CPG Playbook   //   October 30, 2024

More CPG startups are working with retail store influencers

From Costco to Target to Walmart, retail store influencers have become a mainstay on social media feeds.

With account names like Costco So Obsessed and The Queens of Target, these shopping influencers have built a following by showing off their grocery hauls or exclusively posting about the latest products and deals at their favorite retailer. Now, more CPG startups are striking partnerships with these retail influencers to help them showcase their products in stores. According to executives at these startups, this in-store footage tends to be more authentic than a polished video ad shot by the brand and often offers a clear call to action, telling people where in the store they can find these products. These types of creators are also more believable, as opposed to online influencers giving out a promo code in a generic video.

Jake Karls, co-founder of the chocolate brand Mid-Day Squares, said doing this type of influencer content is a “no-brainer” for a scaling food startup. “People love seeing these grocery hauls,” he said. “And the retailers appreciate seeing a brand is actually investing in succeeding in their stores.” 

Locating the product for the customer 

Mochi brand Sweety Ice Cream is one such brand that has relied on influencers to help promote its products in stores since its launch.

Tiffany Yang, chief marketing officer of Sweety Ice Cream, told Modern Retail the company began working with retail-specific influencers in June of 2020. “This was in the height of the pandemic and right after we launched in our first retailer, Walmart,” said Yang.

“Our approach is to introduce the brand and send [influencers] no-strings-attached samples as a start,” Yang explained. If the influencers love the product and post about it organically, the company turns it into a larger paid campaign. “That’s where we share retail-specific talking points to be incorporated into the content and caption,” she said.

Sweety uses a combination of agency and in-house efforts to seed and reach out to influencers. “We find that this combination is most efficient and allows us to discover new creators that otherwise might not have been on our radar,” Yang said, adding that the brand tends to work with micro-influencers “because they have an honest rapport and better engagement with their audience.”

This tactic was applied in August 2023, when Sweety launched its multipack in Costco stores in Los Angeles and Hawaii. “We worked with four influencers on paid campaigns which translated into Sweety selling out in all locations within three weeks,” Yang said. Social media content was made by several Costco influencer accounts, like Costco Mama and the popular Costco Does it Again page, which has 1.1 million followers. Most of these videos are centered around influencers highlighting the product’s arrival at the retailer or telling followers what aisle it’s located in. Some also show the nutritional labels or price of the product at their local store. Many also like to include the promoted product as part of their roundup of finds that day. 

“We had over 600,000 views from the campaign, it shows an influencer campaign doesn’t need to be large or expensive to be successful — you just have to pick the right ones,” Yang said.

Nicole Dawes, founder of healthy beverage brand Nixie, sees working with retail-specific influencers as one tactic that can be helpful in building closer relationships with its retail partners. To retailers, it demonstrates that a brand like Nixie is focused on harnessing its marketing efforts to drive in-store traffic.

“We are a very retail-centric brand, and we really focus on building out long-term relationships with our retailers,” Dawes said. “It’s also a relatively simple way to bridge online and offline marketing campaigns.”

While Nixie is sold at multiple retailers, including Whole Foods and Publix, one of Nixie’s important retail partners is Sprouts, which Dawes said has a very passionate shopper base. As such, Nixie is interested in working with Sprouts-focused influencers in particular.

When working with a new influencer, Dawes said, “The first thing we ask is where they shop. It’s important that they like our brand, but we also want to know what retailers are important to them.”

Dawes said Nixie currently works with a handful of micro “Sprouts influencers” and mainly activates these types of partnerships around new product launches. Sometimes, these posts are also leveraged for giveaways or contests. “We want to avoid inundating followers with the same repeated messaging,” she explained. 

The most recent campaign example highlighted Nixie’s new line of soda, which rolled out in Sprouts over the summer. Dawes said in-store influencer videos helped get the word out about where exactly it’s available in stores. That’s also changed over time; previously, Nixie was located within Sprouts’ Innovation section, but now it is moving over to the main soda set. As such, the brand is now commissioning a new video with an influencer, Dawes said, “to highlight where we used to be and where we are now.” 

The retailers themselves are not involved, said Dawes, but are supportive of these campaigns’ video shoots. “[Retailers] really appreciate that we’re highlighting the partnership, especially when it’s clear that the influencer you’re working with is also a fan of the retailer,” she said.

Dawes said it’s difficult for Nixie to attribute exactly how many sales have been driven by these retail influencers, given that the brand also usually runs a series of promotions around the same time to support a launch. Still, “our soda launch at Sprouts was an enormous home run, and this [content] was certainly a part of why,” Dawes said.

“An out-of-the-box strategy”

Like Nixie, many brands use retail influencers to ensure customers know where to find their products in stores — especially if their positioning changes over time.

About two years ago, functional chocolate brand Mid-Day Squares began tapping creators who post hauls from their favorite retailers. At the time, the Canadian startup was expanding into the U.S. by entering Target and The Fresh Market. 

Today, Mid-Day’s biggest in-store campaigns with influencers are at retailers like Target, Sprouts and Whole Foods. Karls said the brand also works with specialty grocery creators, like those who showcase Erewhon and Fresh Thyme Market. 

“Our biggest challenge is informing the consumer where our product is,” Karls said. Because Mid-Day chocolate is refrigerated, some stores stock it in the produce section while other stores will feature it in the dairy section or on a front end. The company partners with some retail influencers who tell their followers how they incorporate Mid-Day products into their lifestyle. “They can tell people about the benefits while saying, ‘And look, it’s available at Target and is actually on sale today,’” Karls said.

Karls said the return on investment isn’t as immediate as the direct sales increase they might see when they run digital ads directing people to their DTC sites. But over time, there is an increase in in-store sales, he said. Target is one successful example of this; the company tends to experience a sales increase the week a large creator posts a store video on Instagram or YouTube. “So now what we do is actually adjust our forecast internally based on the campaigns,” he said.

It can be tricky to scale these posts across many retailers because brands want to avoid sending too many creators in at once. “We don’t work with that many in-store creators, probably about four or five at the moment,” Karls said. “We’re currently at 9,000 stores, so it’s not possible to do this for every retailer.”

“You have to do what you can to create velocity, and the only way to do that is by building these out-of-the-box strategies,” he said. “I expect more brands will start doing these types of campaigns.” 

Nixie founder Dawes said the most important criterion for these partnerships is finding people to work with who are existing fans of the retailer. “We’d never ask an influencer to go somewhere where they don’t normally shop,” she said. “We’re just asking them to film it.”