Champion: Petfluencers

Pet parents want to feed their fur babies the best and care for them in all the right ways. But there’s a lot of information out there, so who should they trust? Champion Petfoods set out to boost awareness, trust and credibility for its ACANA and ORIJEN petfood brands, by creating an emotional connection with their audience and developing content that provides real value to meet their customer’s needs.

The influencer strategy focused on three key content pillars; Brand Benefits, Education and Entertainment, to achieve its goal of valuable content that the audience want to spend time with. We split influencers into four tiers – pet professionals to educate, macro creators with pet authenticity to build reputation, lovers of ACANA and ORIJEN, who would provide credibility by showcasing their love for the pet food, and pet influencers to provide product-based partnerships.

We weaved the creative platform of each brand into our messaging – ORIJEN’s ‘Nourish as Nature Intended’ to promote holistic pet nutrition and ACANA’s ‘Nutrition They Need, Flavour They Love’ to show the passion that goes into the pet food, and how pet lovers care for their pets.

Our aim for each influencer was to form a long-term partnership, ensuring the most relevant influencers were being used. That’s why we continually monitored results, online conversations and social sentiment, to check we had the right mix of influencers throughout the year. From celebrities like Zara McDermott running creative ‘day in the life’ content of her cat, influencers like Daniel Daytona Enmarch creating outdoor guides for pets in winter showcasing his healthy dog thriving on ORIJEN, to macro lifestyle creators like Poppy Deyes showing her genuine love between her and her dog, Sid, loving ACANA.

All content added a layer of authenticity by tapping into a universal love for pets which helped us reach new audiences. We supported this with several influencer activations, including awareness days, a charity partnership, competitions, content series and promotion of an Instagram filter.

We supported the influencer campaign by adding additional organic content on Champion’s own channels, earned media exposure and strategic paid support to maximise reach. This made sure Champion’s message was spread far and wide, leaving a lasting impact and achieving 100% positive sentiment amongst its target audience.

The campaign has had a big impact, with a 77% increase in organic reach from 2022 to 2023, giving Champion a total influencer reach of over 1.6 million to date. It has achieved more than 78.7k engagements through its long-term continuous influencer partnerships, resulting in significant improved brand love for Champion Petfoods.