Just imagine, it is night, you are preparing to go to your bed, you open Instagram and swipe your feed as usually. You watch pictures of your friends, colleagues and someone you’ve met. There is anything unusual, but in a moment you see the photo of something tasty from a local restaurant. Your dream has been shattered and all your thoughts are about a food.
Who is responsible for that? And, how can you take your revenge?
It was not a chief, who cooked such a delicious meal, who is guilty in your strong desire to eat, but it was a SMM-specialist, who was competent to build a promotion strategy and showed the product at the moment, when you are already on the brink of snapping and ordering a cupcake.
A promotion strategy hides inside a whole science: creating of content-plan, study of target audience, search for optimal ways of promotion, competent positioning and so on. It takes many years for some people, but you need 10 minutes only to adopt their experience in food-projects promotion.
Who are in your target audience?
Your target audience can differ a lot depending on your product and your business type. But there is an audience, which is common for the whole food area. And, you are right if you think that they are women.
As a rule, a core of all the public, which a related to food anyhow is girls. Those girls, who do not eat after 6 pm, but at the first chance they run to the nearest coffee-pot. Their age is commonly from 18 to 30 years. So, you should consider this both at advertising settings and content creation. Moreover, that's the most favorable audience, which will tell about your account to their friends if they like you.
If you have some margin of a budget, I would recommend to make some experiments, because it can work when you even don’t expect this.
How to create a content
The main part, without which you may forget about your success in Instagram, is your content. For the first time, it is very hard to understand how to prepare it and what can be interesting to your audience.
But, there is a versatile rule, that a content should be of three types: informational, marketing and entertaining. Informational content includes review posts, answers to questions from followers and trends. Marketing content is supposed for demonstration of product, posting of reviews, announcing of news and special offers. And, entertaining one is devoted to add to your account something funny, for example, funny stories about your business.
Example of monthly content-plan
Don’t forget to publish reviews from satisfied customers - it always buys some more. Write pleasant, original texts without extra spice.
As you know, a visual part is a very important part of your content. Let’s discuss it in details. The foundation of everything is an appearance of your products, which should look delicious both at the photos and in reality. Any photographer cannot help you if your dish or cupcake is creepy. So, pay a lot of efforts to visual appearance of your products and its comprehension. This hardly will make a big effect to a primecost, but will increase your chance for success. If you have problems with that matter, and you cannot change anything, try to accentuate an attention at something else. It can be quantity, accessories or interesting background.
Forget once for all that thought that you couldn’t achieve big success without a professional photographer. Sure, you can, your smartphone allows taking a pretty good photos. Just pick a place with proper light, right angle, and get minimum skills to work in photo processing applications.
In case if you do not have enough time or wish for that - find the account you like and agree about a cooperation. You do not need big budget for this, as any student, who uses Instagram continuously, can do such photos.
Try to motivate your followers to make photos with your product. Your photo bank will get wider, your followers will be happy and you will share these photos with proud.
Don’t forget involve your followers to a conversation and hold some competitions, which make a big influence to involvement and coming of new followers. There are plenty of ideas for a competition, but the main rule says: the simpler a competition is and the bigger its reach, the best results you will get.
How to promote?
If you believe that your account is pretty “tasty”, but you do not have a lot of followers yet, the only thing you need is to learn how to promote it effectively. There are several ways to promote such account on Instagram, but there are also pitfalls, so, please, avoid them.
Massfollowing and massliking. These ways brought unbelievable results in their “best times”: Ten or even hundred thousands of followers might follow you. But, this way isn’t actual anymore, and Instagram cuts limits strictly. Moreover, you risk to be banned, that is why it is better to avoid this way.
Targeted advertising can give you a perfect result, just make the correct settings for it. The potential of this method is significant: we can choose any-age audience with any interests, any location and even any financial abilities. But, when doing this by yourself, you can throw away your budget for advertising, so, be careful. Read some articles about the subject before you start.
Advertising by influencers and opinion leaders As for me, it is the best way, which allows you to reach a very qualitative new audience for a very short time. However, do not ask celebrities for this - it will cost a lot, but the result will be worse than if you ask few influencers with 20K followers. Go to any platform for influencer search and find the best one for your purpose according to your parameters..
Giveaway or don’t keep making the same mistakes of anybody else. The way is very simple: a popular person announces a competition, where followers are suggested to follow the sponsors (20-30 accounts usually).And then they raffle off iPhones, MacBooks and even cars. A sponsor (you) pays a pretty penny for this and, really, can get around 50K followers or more. The problem is that your carriage will get into a pumpkin at midnight. Your giveaway will pass and 80% of your followers will unfollow you without getting any info about your perfect account. The remaining 20%, in case if they stay, are likely inactive. So, it is a way to throw away you budget, think twice before you agree to take part in such a reckless scheme.
A lifehack for patient onesIf you have a business account, save as a rule to track successful posts among your target audience, and promote them to the new audience. If your current followers like it, others (but target only) for will like it too for sure.
Conclusions
- As a rule, 90% of your target audience are girls, so, your strategy should consider this fact.
- Use navigations and prepare your monthly content-plan in advance. Add the most interesting content for your followers.
- A visual appearance is as important as taste of your dishes, but if you have problems with that matter, accentuate an attention at something else (quantity, accessories or outstanding background).
- You can save money by not hiring a photographer: Just find a good account and its owner makes yours as good as his/her.
- Hold competitions for increasing of involvement.
- Before you start your promotion - study successful cases of SMM-specialists, or, better, hire an experienced professional.
- If you notice that the post is liked by your audience, promote it to a relevant audience too.
SMM-world is big and various, you need to be online to be successful there. And, it is hard to predict what the future will come, as a competition on Instagram and other social media is growing the same as their popularity.
But the only thing is clear: if you follow these simple rules today already, in a short time you will get an experience which will allow you to gather a significant fruits as loyal clients and followers. Just, don't put it on a back burner and start right now ;)
