Srishti Sundram is Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Jupiter.co, a creator-driven CPG marketing and recipe shopping platform.
A 2023 survey by Pollfish and Butcherbox found that 88% of Americans use social media for food inspiration. This highlights the growing role of social media in culinary inspiration.
For example, when my wife was on an inflammation-reduction diet, she made recipes posted by an influencer who focused on inflammation-reduction-based food content. After she recovered, she sent me another recipe she wanted me to make for our date night.
There have been instances of viral recipe content on social media resulting in significant sales impact for consumer packaged goods (CPGs). One of the most popular of them was the “feta pasta TikTok effect,” with #fetapasta having over 600 million views. “Feta” was the number one search term on the Instacart grocery delivery app, and it temporarily emptied shelves with a 200% surge in demand.
At Jupiter, I’ve worked with over 50 top CPGs who have spent several million dollars on social media recipe influencer partners. In this article, I’ll discuss how CPG brands can partner with recipe content influencers to increase product sales.
Identify the correct creator.
Top brands have a particular target audience they want to reach via a specific influencer. The usual parameters to identify the right customers are:
• Location Of The Influencers’ Followers: Brands prefer influencers whose followers are largely concentrated in the regions where the brand has a strong presence. For example, a brand with a significant presence on the East Coast should specifically seek out influencers whose audience is primarily based in that region.
• User Attributes: Top-performing CPGs have a deep understanding of the attributes of their target audience, and they find influencers who align well with those attributes.
Trust the influencer.
The brand marketers at CPGs often feel the urge to over-orchestrate content featuring their product. They believe they are “making the brand more visible” in the content, but this often comes at the cost of reduced viewership and engagement.
Social media platforms like Instagram often choose content that gains strong initial traction to show to a broader audience. Being picked up by the algorithm can significantly boost viewership. So, brand marketers must resist this urge and trust recipe influencers to follow their own process and creative approach.
The Rule Of Seven
As stated by the rule of seven in marketing, a potential customer must see a product at least seven times before purchasing it. While seeing a product endorsed by an influencer is an important touchpoint, brands can use the following techniques to maintain contact with potential customers and guide them further along the sales funnel.
• Enrolling In A Loyalty Program: Brands can ask influencers to share links through Instagram Stories, include a link in their bio or use automated comment replies to direct users to a website and encourage them to enroll in a loyalty program.
• Retargeting Using Meta Pixel: When users visit these pages, they are tracked via Meta Pixel, which can be used to run retargeting campaigns and move customers further down the funnel.
• Boosting Posts Or Ads: CPGs can also purchase a license to whitelist a high-performing campaign and use it in boosted posts or ads. A combination of awareness and lead-gen paid social campaigns on Meta can generate cost-effective awareness and leads for brands. Boosting and ads can be executed using location and interest-based targeting features, allowing brands to focus their paid social campaigns on specific retailers they want to reach.
• Shoppable Recipes: Shoppable recipes, paired with checkout integrations like those available through Instacart, offer brands an opportunity to drive commerce engagements and increase social media visibility. Platforms like my company provide a streamlined connection between recipe inspiration and purchase, making it easier for users to explore and quickly create recipes of interest.
• Blogs: While blogs are becoming less popular among recipe influencers, those who maintain blogs can further amplify the impact of their recipe content by featuring the product on their blog and including it in the shoppable ingredient list.
By selecting the right recipe influencer, trusting their creative process and using the right tools to amplify the awareness generated by the influencer’s content, a CPG brand can achieve both top-of-funnel brand awareness and bottom-of-funnel sales through its partnership with food content influencers.
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