Just about every night, while I’m watching TV or reading in bed, something on her phone will inevitably make my wife giggle. Or crack up, laughing. We share a similar sense of humor, so eventually I cave and ask, what’s so funny? Check your phone, she’ll respond. I’ll click on the notification and, even though I’ve told her many times that I don’t have that app, it will be a link to a TikTok video. Should I just download it, already?!
TikTok has grown to be more than just funny dance videos, of course. It’s a marketing machine. Despite the threat of being shut down in American, marketers can’t ignore 150M monthly active users. This is especially true for businesses in the food industry. A whopping 48% of people between the ages of 18-29 use the app for creating, watching, and sharing short viral videos (Quesenberry, 2025, pg. 186). For this demographic, cooking and recipe videos are among the most popular. Ever hear of TikTok Pasta?
On January 28, 2021, food blogger MacKenzie Smith, @grilledcheesesocial, posted a 30-second how-to video featuring an easy baked pasta dish using fresh cherry tomatoes, basil, and feta cheese. Smith quickly gained over 40,000 followers and, within 24 hours, her video had a million views (Taylor, 2021). The TikTok Pasta phenomenon was born, and grocery stores took note. In a Vogue article that March, “What Makes a Food Go Viral? Inside the Explosive Popularity of TikTok’s Feta Pasta,” author Elise Taylor points out that, after the video went viral, demand for feta cheese skyrocketed by 200% at Harris Teeter grocery stores (2021).
Restaurants, bakeries, cafés, delis, grocery stories, and any business involved with food would be doing their business a disservice by not joining TikTok. According to Hootsuite, short-form videos can drive brand awareness and bring products to life for the intended audience (Isreal, 2023). Who’s the audience? People like my wife — self-proclaimed “foodies” that do most of household shopping and cooking. TikTok can both educate and entertain this highly-engaged audience.
Sure, TikTok is the ideal platform to showcase unique process and delicious products, but the platform also makes it extremely easy to advertise. TikTok One, their creative platform tool, provides an intuitive way to inspire marketers and find potential collaborators. Social media influencers love TikTok. In fact, 68% of social media influencers use Tik Tok, making it the third most popular app choice behind Instagram and Instagram stories (Quesenberry, 2025, pg. 141). In addition, advertisers can discover important engagement metrics without having to pay for services like SproutSocial, Rival IQ, or BuzzSumo.
As a creative professional that works with several businesses in the food and retail sectors, it may seem odd that I don’t have TikTok. At the very least, I should be following trends! Still, every time my wife sends a new link, I ask to watch it on her phone. I can’t help it — the videos are irresistibly engaging. It would be easy to just download the app on my phone. I suppose the same could be said for so many food service professionals. Maybe they just need a better understanding of how TikTok can help their business. Perhaps the better question isn’t should we download TikTok, but when.
References
Israel, S. (2024, December 29). 7 types of social media and how each can benefit your business. Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. https://blog.hootsuite.com/types-of-social-media/
Quesenberry, K. A. (2025). Social Media Strategy: Marketing, advertising, and public relations in the consumer revolution. Rowman & Littlefield.
Taylor, E. (2021, March 1). What makes a food go viral? inside the explosive popularity of TikTok’s feta pasta. Vogue. https://www.vogue.com/article/what-makes-a-food-go-viral-inside-the-explosive-popularity-of-tiktoks-feta-pa
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.
Haley Eklund, @theconnecticutlife.
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.
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%
Sisters Snacking follower demographics.
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.
In this hyper-digital world of augmented and artificial reality, many of us look to create memories we can hold onto. We’re physical beings, and touch creates a vivid sense of recall. Fujifilm is looking to fulfill this basic human need with Instax, a line of instant analog cameras. Here’s how it works: aim the camera, snap a pic, and wait for the printout. The photo develops as, in the words of Outkast, you “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” For those of us that grew up in the 80’s, the experience of holding a photograph is pure nostalgic gold.
To get more Instax cameras into their customer’s hands, Fujifilm is looking to increase brand awareness through paid ads on their social media channels — a smart, if not ironic, approach. Because TikTok helps connect our physical and digital worlds, it’s the perfect app for Fujifilm to reach a young and engaged audience. Their paid media approach appears to be working, but by monitoring and measuring the metrics of a specific ad, we’ll be able to analyze the campaign’s effectiveness and identify ways to optimize their Return on Investment. (Blanchard, 2011, pg. 197)
Campaign Objectives
Through a series of short 6-second videos on TikTok, Fujifilm is attempting to generate awareness of their latest camera, the Instax Mini 12. In the TikTOk Creative Center, we can gain additional insights about their campaign objectives. For example, the U.S. ad is set to prioritize “Reach”, and they have a “High” budget — representing ad spend over $50 per day — reinforcing the notion that they are looking to reach a wide audience. They’ve also published the same creative ad with the objective set to “Traffic,” which indicates they're running an A/B test. This will allow Fujifilm to observe which ad has higher engagement through likes, comments, and Click Through Rate (CTR), perhaps against a lookalike audience in a different geographical location.
Creative & Targeting
The ad we’re analyzing features a group of young friends posing on a purple couch for a group selfie. As the picture prints out, the couch starts to grow and move beneath them, paying off the large headline, “fill your world with joy.” The music is upbeat and the visual is unexpected in a quirky way, creating an emotional connection that works with the intended audience of Zoomers and Millennials. I love the fact that the background is 80’s-style wood paneling. It’s a nice retro touch that helps create a nostalgic vibe, potentially expanding the ad's appeal to an older audience.
Results
Fujifilm’s Instax Mini 12 ad is engaging TikTok followers. Though we have no way to tell how long the ad has been running, it has received 9K likes, 37 comments, and 62 shares at the time of review. The Click Through Rate (CTR) is in the top 26% of the industry average. Unfortunately, we can’t see the actual Click Through Rate, but the available metrics indicate that the campaign is succeeding when compared to ads within the same industry on TikTok.
Even better, both the total number of clicks and retention rate (which TikTok lists as “remain”) is within the top 1% of the industry average. If this was a Facebook ad, we'd be able to track the "hook rate," or the percentage of people that watch the first :03 seconds of the ad. (Denney, 2025) The TikTok equivalent, "remain", shows that 8% of the audience viewed the ad through the first second, and only 4% stuck around for 2 seconds.
This metric makes me wonder if the top 1% ranking for "remain" is accurate, or if this metric is extremely low on TikTok. Either way, there's an opportunity to increase the length of time that the audience views the ad.
Ways to Optimize
The Instax Mini 12 ad accomplishes quite a bit in :06 seconds, but there's easily room for improvement. I would be curious to see if a :15 second spot would be more successful. This would enable Fujifilm to communicate more features, and tell a better brand story. I would suggest performing an A/B test with both video lengths. By tracking the results, the Fujifilm marketing team can allocate a larger budget to the more successful ad, and pause the less engaging ad. This will help reduce the Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and enhance the Return on Investment (ROI).
Another improvement might be to incorporate a short voiceover of the body copy, “Say cheese! The Instax Mini 12 is here to fill your world with joy!” The voiceover, along with a caption, could help increase the rate of retention, and would establish a brand tone of voice for those that have sound turned off.
Last, while the ad’s content is fun and engaging, it would benefit from a clear Call to Action (CTA). Right now, it simply ends with an animated visual of multiple Intax Mini 12 cameras floating above the Instax logo. A simple CTA such as “Learn More” would help direct users to Fujifilm's landing page, supporting the campaign's objective to bolster brand awareness.
References
Blanchard, O. (2011). Social Media ROI. Pearson Education Inc.
Denney, D. (2025, January 16). How to Analyze Facebook Ads Data the Right Way (The 2025 Guide). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCsty8R0UaA
Polischuk, S. (2025, January 10). How To Analyze Facebook Ads Performance Like A Pro. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqYslgQdhV0
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.
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.
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