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Influencer Marketing For Restaurant: 7 Steps to Successful Campaign


So, you’ve decided to dive in and run your very own campaign with influencers. Influencer marketing can be a huge asset for almost any business, but it appears especially beneficial for restaurant industry.

Based on our real case study with one of Sydney-based cafes - Nutshell Hut, we've put together this step-by-step guide to making your influencer campaign a good success!

1. Choose the Right Social Media Channel. Choose one or two social media channels that will best convey your brand to people. For the most part, you can never go wrong with either Instagram or YouTube in the modern food space. All depends on your branding strategy. If you focus on aesthetics and your restaurant menu looks like #foodporn - choose Instagram for promotion. YouTube is a more suitable option if you need more demonstrations - recipes, master classes, interviews and more.

Nutshell Hut chose Instagram as it was most suited social media channel for achieving their campaign goals.

2. Identify Your Main Goals. Your main goal can be a higher brand awareness or increase in visits and uplift in sales metrics. Or you may already have a semi-large following on your social media account, but you want to establish a more productive collaboration with local influencers and stimulate higher activity across several social media accounts. Keep in mind, that you can always create a strategy that brings together all your goals. Depending on your goals, results can vary. Be patient!

For example, the main goals behind the Nutshell Hut campaign were: (1) generation of high-quality content, (2) collaborations & reviews from local influencers; (3) increase in visits and (4) higher engagement on their social media accounts (mostly Instagram).

3. Find Your Influencers. 3 factors to consider when choosing influencers to promote your restaurant include: (1) type of content – choose an influencer who posts quality and creative content in relation to food; (2) engagement level – look for an influencer who gets a high number of likes, comments, and shares because this shows that their audience is actively interacting with them and their content; (3) location – an influencer with millions of followers, but based in a different town or country, won’t be as effective as a local influencer with a smaller following.

Using Persollo "Influencer Directory" of 54,000+Influencers Nutshell Hut searched, filtered and evaluated profiles by countries, categories, number of followers and influencer engagement rate across different social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube). With Persollo's new feature Social Media Post Analyzer Nutshell Hut audited influencer for the quality of their audience, their engagement and compared them with similar bloggers, and also explored the demographic characteristics of influencers audience (it showed the split of audience by country, by global market, and by city).

4. Make Attractive Offer to Influencers. Going with paid influencer content is one way, but very often not the most effective strategy if you aim for authentic and genuine reviews and content. You need to think of how to offer influencers a great experience, which they’d love to talk about and would be genuinely excited to share with their friends and followers. For example, you can invite them for a FREE dinner, send them restaurant gift cards, invite them for special tasting events, limited time offering tied into a specific dish or food and etc. It will help build genuine and authentic buzz around your brand.

Nutshell Hut invited influencers for free breakfast or brunch. And they were delighted and loved it! High-quality content and "delicious" reviews confirms this (see gallery below).

5. Include Call to Action. Call to action is the chance to motivate influencers and their followers to take real steps toward becoming clients of your restaurant. CTA can take many forms depending on the context. For example, on a restaurant promotion the CTAs might look like: "Get a Free", "I Urge You To", "Get It Now!", "Order Now and Receive a Free Gift", "Try Our Free (Example) At", "Activate X Today!" and etc. Use action-oriented words and stress out the benefits of your offer.

Nutshell Hut experimented with various call to actions ("Get free delicious food, and refreshing drinks", "Get free coffee with every Big Breakfast", "Сlick here to book a table”, "Choose yours drink for today!", "Come and try our new Large Banana Pancake!" and etc.). They have used call-to-action buttons to promote free dinner, reservations and food tasting event in their delicious and trendy space.

6. Setup Clear Campaign Deliverable. You need to clearly define what precisely is the influencer expected to do for your campaign. Create a guide or manual that they can use when talking about your products, there should be deadlines and publishing schedule, content types, hashtags, and etc.

Nutshell Hut setup clear deliverables and its campaign on Persollo Marketplace was extremely successful. They received higher brand awareness and uplift in number of visits, widening of their target market and productive collaboration with local thought leaders.

7. Analyze Influencer Performance. You need to track and analyze influencers activities, content, and actual performance and provide continuous reporting on how your influencers have been active in promoting your restaurant and how effective their content has been. Using Persollo's Social Media Post Analyzer - you can get main engagement metrics and brand safety metrics (adult content, inappropriate words), extract Image labels and web references, analyse the comments on the post, analyze the image and even extract the image main colours and create mood boards. Social Media Post Analyzer makes a great start for your campaign, aiming for relevance, success, and proof of ROI.

Persollo analytics helped Nutshell Hut develop clear campaign goals, identify the tactics needed to achieve those goals, and the KPIs to measure the success.

Gallery

Content created by Persollo influencers for Nutshell Hut campaign

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