Kettle & Fire's Full Influencer Marketing Strategy

Broth isn’t exactly sexy. It's literally boiled bones in water.

Yet, Kettle & Fire built a $35M+ business selling this ancient food at premium prices across Walmart, Costco, and thousands of stores in the US.

A part of their strategy is a carefully crafted influencer marketing strategy.

In this breakdown, we'll see:

• How Kettle & Fire uses a two-tier influencer approach to dominate both consumer and healthcare professional channels.
• Examples of how they leverage influencers for to drive retail sales.
• The way their influencers place coupon code in their captions to maximize visibility.
• Specific tactics you can implement whether you sell pet products, beverages, skincare, or snacks, etc.

Kettle & Fire's Two-Tier Influencer Strategy

Kettle & Fire has created two different influencer programs for influencers.

1. Club Kettle (for Brand Ambassadors) → For everyday bone broth enthusiasts.

These "Kettlers" are social media active people who already love the product and use it regularly — they might be busy parents, wellness enthusiasts, or people addressing health concerns.

2. Healthcare Club (for Health Ambassadors) → For healthcare professionals and nutrition experts.This program focuses on connecting with medical professionals who can recommend Kettle & Fire to patients for specific health benefits like digestion, joint recovery, immune function, and inflammation management.

Why two separate programs?

Kettle & Fire's dual approach serves different but complementary goals.

Awareness & credibility

→ The Kettle Club drives general awareness through everyday users — it's straightforward to execute and creates authentic word-of-mouth marketing.

→ The Healthcare Club builds both awareness and authority by partnering with trusted health experts.

While more challenging to establish, these partnerships lend credibility to the brand's health claims.

Market positioning defence

By creating both consumer and healthcare professional programs, Kettle & Fire effectively "owns" both lanes in the bone broth market.

This makes it harder for competitors to establish themselves as either the more accessible everyday option or the more medically credible choice.

Retail strategy support

The two programs likely support different retail channels:

• Consumer ambassadors drive awareness for mass retail and direct-to-consumer sales
• Healthcare professionals might influence specialty store placement, practitioner channels, and potential future medical partnerships.

By building influence in both worlds, Kettle & Fire can pursue multiple distribution strategies simultaneously.

When a two-tier approach makes sense

A dual influencer strategy like Kettle & Fire's might work for your brand if:

• Your product has both lifestyle appeal and specific technical benefits
• You need both broad awareness and expert validation
• Different types of influencers require different support and incentives
• You want to reach consumers at multiple points in their decision journey

By separating their programs, Kettle & Fire can tailor their messaging, incentives, and expectations to match what motivates each group of ambassadors, ultimately creating a more effective overall marketing strategy.

How to find the right influencers for your brand?

While launching formal programs with dedicated landing pages is the goal, kickstarting your influencer strategy often begins with hands-on discovery.

You can find the perfectly aligned influencers with tools like SARAL. Our discovery tools help you identify influencers whose audience demographics match your target customers.

Our Chrome extension even lets you quickly evaluate engagement quality and other influencer metrics before reaching out, so you don't waste time on influencers whose followers won't connect with your brand. Talk to us and see if SARAL is the right platform for you.

Leveraging influencers for retail promotions

Retail shelf space is fiercely competitive. If your product sits too long and doesn't get sold, you'll be swapped out for a competitor that promises better turnover.

That's why, CPG brands motivate consumers to actively reach for those cartons in Costco, Walmart, and other retailers.

And one of the ways to drive retail sales is through influencers.

While some brands might question "Where's the ROI?" when influencers showcase products in store aisles, Kettle & Fire understands that influencer marketing works differently than traditional advertising.

You can't always track influencer marketing dollar-in-dollar-out like a direct response campaign. Instead, Kettle & Fire thinks strategically about the entire consumer journey.

For example, when a creator shows their followers exactly where to find the bone broth at Walmart…

or another creator showcases the product at Costco, they're reducing the mental effort required for a purchase.

The value comes from solving a crucial consumer problem: uncertainty about availability. Many consumers might be bone broth-curious after seeing health benefits mentioned online, but without knowing which stores carry it (and where in those stores), that interest never converts to a purchase.

By having influencers physically demonstrate finding the product on shelves, Kettle & Fire creates a mental shopping map for potential customers. The next time that consumer is at Costco or Walmart, the recognition factor kicks in—"Oh, that's the bone broth I saw that fitness influencer talking about!"—and the purchase becomes significantly more likely.

Think beyond direct attribution

Don't think of influencers as just sales machines. The smartest brands like Kettle & Fire see them as messengers and representatives who can communicate whatever is most important to your audience at that moment.

Need to highlight your retail presence? Influencers can show exactly where to find you on store shelves. *Launching a new product?* They can create authentic,exciting content. Have company news to share? They can tell the story in a way that resonates with their specific followers.

Influencers can also be perfect partners for promotions like giveaways as you can see in this example below:

When you partner with creators, don't just think about Instagram posts or TikTok videos. Use influencers' content beyond social media. Their content can make your emails more interesting and your ads more effective. You can even use their videos as social proof on your website.

Re-sharing influencer-generated content

When you scroll through Kettle & Fire's social media, you'll notice they frequently feature content originally created by their influencer partners. They are not just filling their calendar. It's a deliberate strategy that creates multiple layers of value.

What's in it for brands

Content creation is resource-intensive. By re-sharing influencer content, brands can maintain an active social presence without having to produce everything in-house. This saves both time and production costs while still keeping the feed fresh and engaging.

Different influencers showcase products in ways the internal team might not think of. A fitness enthusiast might highlight bone broth as a post-workout recovery drink, while a busy parent might focus on its convenience as a cooking shortcut. These varied perspectives help potential customers see how the product might fit into their own lives.

The diversity of faces, settings, and usage scenarios also helps break up the visual monotony of brand-created content, making the overall feed more interesting to scroll through and more likely to hold attention.

What's in it for influencers

The exposure to the brand's audience can help creators expand their following with highly-relevant new fans. Since people following Kettle & Fire likely have interests aligned with the influencer's content focus, these new followers tend to be more engaged than randomly acquired ones.

Being featured also provides creators with validation that strengthens their position as category experts. When Kettle & Fire shares a nutritionist's content about bone broth benefits, it reinforces that person's authority in the wellness space.

The influencers build a stronger relationship with the brand, and stay loyal to it.

Building a content ecosystem

The real power of this approach lies in its snowball effect.

When brands regularly feature user content, it creates a positive cycle. Seeing others get featured encourages more customers—both influencers and regular users—to share their own experiences with the product.

This creates a steady stream of authentic content that shows real people using the product, which is generally more convincing to potential customers than purely brand-created promotional material.

How to use this approach?

For brands looking to implement this approach:

• Get clear permission, either through your initial agreement or through specific requests when you want to re-share something particularly effective.
• Always credit creators appropriately, even when you have usage rights. This basic courtesy maintains good relationships and encourages continued collaboration.
• Add your own brand perspective when re-sharing to connect the content to your product benefits or current marketing focus.

How to use SARAL to find the best content for your ads

You don't have to scroll through social media for hours to find potential content for your ads.

SARAL's social listening feature automatically tracks and collects content where your brand is tagged. You can easily spot high-performing posts that would make great ads and even connect with the creator directly via SARAL.

Maximizing coupon visibility

Recipe content presents a unique challenge for influencer marketing. Lengthy, detailed instructions can easily bury promotional elements, making discount codes ineffective.

Kettle & Fire has solved this problem with a smart approach to code placement. Looking at the posts below, you can see how Kettle & Fire positions their discount codes:

"-2 cups @kettleandfire classic chicken bone broth + more if needed (code MADDIE20 for 20% off)"

"-1 cup @kettleandfire beef broth (code DADDIOSKITCHEN for 20% off)"

Why it works

Standard practice often relegates discount codes to the caption's end, after lengthy instructions. By that point, many users have stopped reading or shifted focus to cooking techniques rather than shopping considerations.

But this approach connects the discount to the exact moment of product need. When consumers are writing down ingredients or planning their shopping list, the discount becomes immediately relevant rather than something to remember for later.

How can you use this approach for your own brand?

For brands considering this approach:

• Guide influencers on exact code placement within ingredient listings
• Use simple percentage discounts rather than complicated promotional structures
• Personalize codes to each influencer for proper attribution tracking
• Use visual cues like parentheses to set the code apart without disrupting the recipe flow

Prevent coupon code leaks

When your carefully crafted influencer discount codes end up on coupon aggregator sites, you not only lose control of your promotion strategy but also end up paying commissions for misattributed sales.

This is where SARAL can help.

SARAL's integration with Veeper allows brands to create single-use discount codes that can't be shared or leaked. This means you can track exactly which influencers are driving real sales, maintain accurate attribution data, and avoid overpaying commissions for purchases that weren't actually influenced by your partners.

Take your influencer program beyond spreadsheets

Brands like Kettle & Fire didn't build their influencer success overnight. They had a vision, a strategy and then systems to help them implement the strategy, without being overwhelmed.

Because managing influencer relationships in spreadsheets works until it doesn't. Then growth stalls. You miss follow-ups. Creators feel ignored. And that promising marketing channel starts to look like a liability.

We've seen what happens when brands try scaling creator relationships with tools — generic CRMs, spreadsheets — that weren't designed for it. That's why we built SARAL.

Our users see an average 5.12x ROAS because their teams can focus on building relationships instead of maintaining databases. The system handles the operational pieces — finding creators, tracking conversations, measuring results — while your team focuses on the human connections that actually drive growth.

Book a consultative call and let's talk about what's possible when you have the right tools supporting your vision.

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