4 ways influencer marketing can boost your food business

March 2020 changed everything. It’s now been over a whole year since the stranger sniffling away opposite you changed from a mild stomach churn to potentially lethal. Even the most reluctant technophobes among us were driven online, accelerating the inevitable shift to e-commerce by five years.

The business and retail worlds have changed rapidly as a result. Bricks-and-mortar businesses continue to face unprecedented challenges, and the ‘new normal’ will be an aggressively digital era. Brands must adapt by generating new sales online.

Implementing an influencer marketing campaign will be vital to support your digital efforts. Influencers are professional content creators — and they’re really good at it! Demonstrating how your products work in different contexts and settings across various age groups and cultures opens your brand up to a much wider audience. Now, your customer can experience your product in a much more immersive way, through someone they trust and relate to. This is strong visual and emotional storytelling, through which the consumer can experience your brand.

Here are 4 of the many ways your brand can benefit from influencer marketing.

1. Harness the power of brand ambassadors

Brand ambassadors are people who love your brand, who want to see you succeed and who actively buy your products in real life. They may be experts in your brand’s niche or field, but they don’t have to be, as long as they’re experts on your brand. Their loyalty is also key — brand ambassadors agree to maintain an ongoing relationship with you.

They humanise your business, boost your online reputation and drive traffic to your website. Most importantly, ambassadors give new customers a reason to trust you. They inform others about your products from their own authoritative perspective, without explicitly saying ‘try this’ or ‘buy this.’ Potential customers rely on these genuine experiences with products, and this makes them more likely to purchase. For ambassadors with more than 10,000 followers, you can take advantage of the Instagram Stories ‘swipe up’ feature to drive traffic directly to your website.

2. Hyper-target your customers

There are more than 30 million active Instagram users in the UK — a platform with one of the broadest demographics. Although 75% of 18-24-year-olds use Instagram, so do one in four 50-64-year-olds. Many people wonder how to reach more potential clients, yet they miss that a vast percentage of the population is active on social media. One of the main reasons social media marketing is so effective is that brands can hyper-target ideal clients based on exact demographics.

Showing ads to the right people in the right place at the right time is a critical part of the marketing process to avoid wasted ad spend. When you combine performance and influencer marketing, you can target users based on age, gender, location, interests, and more using content they’ve already engaged with. This data is available to us as advertisers when we publish campaigns and enables us to apply more context in our campaigns to ensure we show relevant information to relevant people.

3. Personalise your promotions

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have a feature called dynamic ads. Essentially, these promotions allow brands to create thousands of ad variants by uploading images, text and offers to the dynamic-ad artificial intelligence program.

The programme analyses users’ interests and creates curated ads designed to overcome objections and solve problems. Using the insights and data from influencer marketing, you can review your buyer personas and create text and images for each customer segment. When a predefined target user is browsing social media, there’s a good chance one of your ads will pop up in their feed!

4. Maximise the impact of creator-led content

Once an influencer starts posting your content, there are some additional things you can do to amplify your impact. Share their content on your brand social channels to give it a further boost and show solidarity. Ask them if they have any future ideas such as doing an interview/podcast, a co-authored blog post, getting their input on your next product, etc.

The more invested the influencer, the more enthusiastically they’ll promote you. Remember, these people are professional content creators, and their ideas are often invaluable as well as innovative.

By putting influencers at the start of campaign developments, businesses can see near real-time intelligence, resulting in more flexible campaigns with deeper resonance. Influencers can be one of your greatest assets, and the earlier you involve them, the better the results.