When Miranda Bucciero, owner of Pelham’s Flour Power bakery, wants to promote a new pastry, she has a couple of choices. She can run ads on social media with photos of tasty treats and hope those ads wind up in her followers’ feeds. She can also consider working with local influencers and invite them in to try the pastry and post about it for her followers to see.
It’s not always clear if a social ad campaign delivers results, Bucciero says. But when an influencer’s campaign is successful (which could be anything from increased views to revenue generation) or goes viral (which is a difficult feat to achieve), it’s obvious. “We’ll get a crowd of people looking to order the same item.” While not every partnership pays off, Bucciero says that Flour Power has “worked on a couple of things with local influencers,” and is often contacted by other influencers who want to work with her. The use of content creators as marketing proxies between a business and an audience is growing in popularity. Although the strategy is not without its pitfalls, if executed properly, it can be useful for Westchester businesses of all types.
What is influencer marketing?
This type of business promotion was born out of the rising popularity of consumers using apps like TikTok and Instagram instead of search engines like Google. The social strategy is used by brands big and small, national and local, including in Westchester. In fact, 86% of businesses with more than 100 employees are expected to partner with influencers for promotional campaigns this year, according to data from the social media management firm Sprout Social. That’s up from less than 65% in 2020. Westchester has just over 600 businesses with that level of employment, making the odds fairly high that most of these companies will at least be curious about utilizing that type of partnership.
86% of businesses with more than 100 employees are expected to partner with influencers marketing campaigns this year.
The core concept behind influencer marketing involves a well-known or trusted personality, such as a celebrity, giving a product or service a stamp of approval. Or, at least, using their media platform to discuss the item or business, in an attempt to encourage their audience to purchase the product or service.
These days, influencers (also called content creators) tend to be social media personalities who’ve developed a following with a specific audience. They use that clout to tout certain products, using their “influence” to spur sales. While this tactic sounds good in theory, it can backfire, especially when an audience feels that an influencer isn’t being opaque about their relationship with a product or service. Despite the risks of running a disingenuous campaign (or one that could be perceived as such), plenty of businesses—such as local restaurants and even hardware stores—use this form of promotion to their advantage.
A plus of influencer marketing is that it can be quite cost effective compared to traditional advertising. Instead of paying for ads on local television or on a variety of social media platforms, business owners often have the option to compensate influencers with free products or services.
The benefits of using content creators
For small and medium businesses, particularly those with a local focus, there can be some clear advantages to working with influencers.
“It gets you in front of a demographic and audience that you might not reach on your own,” says Francis Volpe, co-founder and head of marketing at Y Not You Media, a Port Chester-based digital marketing firm that pairs local businesses with content creators. “If the influencer has built a true, organic fanbase, they’re trusted by their audience to put the right product or service in front of them,” he says. As such, this type of campaign “can grow your audience exponentially.”
According to Volpe, trust is key to an influencer’s ability to, well, influence. That’s particularly true on a local level, where many influencers are also active community members and is a significant reason why businesses have started to use firms like Volpe’s to both vet and connect them with creators.
“There’s often not a lot of hard analytical data as to what your ROI would be as a small business owner working with an influencer.”
He adds that many Westchester-based businesses will reach out to him to see which local influencers he can connect them with—and specifically, which influencers align with their specific brands. From there, an introduction is made and a contract is drawn up, outlining exactly what the influencer will do for the business, and how they’ll be compensated. The contract could stipulate, for example, that an influencer will make three social media posts across their TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube feeds over the course of one week, and will be paid $500. If the campaign is successful, the business will see a jump in their followers on social media, heightened engagement on the influencer’s post, and an increase in foot traffic into their business.
Volpe has been brokering successful connections between his client Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Company in Mamaroneck and select content creators since May of 2024. In that timeframe, he has assisted the bagel shop in partnering with 32 influencers that when combined, account for roughly half a million followers. In exchange for product, the influencers agreed to post two to three videos on the business, what they ate when they visited, standout items, and more. Volpe points out that it’s hard to directly track who walked through the door because of an influencer video. “Without some form of promo code to keep tabs, it’s difficult to allocate the return on investment in that way. The team can’t ask every single person how they heard of the business,” says Volpe. However, the increased brand awareness is the biggest payout for this type of strategy, he says, and the ROI dollars will follow naturally. To date, Brooklyn Bagel’s influencer collaborations have resulted in close to one million views on Instagram, reaching a consumer base the brand would likely not have been able to reach on their own.
What can go wrong
Ideally, the right influencer would have a sizable, organic audience and partner with a business looking to promote its products to that audience. The influencer would be able to show the business owner their audience, analytics, and channels, and give an idea of how the campaign could convert to sales. Documentation is created, the campaign is organized, and if all goes well, a business sees a return on its investment in the form of increased sales, visits, or engagement.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to identify which creators are legit, and which are not. That’s because many influencers are simply trying to earn money, or get free products, while exaggerating or outright lying about the size of their audience—or even worse, may have an audience populated entirely with fake followers.
Volpe estimates that as many as half of so-called influencers use fabricated stats to inflate their metrics to increase their payment; among influencers who prefer to be paid in cash vs. products, some charge hundreds or thousands of dollars per post. Business owners can be misled by alleged influencers into shelling out large quantities of free product, or cash, only to see few, if any, sales materialize. That, in most cases, is the biggest risk that business owners face when working with influencers. Moreover, quantity doesn’t neatly convert to quality. If social media users see multiple influencers posting the same content with identical captions, it’s immediately flagged in the consumer’s brain as insincere.
It’s important to note that 20 businesses were asked about their experiences with influencers for this article and 19 of them declined to comment because they felt that sharing their negative experience could result in retaliation—such as their businesses being boycotted by the followers of the influencers.
Tips for working with influencers
While it’s possible that an influencer partnership could end up being a bust, there are things that business owners can do to try and make the most out of a potential relationship.
Thanks to influencer marketing, Brooklyn Bagel in Mamaroneck now has nearly one million views on Instagram.
Bucciero has become particularly adept at working with influencers and figuring out which ones are phonies. Her advice? Know your customer base and ask for hard numbers. “Have analytics and information about your followers,” she says. If an influencer’s audience is largely in a different geographic region or outside of her target demographic, she adds, “the relationship won’t do my business much good.”
To increase the chances that you’re working with a pro, Volpe suggests doing some basic homework. That means looking at an influencer’s output—their profiles, the types of posts they’ve done for other businesses, and the resulting views and engagement those posts received. It may also be worth doing a reference check by contacting those businesses and asking about their experience with the influencer before taking the next step.
As for things to watch out for, Volpe says that if the metrics—namely, the views—on an influencer’s content are all roughly the same (for instance, if each of their posts has around 3,000 views), it could be a sign that their numbers are faked.
“I work with and know a lot of small business owners,” says Volpe. “I’m very protective of them. I understand how hard these business owners work, and it bothers me when they spend money on [someone] without getting [the results] they’re hoping for.”
Volpe boils his advice down to this: Do your due diligence. But also, don’t be scared off. Influencer marketing may not result in a homerun for every business every time, but if used properly it can be effective. People listen to online personalities they trust, and if business owners can tap into that and utilize it to help build trust in their own brands, it can be a win-win.
“It works wonders. It’s powerful. Especially at the local level,” says Volpe. “Even if that influencer only gets a few hundred views, it packs a punch.”
