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.

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.

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.

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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.