Blue Apron: 3 Ingredients For The Perfect Influencer Campaign
Blue Apron is delivering some great influencer inspiration. Learn how the brand is addressing multiple personas with one tasty campaign!
There’s nothing we love more than a great influencer campaign. In the past, we explored Tuft&Needle, Diet Coke, and Starbucks. Now, we’re back with Blue Apron, whose recent campaign is a great example of how to connect with multiple audiences.
When selecting an influencer to partner with, many brands will look for experts or thought leaders in their relevant fields. Not Blue Apron. The food delivery service could partner with chefs and foodies to tell potential customers just how great their recipes are. But, that’s not their goal. Instead, Blue Apron’s partners represent different personas within their target audience, conveying just how the brand benefits their customer’s lives.
Chances are if you listen to podcasts, you’ve heard of Blue Apron. The US-based food-delivery and meal kit service delivers fresh ingredients directly to their customer’s door, with easy step-by-step recipe instructions. The company truly understands its target audience, and where they are most likely to engage with potential customers.
Why We Love It: Blue Apron’s product is so wonderful because it makes enjoying a home-cooked meal accessible to all. There are so many use-cases that benefit from the Blue Apron service. Using the hashtag #blueapronpartner, the brand has collaborated with a spectrum of influencers, including parents, students, chefs, and individuals living with Diabetes.
Ingredient #1: Understand Your Audience’s Pain
Blue Apron’s recipes are created by chefs, but that’s not the value. The value is that these healthy meals can be prepared by anyone in just a matter of minutes. When it came to selecting influencers for a campaign, the brand didn’t pick chefs to endorse the quality of their recipes. They found individuals who represented their vast audience.
This type of influencer marketing strategy uses the audience’s pain to inadvertently promote the product.
Audience: Entrepreneurs
Running a business is revered for its freedom and flexibility. But, this independence requires hard work, often at the expense of personal time and well being. From freelancers to business owners, entrepreneurs will work overtime to reach their goals. Each day can be planned at a whim, making it hard to efficiently plan a meal. Blue Apron helps individuals with busy schedules fit cooking into their routine, by eliminating the need to go shopping for ingredients. With meal-prep and easy to follow recipes, a Curry-Peanut Chicken can be prepared in just 20-Minutes.
Audience: Parents
Cooking with kids seems rough. I can only imagine. You have to pick something everyone will like and make enough to feed an entire family. That alone seems like a full-time job. Many parents and especially mothers’ cooking responsibilities don’t just end at dinner. There are school events and holidays where food is expected and can be especially tricky for non-bakers. For Thanksgiving 2019, Blue Apron launched dessert recipes for the first time. Throwing a bone to all the novice bakers.
Audience: Diabetics
For non-diabetic individuals, this is not a use-case that would probably come to mind. Living with Diabetes has many restrictions, including meal-planning. This is something I never considered. Blue Apron partnered with the Amerian Diabetes Association to create a Diabetic-Friendly menu. There are some great dishes on the menu including;
Quinoa & Vegetable Fried Rice and Spicy Salmon & Orange Relish.
Who is the Blue Apron Instagram Audience?
Blue Apron has 310K+ followers on its official Instagram page @blueapron. 83% of the audience is female, the average follower age is 29, and the top city is New York.
Ingredient #2: Match an Influencer To The Audience
@missmustardseed, Entrepreneur
Maureen aka Miss Mustard Seed is a social media personality known for her enthusiasm for interior design and home painting. Her name Miss Mustard Sead comes from her business, Mustard Seed Milk Paint which is an all-natural, non-toxic paint formula for home and furniture. With a Klear score of 86, over 185K Instagram followers (94% are women), her followers see her as a design expert and come to her for inspiration and advice. Maureen’s partnership with Blue Apron exemplified how nice it is to enjoy a nice home-cooked meal, even if you don’t have the time to fully prepare it.
@beautifuldrea, Parenting
Drea Evans is a Mommy influencer from Raleigh, North Carolina. She shares content with her 58K Instagram followers about her family, and motherhood journey. Her past collaborations have included Baby Dove, Reading Egg, Play Nation, and Target. All brands which appeal to young mothers. 88% of her Instagram followers are women, and the most relevant hashtags between her and her audience are #momblogger, #motherhoodunplugged, and #candidchildhod. She teamed with Blue Apron to promote their new dessert menu just in time for the Holiday Season.
@t1dchick, Diabetes
Jillian Rippolone is a US-based influencer living with Type 1 Diabetes. With 30K+ followers on Instagram, Jillian shares content about living healthily with Type 1. Her brand collaborations are used to promote healthy lifestyle choices and quick tips for people living with Diabetes and have included brands such as Starbucks and Real Good Foods. Blue Apron has recently partnered with the American Diabetes Association, to release a diabetic-friendly menu. Jillian shared with her followers how Blue Apron makes her love of cooking easy with her dietary restrictions. And encouraged her followers to sign-up for Blue Apron by offering them a special discount code.
Ingredient #3: The Perfect Hashtag
The final ingredient for any influencer campaign is, of course, a #hashtag. It’s like the shaved truffle on top of a simple fettuccine, done right it brings everything together. Campaign hashtags are meant to convey to the purpose of the campaign, and what all influencers in the campaign have in common.
Blue Apron chose a simple and direct hashtag, #BlueApronPartner. This might seem like an easy choice, but it actually highlights the diversity of their influencers. The strength of this campaign is not in the curated content or professional-level food photographs, it’s in the diversity of partners the brand has amassed.
What Can You Learn From Blue Apron?
Lesson 1: The more the merrier. Think about including multiple personas in your influencer campaign.
Lesson 2: Influencer campaigns don’t need to just promote your product, they can also be used to share the benefit your product plays for your customers.
Lesson 3: Identify your customer’s pain points, and find influencers who share similar struggles. This is a great way for prospects to relate to your brands and see how your product can serve them.
Tasting The Success
Blue Apron’s partnership campaign might seem small in scale but the real prowess is in the ability to reach niche audiences. It shows that Blue Apron really understands who their target audience, and rather than screaming at a large crowd they want to have important conversations with relevant people.
#blueapronpartner Campaign Impact
- 40 Posts
- 47.7K Engagements
- 521K True Reach
- ROI $143.7K
Looking to discover niche influencers that will share your brand message with interested and engaged users? Talk to a Klear expert and learn how our platform can support your goals.