The default question in influencer marketing is still how many people a creator can reach. The more useful question, and the harder one to answer, is whether the audience that creator has built would trust them on the subject a brand actually wants to talk about.
CNS Media started from the second question when it set out to strengthen Grape Tree's connection with health-conscious consumers, and particularly with women aged 25 to 44. Rather than selecting a creator on the basis of follower numbers, the agency looked at who Grape Tree's existing audience already followed, engaged with and trusted, and let that insight decide the partnership.
That led them to registered nutritionist, bestselling author and wellness expert Rhiannon Lambert, whose expertise in evidence-based nutrition and whose established credibility made her a strong match for both the brand and the customers it wanted to reach. The campaign took the form of a series of educational, recipe-led Instagram Reels featuring Grape Tree ingredients.
The credibility problem in influencer marketing
The challenge the agency identified was how to make influencer marketing feel credible to audiences who are increasingly sceptical of obvious, transactional brand partnerships. A creator selected for reach and handed a product to promote is a recognisable format, and recognisable formats get scrolled past.
The opportunity was to find someone whose expertise and whose relationship with their own audience could genuinely strengthen Grape Tree's credibility in health and wellness, rather than simply borrowing attention from it. Working with a trusted nutrition expert and building the content around useful recipes and accessible nutritional advice allowed the products to appear in a context that was already valuable to the people watching.
There was a longer-term opportunity underneath that as well. Building the relationship around shared values, expertise and audience relevance gave it the potential to become something more durable than a single social activation.
Content built with the creator rather than for her
Instead of issuing a traditional product-focused brief, CNS Media developed the content collaboratively. The team identified recipes, wellness themes and Grape Tree products that would sit naturally within Rhiannon Lambert's existing content style and would provide genuine value to her audience.
The resulting Reels combined practical nutrition advice with accessible recipes, which allowed Grape Tree products to appear inside content people would actively choose to watch rather than inside an advert placed in their feed. The strategy was built around establishing trust first and letting the brand benefit follow from it.
The agency's summary of the principle is that the right influencer matters more than the biggest influencer, and its reading of the results is that relevance and credibility can be more valuable than reach on its own. Starting with Grape Tree's audience and understanding who they already trusted produced a creator who felt like a natural extension of the brand rather than an external voice brought in to promote it.
Giving that creator room to bring her own expertise into the work made the content significantly more authentic. Rather than asking Rhiannon simply to showcase products, the team worked with her knowledge of her audience, which helped the brand become part of the conversation rather than the focus of it.
From three pieces of content to a longer relationship
The clearest measure of the campaign's success is what happened after it. What began as three pieces of social content developed into a longer-term partnership across social, paid media and television, demonstrating that the right creator relationship can become a much broader brand asset.
CNS Media is an independent full-service marketing agency founded in Chesterfield in 2006, with offices in Manchester and Birmingham and a team of more than 40 media specialists, digital experts and creative innovators. A few years ago it launched its own in-house creative production team, Fork The Waffle, to bring creative thinking closer to clients and to work more collaboratively with its media teams, and the agency sees the Grape Tree work as an example of what that structure makes possible when creative thinking, audience insight and media strategy come together from the outset.
Looking ahead, the agency expects the industry to continue moving away from purely transactional influencer partnerships and towards treating creators as creative partners rather than media placements. For Grape Tree, the next step is to build on the relationship with Rhiannon and on the model that worked here, continuing to create content where expertise, audience relevance and genuine value come first.
The winner of Influencer Campaign at the Social Media Marketing Awards will be announced at the awards ceremony on 8 October in London