Stella & Chewy’s

Stella & Chewy’s is a premium pet food brand committed to offering best-in-class nutrition to help pets thrive. It believes that pets aren’t just animals—they’re family. Stella & Chewy’s goal is to help pet parents in making one of the most important decisions when it comes to their fur children: choosing the best food.

Because Stella & Chewy’s raises the bar in the industry, its target audience is dog and cat parents who go above and beyond for their pets. Ideal customers are actively looking for premium ingredients and solutions that not only taste excellent but also support healthy nutrition.

Influencer marketing and influencer-generated content are important for the company’s overall marketing goals because they’re the most powerful way to start authentic conversations with pet parents on social media. Not only do influencers create high-quality content featuring the brand’s products, but because these influencers actually feed their pets Stella & Chewy’s, their followers trust influencer opinions of the brand.

Prior to using Aspire, Stella & Chewy’s was using another software, but it introduced limitations, such as making discovering new influencers challenging. Also, the other software didn’t offer reporting for Instagram Stories, which was a priority for Stella & Chewy’s. The brand experienced a big gap in analytics.

Overall, this software made it difficult to even consider scaling influencer marketing efforts. As a lean team, Rachel Bindl, Digital and Social Media Manager, and Zoe Kharasch, Digital and Social Media Coordinator needed a better way to find the right influencers, thoroughly track the results of their campaigns, and grow their campaigns to the size that they wanted.

Connecting with targeted influencers

Aspire helps Rachel and Zoe create hyper-specific, niche campaigns. Using keywords and hashtags, they are able to identify pet parents who create on-brand content and who would be genuinely excited about their brand. Plus, insight into content overview, influencer location data, engagement rate, and audience insight and demographic data ensures they can deliver their brand message to the right pet parents.

Manage always-on relationships

The team needed a way to manage a long-term approach to working with influencers. After identifying the right influencers, each creator begins to work as either a brand ambassador or a product reviewer. Top performers create content on a monthly cadence to ensure that high-quality content is consistently drip-marketed to their audiences over time.

With Aspire, Rachel and Zoe can streamline the collaboration process. Because the team sends product to dozens of influencers each month, automatic shipment tracking makes the process much faster and organized. And customizable content guideline templates allow the team to provide as much creative direction as they wish. The team finds the most success when they allow creators to do what they do best: create content that resonates with their audiences. Because influencer content is always on-brand, the team repurposes it on their social media channels, website, and email marketing.

Scaling content creation

Aspire’s content library saves every piece of content created by influencers, including Instagram stories, even beyond their 24 hour lifespan. Having every piece of content in one centralized location, as opposed to multiple email threads or multiple folders, makes repurposing content across multiple channels more organized and saves the team a significant amount of time.

Last year, Stella & Chewy’s partnered with around 100 influencers. This year, Rachel and Zoe have scaled this by another 1.5X. This scalability is made possible using Aspire’s shipping integration and the ability to use the platform as a central communication hub. Stella & Chewy is looking to scale even bigger in the coming year.

Influencer-generated content produces noticeably different results compared to brand-directed content. It drives increased engagement, both on the influencers’ platforms as well as Stella & Chewy’s. The comments it receives show genuine interest and active consideration on the part of their followers. Additionally, influencer generated content is 25-50x less expensive than what they would pay a creative agency.

One campaign in particular was a massive success. Stella & Chewy has always worked very closely with neighborhood pet stores. For Small Business Week in May, the brand worked with influencer ambassadors to send them out to their local neighborhood pet stores that offer Stella & Chewy’s products. Influencers tagged the brand in their posts, as well as the store location.

Not only did this strengthen the brand’s relationship with independent retailers, but it also drove 1.8 million impressions and 181.7 thousand engagements.