Influencer marketing and food is the perfect combination. Everybody loves food, and everybody loves to receive suggestions on which new restaurant or café to go to, or which new food to try. The great thing about influencer marketing is that people don’t mind if the content they see is sponsored, especially for food brands. What matters instead is that they feel inspired.
With the rising power of influencer marketing, it’s no surprise that people place their trust in social media influencers so much. They feel that they are more authentic than traditional advertisements. Influencers are real people just like you and me after all. Hence, it becomes easier to influence buying decisions and consumer behavior.
Mostly, like lots of other industries, companies in the food industry work more with micro-influencers than they do with major influencers. Micro-influencers are those with an Instagram following of about 5,000 to 100,000, while major influencers have more than 100,000 followers, even up to millions.
So, why do food brands choose to collaborate with micro-influencers if they have a lesser number of followers? This is because even though their following may be lesser, they have a much higher engagement rate. You could have millions of followers, but if your engagement rate is low, not many people see what you post proportionally. And this is the case with most major influencers. However, with micro-influencers, their engagement rate is anywhere between 2 to 10 percent, compared to an average of 1.66 percent across all industries on Instagram.
It’s not just the high engagement rate that makes micro-influencers so appealing for food brands. As mentioned before, their followers tend to place a lot of trust in them. Even if a post is sponsored by a food brand, their tens of thousands of followers do not think they are not being authentic. Instead, they feel they are sharing with them what they really feel and think about the brand. This can be credited to the fact that it is easier to think of an influencer as a real person just like me and you when they have lesser number of followers, compared to them reaching a celebrity status when they hit a million followers. This makes a micro-influencer’s follower base extremely strong and reliable.
Today, thanks to influencer marketing platforms like iFluenz.com, food brands can easily find micro-influencers with a niche following. Getting in touch with them and coming to a deal is so much simpler on platforms such as these rather than having to manually look for them on Instagram itself and emailing them hoping they will reply.
Now that we know just how impactful influencer marketing can be for food brands, below are some useful tips that every food brand working with an influencer should know.
- Make your posts visually appealing
Today, every millennial seems to be posting pictures of what they had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The whole point of this trend is to make the food appear as enticing as possible. Just like this, influencers posts have to be visually appealing if you want to attract followers. Staging, angle, framing, and lighting are key.
- Work with the right influencer for your brand
The influencer you collaborate with should be someone who shares the same values as your brand. For instance, if you are a food brand that sells healthy foods which will compliment every day work out sessions, then you should work with an influencer who likes to stay and eat healthily.
- Make your posts fun, yet informative
Make sure that every post imparts something useful to the reader. It’s not enough just to have a great picture if the quality of the content is low.