In the past, supermarkets used to offer free food tastings at stands, a straightforward method to persuade consumers towards a product. Now, in the age of digital transformation, there is a way to extend this experience to thousands of people, encouraging them not just to try products together with friends but also to recommend them both offline and online.
In this article we will show you some challenges of the food & beverage industry and how you can ovecome them with influencer marketing. We will show you examples how a succesfull campaign can look like and what tips we have for 2024.
Tackling Tough Times: Inside the food & beverage industry
Starting the year 2024 there are some challenges the food & beverage industrie has to face. Besides unavoidable and recurring issues like political influences, rising costs and the rising of e-commerce, there´s also the conscious food culture. It puts pressure on the industry because of the strong desire for healthy, sustainable, and ethically produced food. Companies must adapt their production and supply chains, communicate transparently, and meet other growing expectations of the consumers. But also the pandemic brought some changes. Then there are, of course, changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, like, for instance, supermarket tastings. You hardly see stands in supermarkets anymore, and people have become more cautious. Despite our love for trying things for free and buying what truly appeals to our taste buds, this marketing method has become increasingly rare.
Influencer x Food & Beverage
The question now is, how can brands overcome these challenges? Our solution: influencer marketing! Food content is a hot topic on every social media platform and can be done by any creator, it fits in everyones content. There are always some innovative ways to present food content in a entertaining way. Let it be it challenges that go viral and everyone wants to participate, special food recipes or hacks for followers to try out. Brands can choose basically every influencer for a campaign, if they integrate the product correctly. There are some influencers that only try out specific products besides their lifestyle content. But also of course amateur cooks that show easy recipes to try out or the „michelin“ cooks that create content for the aestetics. The online world has much to offer for the food & beverage industry.
However we should never forget the offline world. In our trnd community we have thousands of nano influencers, people who like to speak with their friends and families about things they try out. Our recent survey in Germany with over 4k participants about their behaviour with food & beverage products proofs: 95% of the people we asked say, that they like to recommend products. So whenever they like a product they also enjoy recommending it to their friends and families, by talking to them or also online in form of User-generated content. We also discovered a pattern in the survey, 96% of the respondents have already bought something because of an recommendation. The results show, that word-of-mouth marketing can be very usefull for this industry. It also helps overcoming challenges like the conscious food culture because the consumers educate themselves and learn more about the products in a very authentic and trusting way.
75% like to try a product before making a purchase decision
Speaking of overcoming challenges, 75% of respondents stated that they like to try out food & beverage products before making a purchase decision. With less and less supermarket tastings it seems that its not so easy to do that. Except that we have a way to let people try out products they are interested in and even motivate them to share their recommendation not only offline with their inner circle but also on ratings on review platforms and online on social media. Let us show you how we do it!
In our trnd community we have over 800.000 consumers all over europe, we call them nano influencers.
They can participate in projects and try out all kinds of products. Afterwards we motivate them with dedicated and individual e-mails and microsites to either
The goal of our campaign with Pesto Mutti was to raise awareness for the brand and increase authentic ratings and reviews for the products. With 3.000 nano influencers in Italy, people who cook on a weekly basis pre-made sauces and did not know the brand very well yet, we achieved an online impression of over 7.5 Million!
See more results here.
Or in Germany the brand Eismann, which is specialized in the direct delivery of frozen foods to households, wanted consumer insights, familiarise people with the brand as a company and to generate valuable UGC on social media and honest reviews through nano influencers. To accomplish this we selected new customers that were cookery enthusiasts and had a deep-freezer. They created over 6.000 content pieces but also an offline reach of 400k.
See more results here.
Important in influencer marketing is not only how you can measure your influencer marketing campaigns but also to know what you can measure. For Café Royal in France we were able to see how high the ROI of our campaign is. 3.740 unpaid nano and micro influencers who like to drink coffee and own a coffee machine tried the products and spread the word about it. In cooperation with our partner circana we measured a ROI of 5,44€.
See more results here.
Our tip for 2024: Nano influencers!
Many challenges that the industry faces can be overcome with the help of influencer marketing. Especially with nano influencer brands profit from the high level of authenticity and trustworthiness, a high engagement rate, strong ROI and real recommendations from real people that really tried out the products. Many people say, that their purchase desicion is influenced by recomendations from their inner circle.