The ultimate guide to CPG influencer marketing

What is a CPG marketing influencer?

A CPG influencer has the power to influence your consumer’s opinion and purchase decisions.

As consumers look to influencers for advice in every part of life, creators are shifting away from the traditional one-niche approach. Social users look to influencers for book recommendations, workout regimes, and new recipes. They’re searching through a full lifestyle landscape of their favourite influencers, who have become the top-ranked influential resource for what to do and buy. 

CPG brands must tap into this broader territory, work with a variety of influencers, and see what data comes back. 

CPG marketing influencers are:

• In tune with followers’ needs and spending behaviours
• More influential than paid advertising according to LTK’s Influential Shopper Study
• The most cost-effective and trackable sales channel
• Excellent digital content creators and collaborators
• Able to tap into brand-relevant niches for specific campaigns
• A source of escapism, lifestyle inspiration, and knowledge 
• On-trend, business-minded, and adaptable

Influential Shoppers™ amplify creator sales and engagement by 2X.

What influencers want in a CPG Brand

To keep their loyal followers and inspire them to buy, influencers must maintain their authenticity. That means they have several things to consider before signing with a consumer packaged goods brand.

Here’s what CPG marketing influencers are looking for in brands:

How can your brand benefit from CPG influencer marketing?

Any CPG brand can benefit from influencer marketing. Whether you’re in pet food, grocery, cosmetics, cleaning products, home care, over-the-counter healthcare, paper products, or personal care, there are influencers ready to improve your brand perception.

Helping smaller CPG brands grow 

For lesser-known consumer packaged goods brands, influencer marketing helps increase their brand presence to reach new audiences and increase sales/traffic to their site. In fact, Kantar’s research shows that 60% of global consumers say they would follow a brand directly after seeing it promoted by a creator.

Influencer marketing can also help smaller brands make the most of their marketing spend through licensed influencer content. Over the course of your influencer campaigns, you’ll build a collection of licensed evergreen and reusable content that continues to convert across your owned channels.

Don’t have the budget for a full influencer campaign? LTK offers other placements at lower flat fees to help spread brand awareness.

Helping larger CPG brands scale

Larger brands are often more established in a saturated market, but it’s still critical to stay relevant and top-of-mind. Paid influencers help large CPG brands scale by expanding influencer campaigns for increased reach and revenue.

Through influencer marketing management, large brands build and maintain relationships with content creators and identify effective brand ambassadors to increase awareness and sales.

These brands work with us to develop a layered, full-funnel approach to scale their influencer marketing program with new influencers, test new channels and verticals, and create multi-channel campaign strategies.

Casting the most effective influencers for your CPG brand

Casting CPG marketing influencers is a complex process. Here are some best practices as you begin your search.

Overcoming CPG influencer marketing challenges

Many CPG businesses seek influencers on an independent basis. This approach can be tedious and overwhelming because you need to narrow down 30M+ influencers to find the right mix of best-fit influencers.

With substantial influencer data from an influencer marketing platform, the right lifestyle influencers can help you regularly reach niche audiences, improve brand perception, build brand identity, and set your brand apart in the marketplace.

By leveraging an influencer network platform and expert in creator management, you can confidently execute a successful influencer marketing strategy based on unmatched influencer data in the CPG sector.

Creating successful CPG influencer marketing campaigns

Consider these tips as you’re strategizing your first influencer campaign.

1 — Allocate enough budget

Make sure to allocate a budget that will allow you to meet all your campaign goals. Stretching a small budget across too many goals will likely yield an unsuccessful campaign.

2 — Be generous with offers and gifting

Give your influencers a way to incentivise their followers to risk leaving the brands they know to try your product. A discount code or offer is the way to get consumers on board.

Gifting can be a great way to start influencer campaigns on the right foot. This sweetens the influencer’s experience and gives them time to truly test your product and report back to their audience authentically. 

3 — Utilise social good campaigns

Partnering with influencers on a good cause associates your brand with values the influencer and their followers align with, builds consumer trust, and increases brand exposure by word-of-mouth.

4 — Grow influence

When managing your CPG influencer marketing campaign, return on ad spend and results don’t always happen instantly. Influence and reputation, just like with other marketing media, is built over time with lifestyle influencers. 

The LTK Score™ is a proprietary benchmark that identifies progress and areas for improvement to reach optimal performance. The LTK Score™ provides insights into how your brand’s influence ranks and the best opportunities to improve.