How to Engage Micro-Influencers in the Food Sector?

The French love cooking, dining out, talking about cuisine, and are fond of quality dishes in Paris or elsewhere. Gastronomy has been an integral part of our culture in France for decades!

In the food market, influence has become an essential step in the marketing and communication strategy of brands, restaurants, and distributors to boost their visibility, awareness, and sales.

👀 Did you know? Food-related content on Instagram shows an engagement rate of over 7%, nearly 5 times higher than the average rate!

Developing influencer marketing in this sector, yes. But we advise you to prioritize micro-influencers.

The benefits for you? Visibility, awareness, authentic feedback for future improvements, and increased sales.

Here are the steps to ensure the success of these delicious partnerships.

What is a Food Micro-Influencer?

A food micro-influencer is a person who has a few thousand followers on social media, whether on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok.

Their expertise in the food domain – restaurants, recipes, culinary specialties – and their media exposure through social media posts or “specific content allows them to influence and generate” engagement among “a community of” food enthusiasts or passionate cooks.

We refer to them as micro-influencers because their community is limited in scale on the Web: until recently, these content creators were considered to have between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. But the actual range in 2023 extends from 3,000 to 20,000 followers.

Above 100,000 followers, we talk about “mega” or “macro-influencers”. Below 5,000 followers, they are “nano-influencers“.

Why Recruit a Food Micro-Influencer to Promote Your Brand?

Who remembers the era of cooking blogs, culinary articles, or restaurant reviews and tests? While these contents were a major visibility axis a few years ago, social networks have now gained considerable importance in the sector of culinary pleasure…

Whether it’s TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, recipe videos and food photos are scrolling by. And even when you’re the chef of a grand restaurant, you can get involved by sharing a photo of a specialty on a medium or publishing a post. Now, as a chef, you don’t hesitate to post dishes and regularly communicate with your community of followers on social networks. The food universe and its influencers are everywhere on social media: it’s a communication trend that’s on the rise.

That’s why, in this sector, brands are increasingly implementing partnerships with micro-influencers in their marketing and communication strategy to promote their brand and products and boost their visibility among their customers.

Influencer marketing today presents significant viral traffic power. These influencers are the promise of more accessibility, authenticity, and thus increasingly shape young people’s consumption and lifestyle.

In fact, according to a Harris Interactive study: 8 out of 10 young French people say they have discovered a product, service, or restaurant on social networks thanks to an influencer.

Engaging micro-influencers and implementing influence campaigns for your culinary brand is an effective opportunity to:

• Humanize your brand, distributor site, your restaurant(s) or other establishment;
• Tell your story, your values, and amplify your “brand awareness”;
• Develop a solid follower community with a high engagement rate;
• Boost the visibility and awareness of your culinary brand;
• Boost your e-commerce site’s traffic while improving your conversion rate (and your revenue!).

However, there’s a catch. Using influencer marketing in the food industry requires implementing an effective strategy to limit unsuccessful marketing costs and maximize your growth opportunities.

How to Find the Right Food Micro-Influencers for Your Brand?

Here are 3 effective ways to find the right profiles:

Hashtags on Social Media

Searching by hashtags on social media (Instagram, YouTube or TikTok for example) is one of the simplest ways to find the right profiles for your social media campaign.

In the search bar of the social network, type the keyword or keywords that best define your activity / products, and the types of content sought by users. For example: food, foodlover, healthyfood, healthyeating, italianfood, glutenfree or culinary preceded by the hashtag symbol #.

Posts related to your field of activity will appear associated with the accounts of trendy food micro-influencers. However, this manual search can be a bit time-consuming, you’ll need to be patient to look at posts one by one!

Food Influencer Platforms

There are several platforms on the Web dedicated to influencers with a community of over 10,000 followers in your field, such as food.

Generally, influencers are classified by criteria: category/theme, number of followers, engagement rate, reach of posts…

You can search and extract a list of influencers according to your needs, but this is often very time-consuming.

Software that Matches Your Products with the Right Influencers

The Trustt SaaS solution allows brands and distributor sites to select and engage the best micro-influencers by sector type, particularly in food or lifestyle.

The intelligent selection tool matches product-influencer pairs and identifies the influencers who have the most affinity with your brand and its values.

🔎 Good to know: Trustt’s pop-over feature allows you to visualize the essential statistics of candidates for your campaigns at a glance.

Using Trustt ensures you recruit and engage expert influencers passionate about the food universe, who will disseminate high value-added UGC.

It means selecting influencers with an “audience that aligns with your approach, ready to” engage long-term with your brand.

It means choosing to collaborate with sincere micro-influencers, and obtaining authentic and rich reviews of your products.

Influencer Agencies

If you want to fully delegate your influence campaigns and the search for the right food micro-influencer profiles, there are specialized Web agencies in influencer marketing on the market.

The influencer agency handles the search for food micro-influencers for your brand and the implementation of your entire influence campaign up to the analysis of results. However, this requires a certain budget… and time!

How to Boost Engagement of Your Food Micro-Influencers?

Once you’ve selected your food micro-influencers, it’s time to set up your campaigns.

To start the collaboration, a classic method is to offer one of your products or an assortment from your range to each influencer. Whether it’s a product launch, a best-seller or a discovery / tasting pack, it’s an opportunity to create a first encounter between the content creator and your universe.

👉 The goal? For them to try it, concretely experience your brand, and share their opinion with their community of followers if they wish.

It’s the simplest method that allows establishing communication and collaboration gradually.

Then, if you want to go further in the collaboration, consider taking an individual interest in each micro-influencer and what they particularly like to do. Taking a genuine interest in the content creator and creating a relationship of trust between them and your teams improves the chances of success for a great partnership.

In other words, based on sincerity and commitment from both sides.

Taking an interest in the micro-influencer’s creations also allows you to better understand their universe, understand what type of post they prefer to create and their preferred formats (stories, Instagram reels, TikTok videos…)

Some will enjoy cooking and creating video recipes for their community of subscribers using your products, while others will prefer to create beautiful photo setups of your products with detailed reviews in the description.

If you’ve selected them, it’s because you appreciate their way of creating content with their universe, their excellent storytelling and their close connection with their audience.

The choice of these content creators also depends, of course, on their social media publications and/or the type of article or post they write on their culinary or lifestyle blog.

Giving each of them freedom and trusting them allows them to take more pleasure in their creation, while feeling more invested.

As a brand or distributor site, guiding them without imposing specific results significantly increases the chances that they will speak out in a spontaneous and authentic way. And their messages will be all the more impactful on their audiences!

🔎 Good to know: brands that use Trustt for their influence campaigns (via a custom Ambassador Program) benefit from a comprehensive dashboard to track performance on social networks. Collaborating with content creators is one thing, but it’s especially important to know the statistics of the generated UGC!

Like the Emile Noël brand which, to promote certain of its ranges, let members of its community freely create new recipes.

Indeed, the brand offered its community of consumers who are members of their Ambassador Program to test their famous (and delicious) green tapenade, in order to give a complete and authentic review, and share their feelings on social networks (or even create a recipe!)

60 ambassadors, including 60% influencers, were selected from the Trustt tool, to easily identify the profiles most affiliated with the brand.

Results?

👉 The product has gained visibility and notoriety;

👉 The brand has grown its subscriber community;

👉 More than 35 detailed reviews have been added to the product page on the site (with an average rating of 4.6/5);

👉 The content shared by these micro-influencers is free for reuse by the brand, which can distribute them on its communication channels.

Benefit from tailored support for your food influence marketing with the Trustt teams:

Book a Demo of the Tool