8 Influencer Marketing Tips For Food Brands and Restaurants

Although the term "influencer marketing" is not new in the field of digital marketing, it has advanced significantly over the previous ten years. It was a $7.5 million industry as of 2021. Marketing and influencers go hand in hand. You must thus understand how to use food influencer marketing and restaurant influencer marketing to raise your profile both online and offline.

Influencer marketing generates an average profit of $7.65 for every dollar invested. Additionally, the average conversion rate for Instagram influencers is 2.55%. The growth of influencer marketing is unstoppable in 2022. Customers' intentions to buy are significantly impacted by social media recommendations. We explain the benefits of working with restaurant influencers as well as the best ways to go about it.

8 Tips to Establish Your Food Brand With Influencer Marketing

#1. Partner with the right influencers

Influencer marketing is the concept of collaborating with social media content producers that have significant followings on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and others to help sate consumers' insatiable demand for stories and reviews of the goods they buy. Millions of dollars are being invested in the booming sector by brands and agencies searching for tools to scale the production and dissemination of consumer content. Brands in the food and beverage industry are more well-positioned to work with digital influencers than those in other industries for a number of reasons:

• One of the most talked-about topics on social media is food.
• Everyone on the earth eats food, even though not every customer runs, cares about fashion, or watches movies.
• Eating is intensely social and is traditionally a time for celebration, giving, sharing, and expression.
• Food is incredibly visually appealing, and visual content engages viewers 94% more than text-only information.
• One of the fastest-increasing sources of food-related information is food and recipe influencers..

Check the following qualities within your food influencer:

1. A unique valued proposition 
2. Power of storytelling 
3. Be active on social media
4. Knows photography and videography skills 
5. Part of an active community 

#2. Prioritize creating outstanding content

To ensure that your content stands out in the throng, apply Instagram aesthetics and a few food influencer marketing strategies. Each brand has its own distinct and individual style. To ensure that your influencers write high-quality content on your food and customer service, you must invest in a partnership with them. The function of an ambassador can take many different shapes to promote the business.

One of the most effective culinary influencer campaigns you can undertake is sponsored content posting. The majority of food brands benefit the most from it, but you'll need a sizable budget to pay for it.

#3. Create visual content a dominant part of your marketing strategy

People enjoy tweeting, liking, pinning, collecting, tasting, and sharing about food, which is one advantage the food sector has. A lot. After tweeting their breakfast, consumers immediately start thinking about dinner and browsing blogs and Pinterest for inspiration. When done well, visual content is engaging, motivating, entertaining, and enticing to share. Rich media material like images, videos, and infographics generates more interaction and clickthroughs than just text. So focus on creating drool-worthy content that will emotionally appeal to your target audience in a way they can't say no to your brand.

90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text.”- 3M Corporation and Zabisco

#4. Think out of the box, let your creative juice flow

When it comes to influencer marketing, food brands appear to take greater chances. Even though mistakes occur, don't appear to be hostile to the high-risk, high-reward strategy. For instance, Lays had an extremely popular social media campaign where they offered a $1 million prize to fans and influencers who could come up with a new chip flavour. They produced and tested 25 recipes after receiving over 3.8 million responses, and then they distributed the top three flavours—Cheesy Garlic Bread, Chicken & Waffles, and Sriracha—to retailers so that customers could try them and cast their votes on social media. They saw a gain of 12% in sales with the addition of the Cheesy Garlic Bread flavour to their family.

Take inspiration from the key players in the market and plan something exciting for your target audience.

#5. Instead of your brand talk about the food experience of your customers

The most effective influencer marketing campaigns use content that benefits the target audience. Instead of being all about the company, it should be genuine and thought-provoking with some subtle brand references. Instead of bragging to customers about how fantastic their products are, marketers need to shift their focus to the customer, their experiences, and their satisfaction. The ideal source of this kind of material is frequently another consumer, who understands how much consumers enjoy the information that makes them smile, weep, or learn something new. The food sector benefits greatly from this strategy because consumers enjoy discussing recipes, eateries, deals, entertaining, etc. Know your strong points when it comes to marketing as it would become easier to communicate with your customers and convert them.

#6. Consider long-term partnerships

Partner with popular food influencers in Canada who are not only followed by a good number of followers but also know how to engage with your customers. Instead of a one-time campaign focus on building long-term partnerships which are more beneficial, especially in terms of saving both your time and money. This is why big brands prefer to invest in long-term partnerships rather than spending their money o random influencers.

#7. Host contests and giveaways

From time to time host contests and giveaways on your social media platforms to keep your followers motivated about your brands. Also, who doesn’t like to get discounts, offers and freebies? You can also ask your influencers to do the same from their social media accounts.

#8. Track and measure campaign performance

Making sure measurements are in line with consumer behaviour, which matters most, is the real secret to analytics. No single figure offers sufficient understanding. Metrics should be monitored instead within the following categories: awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, and loyalty. You can make sure your plan is effective across the full purchase process by monitoring a variety of behaviours attributed to certain stages.

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3 Best Practices of Influencer Marketing for Fitness Brands 

How To Market Your Canadian Food Venture On Instagram? (Popular hashtags inside) 

Ready to take your food brand to the next level? Here’s how InfluGlue can help

As a leading influencer marketing in Canada experts of InfluGlue shares a few more influencer advertising tips for food brands:

• Invite popular food bloggers and influencers to your grand opening: Throwing a grandiose grand opening party and inviting local influencers to attend is one of the best ways for a new restaurant to generate talk about it.
• Let them taste your latest dish or menu item: Invite local foodies to sample any recent menu changes or new dishes that you've added.
• Give them a unique code so they can give their followers a discount: The influencer and you both benefit from exclusive incentives. The good thing is that you can easily track your return on investment if you provide them with a code.
• Give them a free meal if possible: Obviously in exchange for a review. Make sure they understand the entire approach and don’t mention that in the review. Allow your cuisine and service to do the talking.
• Ask them to showcase some behind-the-scenes from your outlet: Everyone enjoys peeking through closed drapes to discover what others (in this example, restaurants) are hiding. Have your chef prepare a well-known dish in the kitchen as a culinary influencer watches and records.

Still not convinced? Connect with InfluGlue to know more about their influencer marketing services and packages.