How to Use Influencer Marketing to Build Your Food and Beverage Brand Online

These days, it’s not enough to have an online presence. To build your brand and stay competitive in the food and beverage niche, you can collaborate with digital influencers to spread the word about your products.

Influencer marketing is a strategy where brands partner with people who have a large following and great engagement on various social networks likes Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. By doing this, you are expanding your reach and tapping into the audience of your chosen influencers. The idea behind this is that people engage more with other people compared to brands, which they feel are always out to sell them something. Furthermore, a Nielsen study shows that 66% of people trust consumer opinions posted online.

If you’re in the food and beverage industry, you could easily make the most of influencer marketing. In fact, you can have better success with digital influencers than other brands in different niches. Here’s why:

• Everyone can relate to food.

• Food is the most popular theme on social media. Instagram alone has more than 300 million posts on #food as of this writing.

• Eating is a social activity. Food and drinks will always be shared and celebrated on all corners of the world.

• Food is all about imagery. And 94% of social media engagement comes from visual content.

• Food influencers are the group with the fastest growing sources of food-related posts online. A study conducted by ThinkWithGoogle shows that engagement on social media accounts related to food rose by about 118%.

Reasons to Partner with Digital Influencers

Apart from expanding your reach, collaborating with digital influencers is an effective strategy to build trust and engagement with your target customers.

Here are other reasons you should work with digital influencers:

• They have already developed trust with their audience and your target market.

• People are more willing to engage with them and share their content, further expanding your reach.

• They provide an authentic customer experience.

• They have bigger reach than you do.

• They create content that is shareable.

• Their content is often trusted more than content created by brands.

Strategies to Leverage Influencer Marketing to Build Your Brand

Successfully building your brand using influencer marketing doesn’t happen overnight and requires a well thought-out strategy. Here’s one you can follow to get started.

Find the right influencer

Not all influencers are right for your brand. Finding the right influencers may be challenging but once you’ve found the right people, it’s going to be rewarding.

For starters, check their posts. Do they have high-quality photos? Do they engage with their audience? Most importantly, do they match your brand? You should also look into their audience demographics to ensure their audience is your target market.

Prioritize visual content

People love sharing photos of food and drinks. What’s left for you to do is to create posts that are worth sharing. Don’t limit yourself with just photos. Expand your content mix by creating videos and infographics.

Give your digital influencers a collection of high-quality posts that they can share, retweet, or repost on their social media accounts. Letting them share and repost your own content maximizes the value of your posts and improves your own engagement rate.

Focus on the experience with your product

Influencer marketing is all about being authentic and having a personal experience with a product. Let your influencers share their story and experience with your products rather than asking them to focus on what your products are known for.

An influencer that’s also a great storyteller could effectively boost your sales with a simple recommendation. In fact, word-of-mouth recommendations are responsible for about 20% to 50% of all customer buying decisions.

Share the content of your chosen influencers

Social proof is very important when building your brand online. Whom you associate with matters. You’ve taken the time to choose the right influencers for your brand. Maximize it by letting people know about your digital influencers and what they think about your products.

Influencer marketing for a budding food and beverage business could get you the attention and reach you need to start building your brand online. The key is to find the right influencers that share the same values and goals as your brand.

Contact us to learn more about influencer marketing.