• by Holly Pavlika , Columnist, October 14, 2015

While the summer grilling season is slowly slipping away, there is still an opportunity for marketers to reach audiences committed to grilling every month of the year. In fact, 60% of grill owners (over 200 million Americans own grills) fire up the grill year-round, especially during celebratory occasions like the Super Bowl, Easter, Thanksgiving and even on New Year’s Eve.

Before marketers hang up their grill tongs as we head into the fall and winter months, one key market to consider is Hispanic consumers. With 86% of Hispanics under the age of 25 owning a charcoal grill compared to the national household average of 72%, according to HPBA, grilling year-round has become a cultural mainstay for Hispanic families. 

Marketers like Amy Colella, VP marketing and communications at Padilla Import Sales Marketing who works to help authentic Hispanic brands like El Yucateco break into the U.S. market, understand the popularity of grilling among Hispanics and recently used this at-home event to elevate brand awareness for thehot sauce maker. 

To drive Hispanic and American market impact to El Yucateco’s spicy line of sauces that are perfect for grilled dishes, Colella helped it launch a digital influencer marketing campaign, #KingofFlavor. 

“To celebrate the tradition of family grilling and bring awareness to the El Yucateco brand, we recently tapped into Hispanic influencers, as well as general market influencers, to create grilling parties with a twist,” said Colella. “We didn’t want our influencers to talk about El Yucateco as a product or just as something to be added at the end of a recipe for heat. We challenged them to come up with very creative and innovative ideas that centered on an entire meal that could be cooked on a grill, not just a singular dish.” 

With the end goal of reaching both acculturated and non-acculturated Hispanics, the campaign used influencers from different language perspectives to create content that was written in English and Spanglish. Interesting to note, many Hispanic brands request English content because they want to use the influencer’s content across their social channels. 

Like their Hispanic counterparts, millennial moms are putting more meals on the grill and using grilling as an opportunity to get the family together. Millennial moms are using the grill to create adventurous, flavorful and easy-to-cleanup meals for their family, and the campaign tapped this market to share their experience and innovative meal ideas for other family grillmasters to try. Surprisingly, there were many cauliflower recipes created, an ingredient that appears to be big with Millennials, which was a trend culinary trendologist Christine Couvelier predicted back in 2104.

Overall, results of the campaign show that 58 influencers' original blog posts earned 93.1K content views and generated more than 100,000 blog page interactions. And did the campaign drive sales? Colella had this to say, “We saw double digit sales!”