The influencer industry reached $16.4 billion in 2022, with more than 75 percent of brands having a dedicated budget for influencer marketing. Partnering with influencers on social media has become a key tool in helping bars and restaurants reach their target audience, increase brand awareness, and achieve measurable outcomes. However, there are several critical factors that should be taken into account in order to maximize the benefits of an influencer partnership. In this article, we walk you through the steps for how to create a strategy to set your bar or restaurant up for success.
Step 1: Define Your Goals & Target Audience
The most important first step when creating any marketing strategy is defining your goals: What do you want to achieve with influencer marketing? Depending on your brand, this could be local or national awareness, foot traffic, online orders, reservations, generating reviews, or even securing content to repurpose on your own social media channels.
Once your goals are clearly defined, it’s time to determine your audience: Who are you trying to reach? A juice bar catering to Gen Z and millennials will likely have a different target demographic than a storied steakhouse. If your audience is local, you will look at different metrics and measurements of success than if you’re targeting a national audience for a chain. Reaching a local target market will involve partnering with more niche influencers with hyperlocal audiences, whereas national targeting gives you more flexibility to choose influencers with wider audiences.
Next, consider where your target audience is most engaged, and use this to inform which social media platforms to activate. Instagram and TikTok are perhaps the most widely used platforms in terms of influencer marketing for restaurants, but depending on your concept, you may also consider activating on other channels from Facebook to YouTube or LinkedIn. The key is to identify which platforms make the most sense for your specific brand presence and audience. If targeting Gen Z, TikTok and Instagram will be your primary platforms. Instagram is key for millennials as well, while Gen X and Baby Boomers are more active on Facebook. As a professional platform, LinkedIn can be valuable for things like B2B marketing and reaching trade audiences.
Step 2: Identify The Right Influencers For Your Brand
Once you’ve determined your goals and target audience, it’s time to begin the process of finding the right influencers! A key aspect of determining which influencers to partner with will be your budget. This will impact the size of the influencer you’re able to partner with, as influencers have varied rates based on location, following size, engagement rate, and other metrics. While many influencers are willing to partner for trade (i.e., food and drink in exchange for posting about your business), you may find that other influencers will provide “media kits” with defined rates. Don’t be afraid to respectfully negotiate, and as always, stick to what makes sense for your brand.
For many standalone bars and restaurants, partnering with local “micro” influencers—those who have a smaller, but highly engaged following in a given area—for trade could be sufficient for meeting your goals. That said, it’s also important to consider what’s in it for your partner. Do your best to guarantee they have a valuable dining experience if they are not receiving monetary compensation. For instance, if you’ve invited an influencer to highlight your full menu, ensure they receive enough comped items to create value and make compelling content, and cover the cost of things like parking or valet. If you’re promoting just one new item, offer additional items to be comped or provide payment. It’s also wise to plan on providing gratuity for the staff who take care of the influencers, as they are visiting as their job and may not always consider the expectation to tip.
The next consideration is ensuring the influencer’s content style—both in terms of visuals and tone of voice—aligns with your brand and the desired style for your campaign. Some influencers use professional cameras, while others use iPhones; some draft cheeky, two-sentence captions, while others draft detailed, multi-paragraph text structured for SEO. Some specialize in video content and/or may have a photography background, whereas others may have a more “amateur” or less curated style. It’s up to you to determine your preference and what is the right fit for your brand. Note that while you can engage influencers who have different styles for different partnerships, it’s important that their style and tone always align with your goals.
Beyond the style of content, it’s crucial to examine the influencer’s following and engagement. Do they have a follower size that will help achieve your goals? If you’re a national brand, you may seek an influencer who has at least a few hundred thousand followers, with audiences in several areas throughout the country. Alternatively, if you’re a local brand, a “nano” influencer with a few thousand followers and good engagement can be just as effective for achieving your goals.
Evaluate how many people view their content and how many actually engage (the “engagement” is the total number of likes, comments, shares, and saves). These types of metrics are public and can be seen by viewing their past posts. An Instagram Reel from an influencer that garners 50k views but only 100 engagements is not particularly effective. Generally, an engagement rate between one and three percent is considered average. Social media management platform Hootsuite has a helpful guide for different metrics to calculate engagement rate.
However, when considering audience and influencer selection, engagement is not the only factor to keep in mind. It’s also important to consider the demographics of the influencer, as well as their overall audience. Diversify audiences as much as your goals allow—whether geographically, by age group, gender, or other demographics relevant to your brand—in order to reach a wide range of consumers within your target market. Diversifying your pool of potential influencer partners also allows you to do this, so ensure that you take this into account when scouting influencers to promote your brand.
If your restaurant has a varied menu, speaking to meat lovers, vegans, and seafoodies alike may be equally as important. Also consider activating influencers of different ages, races, body types, and beyond. This is especially essential when targeting Gen Z, as they have shown that diversity in all facets is highly valuable to them when it comes to growing affinity for specific brands and products. For example, many influencers like to diversify their content by pairing luxury experiences with affordable experiences. Because of this, a casual dining establishment can often benefit from the audience of a luxury influencer. It’s important to think through influencer selection holistically.
As far as actually finding influencers, this can be done manually, or through assistance via influencer marketing software.
On the social media platforms directly, you can find influencers by searching hashtags and keywords such as “San Francisco foodie,” “cocktail blog,” or other search terms related to your brand and location. Once you find a few influencers you like, or are on track for what you’re seeking, their profiles can lead you to finding similar influencers via the suggested accounts icon or dropdown arrow on their profile near their bio.
If you are considering an agency, assess if they have invested in an influencer marketing platform such as Klear or Captiv8, which provides the ability to search much more extensively.
Step 3: Connect With the Influencers
When it comes time to facilitate an influencer partnership, start by making the initial outreach. This can be done on the social media platform itself via direct message, through email, or with influencer marketing software.
The approach varies by preference and platform; for example, on TikTok, you can’t DM people who don’t follow your page, so it’s best to email them if they have an email address listed. On Instagram and Facebook, if the influencer doesn't follow your page, your DM will likely go to their message requests, so be mindful that influencers may not always see your DM. Some influencers will list their email or preferred method of contact in their bio, so it’s always wise to note their preference. If you strictly want the partnerships to happen organically, you can also wait for influencers to reach out to you first if your page has organic traffic, but keep in mind this is not likely to happen on a consistent basis.
When making initial outreach, clearly outline the expectations and deliverables from both ends before proceeding to drafting an agreement. Be specific about what payment or trade will be exchanged; this will be informed by the budget you determined during your goal setting. In terms of covering the cost of food and drinks, determine how exactly this will be done: will you set a specific dollar amount, provide a gift card or voucher, or outline how many of each item will be comped? Also, know where you can and can’t be flexible—it may be more cost-effective to provide additional appetizers than an extra bottle of wine. If you’re doing trade only, understand that you and the influencer are equal partners.
Given that the influencers will be selected in part based on their content style, brands should allow influencers to take as much creative freedom as they’d like. That said, the creative direction should be ideated and discussed up front to determine if both parties are comfortable with the desired parameters. If you feel compelled (especially for paid partnerships), you can request to see the content ahead of posting for revisions and approval.
Step 4: Execute The Partnership
A key to any successful influencer partnership is to determine if you would like your agreement to be a signed contract, an unsigned campaign brief, or a written agreement via messaging channels like email or direct messages.
Signed contracts are best when confidential information is involved, there’s a high dollar amount being exchanged, there are legal requirements, or if you’re a large brand.
An unsigned “campaign brief”—a document outlining the scope, key messaging points, compensation or trade, and other details about the partnership—works as a vehicle for ensuring that the correct information has been provided to the influencer but is not an enforceable legal agreement.
A written agreement via messaging channels is most common for bars and restaurants, as there is usually only minimal trade involved and it is a more casual exchange. Regardless of which method you choose, ensure that the influencer knows all brand tags, keywords, and hashtags to use when posting their content. It’s also important to confirm that the restaurant or bar team is fully up to speed on the influencer visit, what to expect, and what is being exchanged so that the experience goes as smoothly as possible for all parties.
Be sure to follow any legal guidelines for influencer marketing. For instance, a brand should never pay an influencer for an obligatory positive review; instead, the influencer should always highlight their true opinion and experience. Partnerships must also be explicitly disclosed: “When it comes to influencer marketing, the FTC's rules state that influencers must reveal their relationships with brands within their posts. Followers need to understand whether what they're seeing is an ad or an organic post by the influencer. Violating the rules can lead to penalties, fines and legal fees.”
It’s also important that the influencers are following the same industry and legal guidelines that your business would be required to follow. For a bar, this might apply as it relates to encouragement of overconsumption or underage drinking. Don’t let the uncharted territory and legalities of influencer marketing deter you, but certainly keep the legal requirements in mind when activating influencer campaigns.
Lastly, be a good partner. Influencer partnerships thrive on trust, communication, and transparency, as these influencers are invited in to provide an honest review of their experience. It also pays to build a rapport with influencers who go above and beyond and that you have success with. It’s mutually beneficial to have trusted influencer partners who you know produce quality content with solid metrics that you can invite back for future campaigns.
Step 5: Measure the Success
The final step of an influencer partnership is to evaluate the success of the campaign. It’s important to think about what success looks like specifically for your brand, which should be informed by your initial goal setting. Success could be a certain number of impressions, engagement on the influencer’s posts, the number of reservations booked as a result of the campaign, or the number of new followers on your page. Determine which metrics mean the most to you, and research platform and industry benchmarks relevant to your brand. If you have no specific focus, then tracking impressions, engagement, and new followers are a good place to start.
Moving forward, consider how success can be better measured in the future. Should you offer a custom coupon code for each influencer to share with their followers so you can track which campaigns led to reservations? There are all kinds of ways to measure success, but determine which metrics are most relevant to your goals, and consider making adjustments as needed.
To Summarize
Leveraging the power of social media influencers can be a valuable tool to help market your bar or restaurant. Defining your goals, finding the right influencers for your brand, acting as a good partner, and using metrics to measure your success will help ensure you’re able to make the most of your time and budget and inform future strategies.
Cole Roberts is Director of Social Media Services at Carbonate, and Ashleigh Pierce is Social Media Manager at Carbonate. Roberts has a diverse background working with brands across entertainment, CPG, hospitality and food and beverage verticals. Pierce has experience with various media types, specializing in social media management and influencer marketing. Carbonate is a brand communications and creative services agency specializing in food, beverage, hospitality, lifestyle, travel and food tech. To learn more about Carbonate and its services, visit CarbonateGroup.com.
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