The Only Instagram Marketing Guide Your Restaurant Will Ever Need Is Finally Here
Instagram Marketing Guide
An Instagram marketing guide is perfect for small business owners looking to bolster their business. Instagram is certainly one monster of a social media platform. Now with the advent of insights, business profiles, and advanced metrics coupled with Instagram’s original, and unique value proposition (immediate, highly visual, and wide scale brand exposure) make the platform an incredibly powerful asset for both small and medium-sized businesses.
This popular photo-sharing network has more than 130 million users per month. Moreover, the site receives more than 45 million photograph uploads each day. There is perhaps no other industry for which this platform is better geared than the competitive restaurant industry.
As per research, people between 18 and 35 years spend about five whole days per year browsing tantalizing food images or photos on Instagram. In addition, perhaps more importantly, 30 percent would avoid a restaurant or cafe in case their Instagram presence was weak.
Therefore, whether you tap into this amazing platform already or need some tips and instruction in order to start off, this Instagram marketing guide will help maximize your business success on today’s most popular and powerful social media platform.
Instagram Marketing Guide Posting Tips
1. Keep Your Instagram Account Active
Probably the worst thing you could do is set up your Instagram account, post two to three times in a week, and do not touch it again. This is because it may give the impression that your establishment is struggling.
So, make sure that you or your team has sufficient bandwidth in order to take Instagram on and operate it effectively.
2. Post the Best Images
Your main goal is to capture your customers’ attention. Make sure your photos are appetizing if you are posting food. Also, include inviting photos of your restaurant’s interior and photos of your staff. Also, avoid blurry images, or ones that you don’t love.
3. Make Your Instagram Account Searchable
For people to find your restaurant and walk through your front doors, you need to be able to be easily found in the ocean of several millions of Instagram users. Although it may sound impossible at first, it definitely is not. All that you need to do is use geotags (add the location or city of your restaurant each time that you post) and include relevant hashtags (such as #foodporn). It will help you get in front of suitable users.
4. Be Consistent
Remember that your Instagram feed is a visual representation of your brand. This is why when potential customers are deciding whether or not they should follow you or interact with the photos you have posted, they’re will base it off of looks.
Therefore, it is important to establish a consistent theme that you can maintain, like a general color scheme, photographic style or editing technique. You can make it even simpler with a useful app like Mosaico, which will allow you to visually plan your upcoming posts.
5. Use Filters and Effects
Once you have taken the photo, you could post the image as-is; however, you would miss some of the best parts – the filters and effects!
Note that there are hundreds of Instagram filters that can give the images a distinctive and appealing look, from a vibrant and bold look to a sepia tone.
The most-used and most popular Instagram filter is Clarendon. It is an all-purpose filter, which can highlight, brighten and intensify shadows. It is the default filter after the standard options when editing images and photos.
Use the following apps to improve photo editing:
- Facetune
- Litely
- Foodie
- Adobe Photoshop Express
Increase Your Restaurant’s Instagram Following
1. Use Hashtags
Your Instagram marketing guide encourages you to keep in mind that this is vital for potential customers to easily find your restaurant. Think of keywords, which describe your photos to determine which hashtags are the best. For example, if you have photographed a sandwich, search “sandwich” in Instagram’s hashtag section and then use these results as starting point.
Or for instance: if you search #burger, it will give you #bestburgers, which in turn will give you related hashtags like #burgerlove and #burgertime. Instagram will cap you off at thirty hashtags; so, effectively use your hashtags by choosing the ones that relate to your cuisine type or location. You could include hashtags in the caption, or separately post them as a comment below the caption (which is visually cleaner).
2. Run Instagram Adverts
Instagram makes it fairly easy as it allows you to effectively target locals as well as set up an advert straight from your smartphone. Choose an appetizing and visually appealing food image, brainstorm an eye-catching and simple caption with your staff, and you are ready to advertise!
3. Interact With People
It is vital to establish a close relationship with your Instagram followers. We recommend that you respond to the comments that you get on your posts or at least like the comments. As a result, your customers would have an incentive to interact with you frequently. This will increase the engagement rate and your post will stay closer to the top of your user’s feed.
4. Introduce Campaigns or Contests
You can take your restaurant to the next level by effectively running campaigns or promotions that potential customers would like to interact with. We will recommend giveaways, posts which encourage engagement (like asking a relevant question), or re-posting your customers’ content with a shout-out to them.
5. Share Photographs with Other Websites
Sharing photos and images on your restaurant’s website as well as other social media platforms like Facebook attracts more individuals. Moreover, the effort increases the likelihood that a unique moment would go viral. Instagram provides restaurants and customers several options for sharing content on many platforms. You can
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