Social Media Analytics

May 6, 2025

Uncle Matt’s Freshly-Baked Influencer Marketing Strategy

Uncle Matt’s is a bakery in Sandy Hook, CT. The owner, Matt Kirshner, is a pastry chef that trained at renowned New York City establishments like the Russian Tea Room and the Essex House Hotel. He has a worldly view of baking that isn’t common in a small town, however, his bakery has become known as somewhat of a neighborhood coffee shop. The reputation doesn’t match the high quality of Matt’s delicious breads, desserts, and other baked goods.

To draw more affluent customers from surrounding towns, Uncle Matt’s needs to elevate their brand perception in the marketplace. Enter, the influencers. By creating authentic content that resonates with their followers, social media influencers can significantly amplify the reach of a digital marketing campaign. (Thony, 2024, pg. 60) But, choosing the right influencers is crucial to the success of any partnership. In this case, they need to have a love for and appreciation of freshly baked croissants, macrons, cookies, and other delectable pastries. Influencers that have built trust and credibility in the competitive food category can increase brand awareness and engagement for Uncle Matt’s.

This is an overview of how I developed an influencer marketing strategy for Uncle Matt’s bakery. I outline appropriate influencers that will help meet specific goals, list a few ways to measure KPIs for success, and layout some of the challenges of tracking metrics for influencer campaigns. Ultimately, it's a starting point to form professional relationships, learn from, and optimize for future partnerships.

Strategic Influencer Approach
With over 3,000 followers on Instagram alone, Uncle Matt’s has respectable reach and a decent engagement rate on social media. But, the objective of this influencer campaign is to increase brand awareness — Not many people know about the bakery outside of town. One of the best ways to expand reach is to feature influencer content in their own social media feeds. By creating an ambassador program, both Instagram Reels and TikTok will provide opportunities for influencers to visit the bakery in person, and share their experience with larger audiences. To get a better understanding of Return on Investment, I want to find both a Nano-influencer with a reach of 1K–10K followers, as well as a Macro-influencer with a reach 100K–1M followers. Nano-influencers usually have the lowest Cost-per-engagement (CPE), but this approach will allow us to test other important KPIs as well, such as overall reach and number of impressions. (Burchill, 2025)

Obviously, the selected influencers need to be authentic and aligned with Uncle Matt’s friendly neighborhood brand. We also want to elevate the perceived value of Uncle Matt's products, so they have to appeal to a sophisticated audience looking for premium baked goods. Their content will be short, trustworthy customer review-style segments. With these parameters in place, I can easily find a range of influencers to choose from, even in our small state.

Who Brings Home the Dough? Influencer Selection Process
I want to find two influencers to test for future ad optimization. Uncle Matt’s has never run paid ads, so finding the right influencers is imperative. The wrong influencer can turn people away and create brand dissonance. They must be credible within the food and travel category — especially in the Tri-State region — and have a friendly, approachable, and affable personality. In other words, their personal charm needs to come through the content they create. From a metrics standpoint, engagement rate is a priority over follower count. The people that follow them need to be motivated to visit Sandy Hook and try Uncle Matt’s baked goods.

I started my search with HypeAuditor, an AI-powered platform that helps agencies find, analyze, and manage influencers. Using the “Influencer Discovery” function, advertisers can “shop” for their ideal collaborators. For Uncle Matt’s, I initially set the search parameters to ensure a Connecticut state audience reach of 1K-10K followers (Nano-influencer), both male and female with an age of 18+. After trying a few search terms, “Connecticut Foodie” served up the most relevant results. HypeAuditor populated a list of influencers that I was able to research further based on platform, number of followers, engagement rate, and type of content.

Influencer #1: Haley Eklund
Among the influencers that piqued my interest was Haley Eklund, @theconnecticutlife. While she doesn’t seem like a typical food blogger, her Instagram profile mentions that she’s a “lover of Coastal New England,” and that she’s simply sharing her favorite spots in Connecticut. Of course, many of her favorite spots are small restaurants, ice cream parlors, and cafés. Considering the smalltown charm of Sandy Hook, Haley’s interest in both local food and travel makes perfect sense for a partnership with Uncle Matt’s. Some of the metrics I uncovered in HypeAuditor include:

Engagement Rate: 3.08%
Avg. Likes: 596
Est. Reach: 3.3K

These numbers aren’t phenomenal, but they’re above average for Nano-influencers on Instagram. (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2025) More importantly, Haley seems to have a tone of voice that’s appropriate for Uncle Matt’s brand, which is low key and approachable. Her photos and videos are high quality, she describes her adventures clearly and with a bit of intrigue, and she always encourages her followers to visit the places she has been. This component will be critical to getting people from surrounding towns to travel to Sandy Hook.

Two other metrics that really stood out to me: average views and account growth rate. Haley’s posts are seen by an estimated 16.76% of her followers, which HypeAuditor describes as “significantly above average.” Essentially, her Instagram posts are viewed an average of 6.6K times by her followers. In addition, she averages 32 comments per post, meaning people engage with her.

Haley's estimated reach, according to HypeAuditor.

Source: HypeAuditor. Expected price range: $50-$140.

Last, Haley is gaining quite a few followers every month. Her Instagram account is growing at a rate of 16.68%, which is significantly higher than the typical growth rate of 10.52%. With an estimated cost per post currently at $90, we can potentially earn a cost per engagement (CPE) of only $0.15. That means working with Haley won’t break the bank, and Uncle Matt’s can likely get a nice return on investment.

Influencer #2: Sisters Snacking
Since this would be Uncle Matt’s first social influencer campaign, I want to A/B test a different personality with a broader reach. HypeAuditor is a great tool, but I kept finding accounts with similar content, reach, and metrics. By setting up a TikTok business account and creating a brand profile for Uncle Matt’s, I was able to search for influencers on their new TikTok One platform. Similar to HypeAuditor, I used the “Explore creators” functionality to find potential collaborators based on location, reach, and engagement rate. TikTok resonates with a younger audience that's looking to discover new experiences, and I want to see if their followers are also more likely to engage online.

One of the accounts I discovered is Sisters Snacking, @sistersnacking, a group of four sisters based in New York City, Connecticut, Boston, and New Hampshire, respectively. They travel extensively and have over 400K followers on TikTok alone. A few of the metrics that impressed me:

Followers: 412K
Engagement Rate: 7.91%
Median Views: 25.6K
Active Followers: 84.27%

Of course, the high reach and engagement rate comes at a cost: Sisters Snacking charge at least $650 per post. That doesn’t mean a collaboration won’t be worth the investment — Their most popular video has over 11 million views! Just as impressive, many of their organic TikTok posts reach over 2 million views. Plus, 48.51% of their followers watch at least six seconds of their videos, and 5.93% complete the videos entirely, putting them within the top 27.68% of influencers on TikTok. What does this mean? Simply put, they create great content that a lot of viewers love to watch.

Sisters Snacking may be relatively expensive, but there’s no doubt that they make engaging content that resonates with their audience. Unlike Haley Eklund, they also create first-person reviews, allowing their personal tone of voice to shine. If my client agrees to partner with them, I’ll be able to provide more creative direction when creating the brief in TikTok. For example, I can define unique items on Uncle Matt’s menu for them to try and review. Their honest, down-to-earth reviews are quick, informative, and well-produced, creating a sense of FOMO for their captive audience. In addition to awareness, they have the potential to increase foot traffic to Uncle Matt’s for a younger audience that’s looking to get out and try snacks in unexpected places.

Sisters Snacking feature videos that are fun, approachable, and incredibly engaging.

Uncle Matt's Competition
It's important to note that Uncle Matt's competitors are successfully using influencers to drive traffic to their businesses. While researching potential candidates, I came across several food bloggers that documented their trips to other bakeries. Fancy Bagels in Plantsville, CT, for instance, worked with Bald Bites, @bald_bites, in January to promote breakfast bagels. It was a smart marketing collaboration, built around National Bagel Day, that resulted in over 200 likes and comments. Bald Bites has 13K followers on Instagram, so it was most likely an affordable collaboration. At the very least, our client should be informed and educated about the possibilities that strategic partnerships with influencers present, especially when his competition is already taking advantage of the marketing opportunities.

Challenges and Solutions
Return on investment is crucial for Uncle Matt’s to consider, however, tracking the financial effectiveness of an influencer campaign can take time. Sales cycles for brick-and-mortar can be seasonal and take longer to calculate for small businesses, making it difficult to attribute conversions in real-time.

On the other hand, tools like HypeAuditor, TikTok One, and Instagram Insights can provide tracking data and in-depth analytics to help overcome some of these challenges. We can measure precisely how well the influencer's content resonates with their target audience. When compared against sales, metrics like reach and impressions can help gauge the impact of the influencer campaigns. Plus, our multi-platform approach will enable us to reach vastly different audiences, allowing us to quickly pivot if one doesn't work well. (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2025) As time passes, we can leverage other tools like Sprout Social and BuzzSumo for social listening, and gain a better understanding of brand sentiment in the marketplace.

There's potential to drive and track conversions in the future. For example, we can create a limited-time offer for our influencers to highlight. With an affiliate program, a link to redeem the offer online would make it easy to track CTR and actual conversions. Strategically, I would like to avoid a value-driven approach — It can make Uncle Matt’s audience reliant on savings to visit, which can detract from the brand’s premium quality in the long-term.

Conversions aside, brand awareness is the most important objective for our influencer partnerships, initially. I'm recommending Haley Eklund and Sistsers Snacking specifically because their reach and engagement rate can help elevate Uncle Matt’s reputation. They also have the potential gain "Earned Media Value." In the context of influencer marketing, EMV equates to the estimated monetary value of the exposure an influencer generates for a brand through social media content. Our client will appreciate understanding how much they would have to pay for similar reach and engagement through traditional advertising channels. Finally, after creating content that resonates with a broad audience, we can repurpose it to share in Uncle Matt’s organic social media feed, their e-newsletter, and in a press release for traditional media like trade publications, newspapers, and even local radio.

References

Burchill, A. (2025, January 22). Influencer marketing statistics to know in 2025. Dash, Digital Asset Management (DAM) for Growing Brands. https://www.dash.app/blog/influencer-marketing-statistics

Influencer Marketing Hub. (2025, January 30). Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2025. https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-benchmark-report/

Qudsi, I. E. (2025, January 16). The top 5 influencer marketing trends for 2025. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2025/01/16/the-top-5-influencer-marketing-trends-for-2025/

Ryan, H. (2024, July 26). HypeAuditor platform overview. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpsJIgy2ox0

Thony, S. L. (2024). The Marketing Campaign Playbook. STK MKT Entertainment.

March 15, 2025

Selling Space at Edmond Town Hall

Edmond Town Hall is a 1930's Georgian-style historic building in the heart of Newtown, Connecticut. As the name suggests, it once served as the town hall. Today, it's a community gathering place that shows movies and live performances in a 500-seat theatre. However, very few local residents realize that Edmond Town Hall also has rental space. Guests are welcome to rent the theatre for private screenings, a full gymnasium for sporting events, or one of several historic rooms for galas and weddings. Edmond Town Hall wants to generate awareness of their available space and, more importantly, get people to rent them for their next event.

Facebook is a great paid media platform to help Edmond Town Hall target their ideal audience segment and help create conversions. First, Newtown has an aging population, and Facebook tends to skew towards an older audience. Next, Facebook allows businesses to geo-target their audience and deliver ads to a specific region, which is preferred for a local establishment. Edmond Town Hall already has an advertising budget based on their 2025 goals for the available spaces. Setting up an ad campaign with clear objectives will enable us to target their audience effectively and maximize their Return on Investment (ROI). Finally, we can track the results to optimize future targeting and ad spend.

Setting the Objectives & Audience

Make no mistake, this campaign is about driving rental sales. Engagement and brand awareness will hopefully grow, but Edmond Town Hall will measure success based on financial outcomes such as net new sales. (Yahoo, 2011, pg. 211) Fortunately, Facebook allows us to set campaign goals immediately, and we can even designate the conversion location to drive sales on their website.

Targeting the most appropriate demographic will be crucial to increasing the campaign's efficiency. Edmond Town Hall is looking to serve local residents first, since it's partially funded by local municipality. We set the geographical targeting to Newtown, CT, with a radius of 15 miles. This will allow us to target our unique audience better, which will also help to optimize Conversion Rate (CVR). In this case, conversions take the form of users renting space online. In the future, we'll be able to retarget the audience that previously rented space, potentially increasing conversion rates even further.

Most likely, customers will be renting space at Edmond Town Hall for celebrations — birthday parties, engagements, and weddings — or fundraisers and special galas. Therefore we set the minimum age to 25, and included audience interests such as parties, weddings, and kids activities, in addition to entertainment, dance, and theatre. Ads that show up in the feeds of the wrong audience will result in lower Click Through Rates (CTRs) and Conversion Rates (CVRs), and fewer sales. Interestingly, the average CTR and CVR for the Travel and Hospitality industry are only .9% and 2.82%, respectively. (Irvine, 2024) We will set those benchmarks with our client, and explain that the targeting or creative can be adjusted, if needed, to hopefully exceed those goals.

Placement, Budget, & Reach

Lucky for us, the budget and timeframe have been set. Our client has $300 to spend over the next month, which equates to $30 per day. With the geographic and demographic parameters defined, Facebook estimates that our campaign will reach an estimated 349,800–411,600 people on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Facebook Audience Network. This amounts to 398–1,100 views per day, representing a relatively specific audience, but less than 10 conversions per day. While that seems low, Edmond Town Hall only has 5 spaces to rent, and they aren't available every day. 300 actual conversions over 30 days would exceed their goals, by far, which is why Cost Per Click and Conversion Rate will be our most important KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. (Thony, 2024, pg. 50) Considering the cost to rent each space ($450 – $2,000 per day), and the low advertising budget, one month will provide a great trial period to calculate their return on investment.

Creative & A/B Testing

Given the budget and timeframe, it wouldn't make sense to test too many variables at this point. But, we do want to take advantage of A/B testing in order to refine our target segments in future campaigns. One way we can do that is to test video ads versus static ads. Since Edmond Town Hall has multiple of rooms to rent, a carousel might work well to show the range of spaces available. This ad will be somewhat straightforward:

Headline
Host an Event at Edmond Town Hall

Copy
From birthday parties to business meetings, and cultural affairs to fundraising galas, Edmond Town Hall offers a variety of spaces for your next event. Our historic 500-seat theatre creates an extraordinary setting for a private screening. Need a gymnasium for your sporting event? We've got that, too. From small get-togethers to large weddings, check out all the spaces that Edmond Town Hall has to offer.

CTA Button
Book now

Images (Ideally hire a photographer)

On the other hand, video often shows a higher engagement rate. (Beveridge, 2025) This might be a more a successful creative approach. We'll create a short :30 spot to test, featuring all of the same rooms shot with drone videography. Voiceover with captioning will explain all of the available amenities. The video will run simultaneously within the same ad set as the carousel ad. By keeping the headline, ad copy, and call to action the same, we can easily see which creative media format works better. The use of video might also help determine if there is a younger audience — new parents, for example — that's interested in renting space.

There's a lot to consider when planning a paid media ad campaign, even on Facebook and Instagram. But, with clear goals and objectives, we can align on success metrics with our client to help figure out a proper return on investment. The targeting focus for Edmond Town Hall will be a highly-specific geographical and demographic segment. That way, we can reach the desired market, optimize conversions, possibly retarget engaged users in the future, and manage the budget efficiently.

References

Beveridge, C. (2024, January). Paid Social Media Advertising: A beginner’s guide. Semrush Blog. https://www.semrush.com/blog/paid-social/

Blanchard, O. (2011). Social Media ROI. Pearson Education Inc.

Hootsuite. (2023, March 20). Social Media Metrics You Should Know. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RAvd-ng8Ew

Irvine, M. (2024, September). Facebook ad benchmarks for your industry [data]. Wordstream. https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/02/28/facebook-advertising-benchmarks

NestScale. (2023, November 21). Facebook ad metrics that actually MATTER in 2024 (How to analyze FB ads the right way?). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVz-8jAzn0g

Thony, S. L. (2024). The Marketing Campaign Playbook. STK MKT Entertainment.

Yakob, F. (2022). Paid attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World. Kogan Page Inc.

February 21, 2025

Navigating NATO’s Organic Social Narrative

NATO has been in the news a lot lately. Otherwise known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the transnational military alliance includes 32 members, including the United States, and was established in the aftermath of World War II. The security pact is simple: each independent member state agrees to defend each other against attacks by other parties.

No doubt, member expansion and the current situation in Ukraine has led to heightened tensions between NATO and Russia. In addition, support for NATO has been heavily debated since 2018, when President Donald Trump began threatening to pull America out of the alliance. (Tatum, 2018) As you can imagine, NATO’s brand reputation has taken a hit — that will happen when the leader of the free world questions the United States’ commitment to defending its allies. Can social media help shift the narrative?

Goals and Objectives

NATO is extremely active across all their social media channels, including Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and even flickr. They often share more than one post a day to each platform. On Instagram alone, they’ve added over 3,400 organic posts since joining in 2017. (Yes, I scrolled all the way to the bottom.) Though NATO is a military alliance, their social media presence functions similar to a non-profit organization. They aren’t looking create conversions through sales, but have a herculean task of driving member support, managing public relations, and sustaining member loyalty. (Blanchard, 2011, pgs. 24-27)

Social Media Situation

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, NATO has been on a social media blitz to clearly define their role, answer public questions, and defend their purpose. Their YouTube page, for example, highlights an 8-minute video explaining why NATO was created, and how it helps to manage world crises. Beneath videos of NATO’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there’s an archive of videos expounding on its history — undoubtedly an attempt to assure the global public that NATO represents the good guys. Public Relations efforts like this represent a necessary campaign to combat Donald Trump’s criticism of member nations.

Perception

Unfortunately, public opinion is hard to sway, and many of NATO’s best social efforts have fallen short. Hootsuite’s social listening functionality shows that NATO has a 47.1% negative sentiment, compared to only a 4.3% positive sentiment. That’s worse than any president’s lowest approval rating, ever. (Harry Truman: 22% from 1951-1952, in case you were wondering.) This is not a small sample size, as engagement with NATO's brand across all channels represents more than 3M users, representing an enormous amount of reach. Moreover, negative sentiment spikes every time NATO is mentioned by President Trump in traditional media, and the long-term trend is heading in the wrong direction.

You wouldn’t glean such negativity by following their social media feeds. Their content includes striking photography and videography of military drills from member countries. The most recent video contains a simple infographic containing a list of items that are “in” for 2025, like “Supporting Ukraine,” and “Strengthening unity among 32 Allies.” The much shorter “out” column shows two items: “Russian forces in Ukraine,” and “Destabilizing acts by malign actors.” Infographics are a great way to increase brand visibility and are easily shareable. (Thony, 2024, pg. 26) As of this writing, the Instagram post has 9,358 likes and almost 300 comments. Engagement rate is not the problem.

From an organic perspective, NATO seems to be doing everything the right way. They post high-quality content that’s informative and visually appealing. Short, impactful videos also help to capture attention. And, the reaction to their social feed is overwhelmingly positive, regularly getting over 10,000 likes, comments, and shares from their 1.5 million followers on Instagram, and 1.8 million followers on Facebook. Most importantly, in my opinion, they are defending their stance and holding true to their brand values. This only goes to show the stronghold that President Trump has over the political narrative in our country. Democracy used to be much easier to defend.

Redirecting the Narrative

Moving forward, NATO should certainly continue certain elements of the strategy they’ve devised — post frequently, use appropriate hashtags, and stay consistent with their visual and verbal tone of voice. (Wilson, 2024, para. 7) The general population gets a powerful glimpse into their global efforts. However, there is also a great opportunity for NATO to utilize social media in a way that’s going to help reinforce and redirect their narrative. First, they don't need to post multiple times a day to each channel. That's overkill, and it may actually deter engagement. A more sustainable approach would be 2-3 posts per week on the channels that are most impactful. Based on the available metrics, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are all working well. NATO can prioritize these channels and focus less on X, where the political commentary can be polarizing.

In order to optimize their content strategy, NATO can create user-generated content (UGC) from NATO members and soldiers. The Secretary General gets plenty of airtime on mainstream media but, from an organic standpoint, it would be more powerful to hear directly from those with their boots on the ground. What are they fighting for? NATO can encourage members to create and share their own photos and videos in the field. NATO can share this content in their own organic feeds. This would help tell a complete story and facilitate engaging conversations with civilians and possibly even legislators.

The data shows us that sentiment for NATO is negative, despite their enormous reach and positive engagement rate. A more emotional connection can be established by encouraging people to engage with real NATO members. They can repurpose their short UGC video segments to populate all of their social media channels, as well as their e-newsletter updates, that can help foster a sense community among NATO members, civilians, and politicians. (Thony, 2024, pg. 28) The idea is to continually reinforce the brand’s positive message on a more personal level.

Last, if they are to turn sentiment around in the media, there needs to be a concerted organic media effort to communicate with legislatures in the United States. Members of Congress, both in the House of Representatives and the Senate, have to understand the importance of NATO if they are to publicly defend it. When it comes time to vote, I can’t think of a more impactful statement than a stream of testimonials from soldiers around the world, representing democracy and standing up for freedom.

References

Blanchard, O. (2011). Social Media ROI. Pearson Education Inc.

Tatum, S. (2018, July 18). Trump seems to question US commitment to defending all NATO allies | CNN politics. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/17/politics/trump-nato-fox/index.html

Thony, S. L. (2024). The Marketing Campaign Playbook. STK MKT Entertainment.

Wilson, C. (2024, December 20). Navigating the Social Media Algorithm for Organic Reach. Home. https://www.robineaumedia.com/blog/navigating-the-social-media-algorithm-for-organic-reach

Yakob, F. (2022). Paid attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World. Kogan Page Inc.