Perry’s Ice Cream: Influencer Strategy

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a central function of online/digital marketing. This form of social media marketing uses the reach of individuals to help promote products and reach new markets.  Many people are still unaware of influencer marketing and how it plays into larger campaigns. It can be useful for brands looking to expand their brand awareness, promote a new product, or reach a new audience.

We recently worked with Perry’s Ice Cream on a seasonal influencer campaign to promote their seasonal ice cream flavors in their expansion markets. Perry’s is a well-known Buffalo, NY ice cream company and a great way to expand their brand recitation into other markets is to utilize influencers. We used local influencers to target the Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Raleigh areas where Perry’s ice cream is sold in stores but didn’t have a local tie.

Influencer Selection

When selecting an influencer, you first need to determine a budget. This budget will define the content type and reach of the influencer you can work with. There are different levels of influencers ranging from 10,000 followers to millions of followers. At the lowest level, the micro influencer has between 1,000-100,000 reach and focuses their content on a specific interest.  Macro influencers have between 100K and 1 million reach. A mega influencer has over 1 million reach and is often a celebrity. In addition to the reach of the influencer, you must consider what platform you are prioritizing. Video content for TikTok and Instagram reels has a higher cost than an Instagram feed post.

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Perry’s was targeting smaller markets, so we choose to focus on micro influencers. This type of influencer tends to be an everyday consumer sharing tips, tricks, and finds with their audience. For this campaign, we looked for micro influencers who had an interest in food. Our target platform was Instagram, and each influencer was asked to create a feed post and a 3-story series. We selected five influencers each located in one of the expansion markets. From there, we gave each influencer a flavor to focus on and a corresponding posting date. This campaign ran from October to December and featured all five seasonal flavors. We choose Instagram because this platform is most used by the influencers and users in our target areas. This also allowed Perry’s to reuse this content on all their social channels.

Measuring Results

An important part of any campaign is how we measure the results. Success for an influencer campaign can be defined in different ways. A key metric for influencer campaigns is the EMV (earned media value), which is an assigned value to different actions taken on social media content. The EMV is often compared to the cost associated with the influencer’s post. Link clicks and website traffic are two other major metrics. The number of people who see an influencer’s post and then click the link in their stories or in their bio lets us know that the post was successful or that the content is relevant to that influencer’s audience.

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Perry’s seasonal flavors are limited editions which are only sold in the fall and the winter. This specialty product comes at a time of year when many consumers are shifting from summery foods to more warm comfort foods. Using influencers to promote the seasonal flavors gets consumers thinking about ways they could incorporate them into their holiday gatherings. The goal of this campaign was to increase brand awareness for Perry’s and have content created that could be repurposed on their social channels. The content created by the influencers accomplished this goal and provided Perry’s with authentic content that they can now use on their social channels!