make food enthusiasts look at you in a new light, you'll make more impact than a beige post from a social foodie heavyweight.
3. Prioritise relevancy
It's important to keep both your campaign goals and your target audience's desires in mind when selecting an influencer, to establish relevancy. It's a balancing act: if you choose a popular influencer but the content doesn't feel natural to them, their followers will switch off as it won't feel authentic. If your influencer creates popular content but it doesn't align with your brand, it won't meet your wider goals.
So - consider how your product would naturally fit within that influencer's content, and use this to fuel your briefs. For instance, do they have a background in recipe development - and could you let them include your product in a new signature dish? Or, do they focus on educational content, and can they talk about your food product through interactive storytelling?
Choose influencers for relevancy and engagement, and you can have real-world impact. In fact, a recent study found that observing food influencers cooking on social media triggers cooking at home.
Funnily enough, thinking outside the box can help. If you’re a food brand creating easy recipes that anyone can cook, a relevant influencer might not be a food influencer at all! If you use someone who's not a whizz in the kitchen, you make it relatable. Take a look at this unusual influencer collab example of ours, which resulted in an 80% rise in Instagram profile visits.
If you're looking for inspiration on the right food influencer to work with, check out our article on the top food influencers.
4. Look at their previous brand work
This will help you to establish relevancy and can also be a great indicator of the quality to expect.
By now you should have some idea of whether your influencer's previous content aligns with your brand guidelines and what you need for your campaign. But now's the time to get meticulous. Check which brands they've previously worked with, and note what you like about their work. Check previous posts where they've achieved the highest views or engagement rates. If you see elements you'd like to repeat in your campaign, this is a great sign!
Some food and beverage brands will include contracts that specify that influencers do not work with their direct competitors for a certain period of time. If your influencer has recently worked with a competitor, we recommend placing them on a backburner. You can always pick up the conversation in a few months, and have them discuss their new preference for your brand!
It's also worth double checking their personal message. If you’re creating vegan recipes and the influencer you’ve chosen has previously poo-pooed plant-based food, is that the best fit?
How to work with food influencers for a successful campaign
So, now you know how to find a strong set of food influencers to showcase your brand on social. How do you expand this to create successful campaigns for food brands?
Here's exactly how to set up strategic partnerships that will win in the social food and beverage space.
1. Establish your goals early on
When embarking on a food influencer marketing campaign, it’s crucial to establish clear goals early on as a brand.
This involves defining the target audience, desired outcomes, and success metrics. By setting these parameters, you can ensure your chosen influencers align with your objectives. Clear goals also facilitate the measurement of the campaign’s success, allowing for adjustments as needed.
Clear goals can even help you determine whether or not to go down the influencer marketing route. If the goal is Reach and Conversions but the budget is small, for instance, using UGC creators to create food-related content for use in performance ads may work better.
2. Develop an adaptable campaign theme
A well-developed campaign theme gives influencers a clear direction while leaving room for an influencer's creativity.
Consider how your influencer's house style can showcase your brand message in a way that feels natural to them. Whether it’s a recipe challenge, product review, or a behind-the-scenes look at a culinary experience, the theme should resonate with the influencer as well as your brand.
If your campaign theme is too strict, content creation - and your KPIs - will suffer. Influencers' followers subscribe because they like their style of food content. If the brand message feels forced, their followers will ignore it and your marketing efforts will be for nought.
You should encourage influencers to share their authentic experiences and promote genuine conversations. This won't just help you resonate with your target market - it will also help you learn more about them and how they see you, which you can use as insights in your next marketing strategy.
3. Communicate clearly
Whether you're working with professional chefs or a micro influencer, communication is paramount.
Start with personalised initial outreach. Mention their style or any previous work you appreciated. Give a simple outline of your campaign and ask for a yes/no reply if they're like to learn more. That way, you catch their attention and it's easy for them to respond.
Once you've heard they're interested, share more collaboration details. Your briefing document should include brand values, product information, key messaging and campaign timelines, as well as your campaign theme.
Discuss compensation and expectations early on, and draft a clear contract that outlines deliverables for them to sign prior to the campaign. Then schedule check-ins. We recommend including revisions in your brief and establishing a feedback loop to ensure influencer work meets requirements. If you're shipping out product, share tracking information.
Finally, after your campaign, share a 'thank you' message. It goes a long way!
4. Consider logistics
Logistics is key to any activity in the food industry, and working woth food influencers is no different. It's important that you factor this in, to ensure a timely supply of any perishable goods. This improves safety and reduces waste - not to mention improves the freshness and quality of your product being showcased!
This starts with a solid content creation timeline. Establish when the influencers will recieve the food product, when they will create the content, when they'll post it, and when (or if) you will use the content in any additional formats for your brand.
Use this timeline to plan for the timely and safe delivery of food products. Consider shipping and packaging methods, and track shipments to confirm delivery. Remember to budget for logistics, too. Once your influencer has made the content, make sure to align your posting date with your inventory to prevent stockouts if the content significantly boost sales.
Finally, ensure you clearly communicate storage requirements with the influencer. If your food product needs to be kept in the fridge, let them know!
4. Track and measure results
Measuring the success of your campaign is essential to understanding what worked and what didn’t. Use tracking tools like Google Analytics, social media analytics platforms, and custom URLs to monitor engagement, reach, and conversions.
This is why it's important to set campaign goals from the offset: whether it's boosting awareness of seasonal promotions, increasing sales through social, or changing your target customer's views, you will only know if your marketing efforts were successful if you have a goal in mind.
One kind of result that's harder to quantify is comments - but we recommend you take the time to assess them on your influencer's posts. Did you know that almost 77% of TikTok users always read the comments on TikTok videos? This is a great way to see how your target audience are responding to the content, and potentially discover more ideas to create content that will land for social.
Food influencer marketing ideas: thought starters for your next campaign
While it’s all well and good telling you how to work with social foodie whizzes, you need to know what to do with them. Lucky for you, we’re generous, so here are some thought starters for your next food influencer marketing campaign.
1. Use creative demonstrations
Leverage influencers by inviting them to demonstrate unique ways to use your food product. Whether it's a cooking tutorial, meal prep tips, or creative hacks, showing the product in action can drive engagement and inspire purchases.
Here's an example of a small-scale campaign that really nails it: Kenwood worked with influencer Adam @adam.floatinghome to make a cake using only their Go collection as utensils. The creative angle - and clever use of an influencer who lives in a barge - illustrates how compact and useful the product is.
2. Try taste tests
Taste tests are a popular content format, especially for food brands. Have influencers conduct taste tests of your products, offering honest reviews to their audience. This adds authenticity because it doesn’t look like they’re just pushing product down your throat (if you’ll pardon the pun).
This example is an especially relatable one - and it has our mouth watering for NUII ice cream...
3. Take food into new contexts
Challenge influencers to create content that showcases your food product in unexpected ways or contexts. For example, create recipes for non-traditional occasions or showing how your product fits into different lifestyles.
We took this to the next level for our client Yutaka. We worked with food art influencers to make portraits out of sushi, to showcase how fun and creative sushi can be to make at home.
4. Play with ASMR and brand codes
You don't have to be a food brand to work well with a food influencer. Take, for example, Sony's partnership with influencer Sam Way @samseats to promote new movie Venom. The foodie creator developed a delicious meal in his signature style, which included the Venom logo toasted onto a muffin and black squid ink to tie in the character's signature brand codes.
What makes this content extra satisfying is its speed and ASMR elements. It's incredibly re-watchable, meaning the chances of seeing the brand codes are very high.
5. Work with UGC for evergreen demos
User-generated content (UGC) can amplify your campaign's reach. Working with them is different to your standard influencers, as the content is owned by you as the brand, and lives on your channel. So, if you’re looking to reach as many people as possible, with less spend, this could be the way to go.
Read more about how to work with UGC Creators here.
6. Host giveaways or contests
Hosting a giveaway or contest with influencers is a great way to increase reach. Collaborating on Instagram posts is a great way to do this, as your content will have instant access to the influencer's following, and you can see engagement in real time.
Encourage followers to like and share the post, to boost it in the platform algorithm and increase its reach amongst their personal network. It's an old-school method, but there's a reason it's still around. Take, for example, this recent post from influencer Tuê @twaydabae drawing attention to her local eats. Coffee shops and restaurants take note: restaurant influencers are big news in the social culinary world, so a simple competition like this can go far.
Sometimes, the simplest ideas can be the most effective.
7. Cook up a food trend
Remember cloud bread? Baked feta pasta? Dalgona coffee? If you're considering marketing on TikTok, sparling a viral TikTok food trend is the dream. But how do you do it?
Some of it is luck. But what we know about viral food trends so far is that they're surprisingly easy to recreate, and look fun or healthy. If you can do this all while standing out - much like the originator of the cucumber trend this summer - you raise your chance of success.
Another trick is to join an existing food trend - but you need to act fast, and add your own twist. If you need help to stay on the pulse of what’s going on with food trends on social, get in touch: we’re experts at finding and creating the right content for our clients.
8. Host a challenge
Food challenges aren't new to social media (anyone else still scarred by the cinnamon challenge of 2012?). But TikTok is their new home. If you want to get potentially hundreds of people buying and engaging with your product, a food challenge is a fun way to do it.
Take notes from Chipotle. who partnered with influencers Loren Gray and Brent Rivera to kick off a hashtag challenge - #GuacDance, smashing records in the process. It was incredibly easy to replicate, and spurred hundreds of pieces of UGC. The official sound drew users back to Chipotle, who were offering free guacamole and shipping during the period. Smart!
9. Go deeper
Is there a cause or celebration that's meaningful to your customer? If so, show you're on their side with a campaign that ties your food brand into the conversation.
A great example comes from Hershey's campaign for International Women’s Day. They partnered with influencers to talk about the influential women in their lives, and share a limited edition SHE bar with them. It was a huge success: #hersheysshe accrued 94,645 posts on Instagram and 65.4M views on TikTok.
Food influencer marketing campaigns: the secret sauce for success
There you have it, the world of internet food and influencer marketing. Working with food influencers doesn’t need to be a mammoth task. Sometimes simplicity is key. If you pick the right influencers for the job, people who are authentic, relatable to the key messaging and align with the campaign goals, it can be the recipe for success.
The trick is to always take your time with the brief. Sometimes, a mix of different foodie influencers can help you reach your goals in a way you may not have thought. Spreading your budget correctly can help make sure you reach targets without overspending.
Plus, if you need any help, that’s what we’re here for. Get in contact for any burning influencer questions.