Kroger was the first company to launch a branded TikTok challenge. They have also successfully engaged influencers for events like Hispanic Heritage Month and partnered with publishing platforms like Funny or Die to product share-worthy online content.
But the brand also has built incredible social media success in its own right and much of all that success can be linked to Casey Smith. She is the social media manager for influencer and publisher strategy at the Cincinnati-based company.
Smith joined me on Winfluence to talk about the company’s influence success, her perspective on the dividing line between influencers and celebrities, Kroger’s process for creating engaging influence programs and much more.
If you enjoyed the insights on influencer marketing from Casey, please share the episode with a friend or colleague. Be sure to subscribe for new episodes posted twice each week.
Winfluence Podcast – Casey Smith Transcript
Jason Falls
Hello again friends thanks for listening to Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast. If you know anything about TikTok, you are familiar with the TikTok hashtag challenges. You may not know that brands can actually sponsor them and engage the Tik-Tok audience and they’re more natural mode of creating and consuming content. Kroger, the grocery store chain, was the first brands do one and Casey Smith is that brand’s social media manager for influencer and publisher strategies. Not only does she have a great handle on leading TikTok hashtag challenges, but engaging influencers across multiple networks and mediums. Kroger also has a publishing partnership with Funny or Die that has Jeff Goldblum is the main talent in the fun videos engaging Kroger associates. Casey’s first big success story at Kroger was growing the brand’s Instagram account tenfold by reshaping its content and of course, engaging influencers to spread the good word. She has a ton of insight on how to manage and build social media success using influencers and content creator partnerships. And she shares her experiences with this next on Winfluence.
Jason Falls
So Casey, it’s not every day someone whose core title and role is social media manager or in the social media management sort of suite. Not every day that someone with that job title gets to work on a project with Jeff Goldblum, I wouldn’t think that’s pretty cool. Tell me about that.
Casey Smith
Oh, yeah, that was probably five. Some of the most fun work I’ve done at Kroger and at any job, and probably thing I’ve done in my life. So the work that we do, Jeff Goldblum is through a partnership that Kroger has with Funny or Die. Funny or Die actually reached out to us a few years ago pitch to us, working with them when content series featuring a celebrity the initial celebrity at the time actually wasn’t Jeff Goldblum and someone else, and wanting to work with us in a series that would have, you know, the celebrity go shop at their local Kroger store, and then, you know, take their groceries home and make a great recipe. And then you know, potentially have some guest talent with it. And the first option they had, it actually didn’t work out. And they suggested Jeff Goldblum and it worked out so well he has such a great personality. And we work with him typically film in the Los Angeles area at our Ralphs stores, but you’re part of the Kroger family of stores. And you know, we just kind of pretend like it’s part of Kroger, and he’ll go on store and he has really great interactions with our store associates. And lets them kind of shine and show their expertise. And you know, how knowledgeable they are about you know, picking perfect produce for you know, whatever kind of recipe he’s making, or trying to figure out, you know, like what cheese to get from the cheesemonger and recommendations there. And then he’ll go back to his, his home for the video and a special guest, who will be like another celebrity talent will join him. And typically, that person actually suggests the recipe that the that the pair will make. And it might be like a family recipe or you know, something else. But then they’ll prepare that recipe together. And even though they may not be like, you know, chefs themselves or anything, it’s really just about kind of the connection and conversation that happened over preparing a meal together, and then enjoying afterwards. And we’ve been really happy with the content and the performance of it overall.
Jason Falls
So that brings to mind a really good question to kind of start off the conversation here. And Jeff Goldblum, obviously is a celebrity. Him being involved with Kroger is something I think we would normally fall under celebrity endorsement. Where do you think we should draw the line between something that’s a celebrity endorsement and then something that’s influencer marketing? Or do you draw that line? And why or why not?
Casey Smith
That’s a good question. And I don’t think we haven’t necessarily drawn that line at Kroger. yet. I think in this case, the partnership the way it came about was with Funny or Die, who’s you know, publisher content, you know, partner that we work with. So that kind of falls under and the work we do in the social media team. And then for celebrity endorsement, that might be something that typically comes about from like our media teams specifically. So I think that’s something we trying to work through and, you know, possibly improve that process over the next year, just partnering more closely with their media team and kind of understanding how we can take advantage of, you know, celebrity endorsements in the way that they maybe traditionally, we’re done at Kroger and then potentially incorporating those more in social media too.
Jason Falls
So do you think that the dividing line if we were let’s just hypothetically say we were going to divide the line between celebrity endorsements and influencer marketing just for the sake of argument? Do you think dividing those definitions might be, you know, if you’re known on more channels than your own, you’re a celebrity or and if you’re known just on your own channels, you’re an influencer? That’s, I don’t know, throwing that out for discussion. What do you think about that?
Casey Smith
Yeah, I think that’s a great way to look at it. I would also say there’s celebrities themselves can have influencer or be an influencer in some way. And almost that’s a way to very high level, categorize celebrities. And then like under influencer, and then almost I would say like celebrities that like top tier talent, where they have the most just name recognition. And like you say, that falls outside of social platforms. It’s just, you know, anyone kind of knows them from pop culture. But then below that, I would say, how some people refer to influencer, I would almost say, like, content creators, or YouTuber or Instagrammer, kind of like kind of categorizing them based off of the platform. They’re on in a way. And then thinking through like, Are they a macro level? You know, did they have an audience of like, the size? Are they more of like a mid tier or micro? And but I think in some ways they can all fall under the title of influencer.
Jason Falls
Sure. So you’ve been at Kroger for a while now. And I think you and your team have been engaging influencers for several years, I guess we should first get into the kind of the various campaigns you’ve LED. So people get an idea of kind of the range of work you’re doing. Tell us about the I guess it’s the first ever branded TikTok challenge and how that worked.
Casey Smith
Mm hmm. So Kroger ran the first ever globally first ever hashtag challenge plus campaign on TikTok. And so, a hashtag challenge. If you’re on TikTok, or even somewhat familiar with a fight, understand what those are. Maybe someone doing dance or even what the recent celebrity or celebrity persona on TikTok, where he’s listening to Fleetwood Mac “Dreams.” And he’s drinking cranberry juice. And people kind of recreate that as if it’s a challenge. Well, brands can do official challenges. And they will have a brand page within the app on TikTok. So that’s the typical hashtag challenge. The plus part of the campaign is that we actually had, in addition to that page that featured our challenge and information about it, it was a shoppable page so people could purchase products that were highlighted from the challenge and then also find their local Kroger store. The way we came about that was we were planning for back to school content, and just marketing overall for back to school and one of our primary audiences or people who are heading to college or heading back to college, they’re, you know, apologies college age students, and, and they were likely, you know, looking to stock up for their dorm room or their first apartment and they need some household items at no like organization type things for their dorm, as well as like really good snacks that they can get at Kroger. So, because of the audience we were trying to target with that and we considered you looking into TikTok and we set up some time with the team at TikTok and discussed, you know, what we were looking for the target audience we were trying to reach and to get a better understanding of their platform and what measurement they’d be able to offer us at Kroger for the social team, we definitely really like to look at brands lift measurement for our larger campaigns and our work. So they actually are able to offer that and they’re really impressed with the measurement detail that they were able to provide us with. So we move forward with the campaign. And we were the first brand to to run that specific campaign because it was a new offering at TikTok and we kind of you know, jumped on that just to try something different. And it was certainly a leap to try something different like that, but we felt really confident in you know, their partnership and what they were able to offer us and then I think what like really made the campaign successful overall is that we worked with for Gen Z creators to kick it off. So they all completed the challenge and and they were located different, you know, market’s Kroger stores, I mean, some of them are rough shoppers, some of them were actually one of them was here in Cincinnati, he went to UC and shopped at Kroger. And they completed the video in such a great way. And they would do the challenge and beat the video and typical like TikTok format where it’s like this really quick cuts in time to the music. And you know, just doing things that are very needed to the platform, because they were the experts on there. So it made sense to kind of, you know, work with them and sort of borrow their clout for the content versus Kroger trying to come into tik tok and not really having a presence or an audience there and doing something that would feel inauthentic. Partnering with them really just helped us kick off in a great way.
Jason Falls
I want to ask you, you know about how you handle with these influencer campaigns, especially on a you know, big publishing platform that’s, you know, global like TikTok I know the Kroger brand is I mean, you have multiple brands under the Kroger company umbrella are do you do you geo fence it? Do you geo target it so that you know if you’re if you’re under the label of Kroger, are you going to market in markets where there’s not a Kroger store? How do you handle that
Casey Smith
We’re able to geo target content, we also look for partners who are based where we’re at, we do have, we’re pretty national. And though we don’t really have a presence kind of in the northeast, or Florida and a little bit of like the middle of the country. But most people are familiar at least with one of our stores. So while we can geo target as to our main markets, we’re also flexible for reaching people outside of that because we do have some offerings of online shipped to home like shopping that people can do so even if they’re not living in one of our markets where they can physically visit a store and you could still shop with us online have our products shipped to their home.
Jason Falls
So I know you’ve been also you’ve worked on a campaign for Hispanic Heritage Month and engaged I believe beauty influencers around the pop up store, I think out in Seattle or something to create awareness for more than beauty products yourself. So I I’m fascinated, you know, with with that as well. But I really want to ask a broader question here. What’s the strategy cycle? Like at Kroger? I mean, does the the sales or other marketing team members come and say, Hey, we have to come up with ideas to drive more shampoo. So what do you got? Or? Or is it developing strategies that fit into a larger calendar or product support effort? How does the the need originate? And then take me through the kind of creative process to get to a good influence idea?
Casey Smith
Mm hmm. That’s such a good question. And I, I wonder and imagine, and how many other people can kind of relate to that you work in social media, where it’s sometimes you get requests, they’re like, Hey, we need this, we have to have this for XYZ this week. And next week, it’s another thing and it goes back and forth. And Kroger marketing has made a lot of growth and that department just in the past few years, we used to be a place where we would be very tied to essentially merchandising and what’s in our stores, what products are, what the different sales are. And all of our marketing was kind of based upon that and reflected that. And it didn’t really let us tell a consistent story over time. And that’s something we’ve been, you know, addressing I think over the past year, year and a half now. And ever since we kind of relaunched our brand is Kroger fresh for everyone, we were really trying to hone in on certain brand equities for Kroger of you know, just being a place where you have a great assortment of fresh produce and products, as well as having, you know, great convenience, utilizing our free pickup and things like that. So while we do sometimes get those requests about a beauty event in store and things like that, we’ve moved away from those a little bit. And we tend to stay, you know, we need to support these main messages and narratives that we’re going after. And instead to get more to get more return on investment to get more value for the work that we’re putting out so that everything kind of ladders up to those same consistent messages. And then campaigns might reflect so um, for example, we might be talking about like Halloween, and right now we do want to talk about value at Kroger and how just reflecting you know, current times and shoppers are looking for good value while they’re shopping and maybe they’re going to fewer stores right now they’re shopping just for safety concerns and they’re utilizing pickup or they’re just making one visit to a store you know every other week and and they’re looking for you know, good value on their grocery budget. So we understand we want to talk about value, high level and ladder everything up to that but we also want to reflect current times. So for Halloween, for example, we’ll we’ll talk about, you know, candy and meals and ways that people are celebrating at home to reflect current times, but also working some messaging through marketing that speaks on value, whether it’s kind of talking about a deal you can get there or just making the most of your grocery budget. And influencers can do that with their content, where they’re talking about how they’re kind of getting creative with what they’ve got. And they found a great deal at Kroger, or they’re, you know, utilizing an ingredient that they’ve got from the store. And they’re making multiple recipes with that. And that’s kind of how it starts to just show up in the the content that’s created to support those narratives.
Jason Falls
Nice. So Kroger, you’ve mentioned a couple times at Kroger obviously has an amazing internal marketing team. But based on the scale, and the and the geographic scale, even of what you’ve done, I’m guessing there are agency partners, maybe even some influence software solutions out there you’ve used along the way, tell us you know where you do reach out for support to pull it all together and and what you look for when you are reaching out to either an agency partner or a software solution when you do reach out to them?
Casey Smith
Mm hmm. So we do we currently at Kroger, we have a pretty small internal team on the social team. And for our enterprise like influencer support, that’s myself and working with an agency team. So we currently work with 360i, and they do both our influencer kind of management as well as our social content channels. So they’ll create that content. And I think, working with an agency, one thing I’m looking for and looked at while we were kind of going through the RFP process was an agency partner who understands that just a few things like the content that influencers are creating needs to you know, have the brand is the hero. And even if they ran a campaign, and they’re showing us example, that, you know, they had a great reach, and if the brand’s not the hero, people aren’t gonna associate the brand with the content that’s really valuable to us, we don’t want to just look at those social KPIs, you know, just did a ton of people see this, we want to understand that people saw that content and kind of took away that it was a partnership with Kroger and they should consider Kroger for the future. Or go shop at Kroger again. And, and then a think also looking for partners to understand especially with Kroger, how we own so many we have multiple stores under the Kroger family store. So trying to wrap their heads around that and be flexible with that because we own about like 15 other stores and do social content for overlap 11 of those. And, and then we also have our own private label brands. So we have the Kroger brand and private selection and simple truth brands. So they’re also sometimes needing to speak to those as well. And then I think one thing we value with influencer partners is longer term partnerships. So if that’s something that they’ve done in the past, I think that’s really great to see if they kind of understand that we’re looking for an authentic long term partnership with influencers that’s really important to us. And, and then I would also add, I think, for platforms specifically, and being able to, you know, get into the nitty gritty of like where influencer is if they have, there’s any information about like, other brands they have an affinity for, and whether it’s Kroger or some of our competitors, so we can think about how we might work with them or might pass on working with them. I think that’s really helpful. And I think, I think that’s it. But we’ve been really happy with everything we’ve done 360i thus far. And the TikTok hashtag challenge was kind of one of our first big campaigns that we worked on with them and they were you know, a great partner and trying to get us into doing something a bit new.
Jason Falls
Nice. Now, you you mentioned that you prefer for your influencer relationships to be you know, longer term relationships, but you’re also operating on a scale that I think challenges that in a lot of ways I mean you if you if you have a you know, a big national brand and you have to scale and reach a lot of people with your programs, you’re either using influencers with incredibly large followings or a larger number of micro or nano influencers that sort of add up to the large following. And your business is a transactional business. I mean, we’re talking straight up retail here. So I love the fact that you said you prefer longer term relationships, but you know, what do you have? What do you try to do, from the brand perspective to build those relationships with influencers when a have to use a lot of them probably to get what you want to get out of your budget. And be you’re also working through agency partners and, you know, software vendor platforms and whatnot to make those connections. I wonder, you know, what it is that you do to try to make foster those long term relationships from a big brand
Casey Smith
We’ve been working with. So we do a variety of longer term partnerships, as well as kind of one off partnerships. And we have what we call the Kroger collective, it was previously called like Kroger Influencer Council. And this started just when I started at Kroger almost five years ago now, and we’re actually still working with some of the same influencers who we, you know, first started working with about five years ago when we, you know, first did anything with with influencers and blogger partners and stuff. And, and we really just try to, we definitely work with bloggers who have a large audience and the two we consider for this collective. And so we do invest a good amount of money into this partnerships with them for longer term, and you have a partnership where we’ll be a contract for six months or a year at a time, and working with them on, you know, recipe content regularly on their blog and on their social channels. And then also try to work with them on some sponsored like Instagram story content, or extra in feed posts, and just kind of like shows them you know, shopping in store or making a recipe or picking things up like that. And we also tried to kind of foster that relationship by like, bringing them into the brand, how we can. And we haven’t been able to do it this year, due to COVID. But in the past, we would actually hold brand immersion days with our collective partners. So they would come into the Kroger headquarters here in Cincinnati, they’d spend maybe like two days with us, and they’d come in one, one evening, we’d have dinner and the next day, they would be with us at Kroger to really kind of immerse them into like behind the scenes at Kroger. And they would spend some time meeting with the like our brands team. And getting like insight into how Kroger identifies like new products to make and understand like food trends or things like that just because most of these people that we’re working with our food bloggers, so that’s something they’re like, naturally very interested in. And it’s personally really fun to like, hear about how we’re like trying to follow food trends and bring in like new snacks and you get a taste of everything. It’s very fun. And they get to experience that and get that kind of understanding. And then also meet with some other team members at Kroger who lead things like our digital efforts and share some note exclusive behind the scenes detail about you know, different changes we’re making to our pickup services or at home delivery. And then also spend some time with our Corporate affairs team to learn about Kroger’s community efforts and how we are trying to be zero hunger, zero waste. And that’s a big initiative we’re after to reduce hunger in the communities where we have our stores and also reduce all food waste within our stores. And so they can kind of like hear that from the company. And I think that really helps to like just foster the relationship. We you know, give them exclusive behind the scenes information about us. They get to learn about things before the average customer and then it’s also time for them to connect with us in person, as well as you know, other team members at Kroger and other leadership at Kroger so they can ask us questions, make suggestions for us and things like that. So I think that’s like one of the greatest things we’ve done to sort of foster those relationships.
Jason Falls
Sure. Now, aside from influence marketing, I know you were you know, one of the main point people behind Kroger’s growth on Instagram, I think you you helped take it from 10,000 fans to over 100,000 engagements went through the roof and all that but take take me back to starting that particular effort. What was the strategy to make that happen? I mean, no offense at all. I’m a very loyal Kroger customer. It’s the only place I shop for groceries. But I wouldn’t think about following the brand on Instagram myself. Now that might just be me being an old fogy. Or the fact that I’m not really a shopper. I don’t do coupons or anything like that. So I wouldn’t necessarily make the connection to do I should follow Kroger on Instagram. But what was the thinking behind it all? Was it you know, is that channel growth mostly Gen Z? Is it mostly shoppers? What was the thought process that went behind that tremendous growth?
Casey Smith
You say that and that’s honestly that’s how I felt at first about you know, Kroger on Instagram, I was like, are people gonna want to engage with us on this platform? And, but I always think it’s helpful sometimes to look at how people are successfully utilizing the platform, even outside of like other brands, and looking at the influencers we were working with and how they were utilizing it to share their recipe content. And Kroger has so much recipe content within our website, with the people, we partner with all these influencers, and in just custom content that we create to, and it’s really like a service for people to share this. So that’s certainly something we were focused on quite a bit to just show people like, you know, here’s useful content for you, we’re, you know, the grocery store, and you come here for us and a lot of people sometimes don’t know what they want for dinner, like that night, like it can be like three o’clock, and they still aren’t sure what they want for dinner that evening. So they can look at our feed and get inspiration for for dinner that evening. And then in addition to that, we also utilize UGC quite a bit, and I think that helped us tremendously with her growth, we would always see a lot of engagement on that content as well, just because people were so you know, enthusiastic to be featured in the content, but we’d also share things that are like fan favorites that we weren’t even quite aware of until we started looking. And so one of them is like, Kroger, chocolate milk is has a huge fan base. And it’s like a cool item for people they love it. So we discovered that by like being on that platform and seeing things that were tagged in or people are using, like our hashtag, to share about it. So you know, we share content for that. And also, you know, just people take photos of their their children while they were shopping, we always re posted those photos with like hashtag Kroger, cuties and things like that, and our audience on there, I’d say leans more like millennial or Gen X. So it is the people who currently are making those like grocery shopping decisions for their household, they’re probably also looking for, like, those easy solutions for meal time, which we try to provide with with our content and continue to be useful for them. And it also we can show how for like a convenient option for them and you utilize or pickup and services like that. And we we try to always stay away from anything that’s too focused on like price an item and makes them feel like they’re looking at, you know, like a print ad or something. So, you know, we mostly just want to be content that’s a service to the audience that sees it.
Jason Falls
Casey, thank you so much for sharing all this with us here on the show. Where can people find you online if they want to connect and get to know you?
Casey Smith
And well first, thank you so much for having me. This is great. Always fun to talk social media and influencer marketing. And I can be found at Casey Smith on LinkedIn as well as CaseyNS on Twitter. That’s N as in Nicole and S as in Smith.
Jason Falls
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time appreciate the insights.
Casey Smith
Thank you.