Through the years, influencer marketing has grown to become a legitimate channel for businesses to promote their products and services. In particular, micro-influencer marketing allows brands to make an impression on their target audience without having to stretch their budget.

The channel’s value has increased in the eyes of industries that are tough to break through — one of them being the food industry. Since multiple brands are vying for attention from the same people promoting similar products, they need the power of influencers to help them rise above the rest, like cream rising to the top.

In this post, we’ll look into the different influencer marketing strategies you must partake in to get a proverbial slice of the industry’s pie as food and beverage brand owners.

1. Go All in on Videos

Videos should be a crucial component of your food brand’s influencer marketing campaign. The success of viral videos across different social platforms can’t be denied. 

As mentioned, food is an experience. Not only should the food look good, but it should also tingle the other senses such as hearing, touch, smell, and taste. And because you obviously can’t make viewers enjoy the food in your video using the other senses, the videos should communicate these nonetheless.

The most popular food micro-influencers are those who publish short but sweet cooking and baking recipes. Some mix their travel adventures by tasting dishes from the different locations they visit.

If your food can be used as a condiment to the recipes they prepare or a region-specific dish that they can try out on their next upcoming video, try reaching out to them. If not, you have to be more creative in presenting your food and beverage while working with influencers.

For example, Dunkin Donuts enlisted the help of a micro-influencer who tried all of their donuts and rated each one on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest).

EATING EVERY SINGLE DUNKIN DONUTS DONUT

It’s an exciting concept that’s unlike most of the viral food videos you get to see all the time. More importantly, this approach allows you to boost your brand awareness by getting the influencer to feature only your products.

Also, the rise of TikTok and its shorter video format paves the way for more types of partnerships between food and beverage brands and influencers. Depending on your audience and your brand values, you can create over-the-top videos with influencers to put your brand out there.

2. Partner with Influencers from Adjacent Industries

The typical approach to influencer marketing among food brands is to reach out to influencers who showcase lots of content about similar products as yours. 

While this method is logical and sound, everybody else would be doing it. That means you’ll go up against the tough competition in your niche with deep pockets.

To get around these obstacles, you must be creative with your influencer marketing strategy. One way to do this is by partnering with non-food influencers but are related to food. An example is a dentist. Proper dental and allows people to keep their mouths clean and, more importantly, continue to eat delicious food without problems.

Partnering with influencers in these spaces opens your brand to market segmentation, allowing you to tap into a brand new audience. From here, you can ask dentists to promote your food that’s good for the teeth. For your other group of products, you can search for another influencer from a different niche to market them.

When approaching influencers, make sure that they have their house in order. That means they have a solid dental SEO strategy with lots of monthly organic traffic. This way, you can expect their promotions to gain traction and generate ROI on your end.

Another potential partner to consider is gaming influencers. Most gamers spend their time sitting in front of their favorite consoles. Therefore, encouraging them to eat your healthy food is an easy sell even to influencers in this niche.

3. Reach Out to Top Bloggers

Blogger outreach is nothing new as a marketing tactic. However, it remains a vital part of a brand’s strategy if you wish to cover all your bases and get your audience’s attention.

In essence, you want to reach out to top food bloggers and leverage their existing influence so you can promote your food products to a broader audience. Narrow down your list by finding those with millions of followers across different social media channels. Also, consider other factors like who their audience is, the types of influencers, and others.

Next, reach out to them via email. You could find the different contact pages of each blogger and send them the message manually. But the most efficient way is to find the right email address of influencers using various tools.

Another method is by commenting on their social media profiles multiple times. The idea is to build familiarity in the mind of influencers. So, when you start reaching out to them, you can use your activity on their social media profile as a jumping-off point to discuss the partnership.

Regarding your message, make sure to propose a partnership that is beneficial to both parties. Aside from providing compensation to influencers, your values must align with the influencers’ and vice versa.

From here, they could reply to talk about how to proceed with your influencer campaigns. They will collaborate with you on how to promote your product on their blog. The influencers could ask free product samples or a chance to dine in at your restaurant. After which, they will publish a post documenting their experience with your product.

You can also offer giveaways or discount coupons at a limited time to help boost product sales and walk-ins to your store.

The chances of getting a positive response like the one above are few and far between. Therefore, make sure to cast your net wide by reaching out to potential blogging partners.

4. Keep Track of Progress

The success of your work with influencers hinges on the system you have in place. The campaign may have increased your brand awareness and boosted sales, but you wouldn’t know the exact details if you didn’t track it, to begin with.

To determine how many sales were generated by the food influencer, you must assign an affiliate link to each one of them. The influencer must then use the unique link and share it with customers to see how much sales were made from that particular link. You can do this with the other influencers you will work with to help you determine which among them yields the best results.

Aside from sales, there are other metrics you need to consider. You can gather information on social media, especially if you encouraged the use of hashtags in your campaign. You can search for the hashtag across different platforms and see how many included it in their posts and tweets.

Traditionally, the more hashtag mentions on social media, the more successful the campaign has been. However, you also must factor in the campaign’s sentiment and whether it was received positively or negatively by your audience.

Another variable to factor in your campaign’s success is referral traffic.

There could be a correlation between growth in traffic during the ongoing campaign. And while traffic in and of itself is an empty statistic, you need to look at it alongside other traffic-related metrics such as bounce rate, average time on site, and others. 

From here, you can determine if the influencer marketing campaign was responsible for the increase in website traffic.

Tools and social media services are available at your disposal to help you gather and consolidate all the data in a single place. They can also help facilitate your campaigns with influencers and thoroughly view the strategy and the results it produced.

Conclusion

Developing an influencer marketing strategy for your food business is like choosing the dishes to eat in an all-you-can-eat buffet. There’s a lot to choose from but only a limited time to do all of them.

This is why using the best tactics listed above to formulate the best strategy for your food brand. Doing so ensures the success of your campaign so you can generate more awareness about your brand, if not sales and revenue.