18 Jun How to Use Instagram to Turbocharge Your Food Business: Seven Practical Tips

How can you use Instagram to grow your food business? Actually, this task is much easier than you might think! Social media is one of the primary tickets to success these days, so don’t rule out Instagram when looking to enhance your food business.

Taking on the world of social media in order to achieve Insta fame or social networking success might seem overwhelming, but not to worry – that’s why we’re here! Check out these seven tips that you can easily insert into your Instagram food business plan for success.

Seven Tips to Turbocharge Your Food Business

Whether you’re a seasoned pro or you’re new to the Instagram food business game, these tips will help you to expand your reach on the app and achieve greater success overall.

1. Create Content Around Drink & Food Holidays

Since you’re in the food business, it’s a good idea to pay attention to when all the food-and-drink-related holidays are so that you can play to the events that are relevant in your industry. Celebrating holidays by posting about them on social media is a great way for you to promote your food business on Instagram.

Luckily, there are plenty of options to choose from in the food and drink industry. Think of occasions such as National Hamburger Day, National Cupcake Day, and National Sweet Tea Day. While these might seem trivial, there is a national holiday for virtually every food and drink, and these can end up being very helpful to you as you use them for fun promotions.

Whatever your food business specializes in, be sure to make note of all of the food-related national holidays that are associated with your products. Then, make fun graphics celebrating the holidays and publish posts encouraging your followers to come and give your products a try! These holidays are a great chance to put your business into people’s minds. And we all know that, once we start thinking of a particular food that sounds especially good, we can’t quite get it out of our minds until we finally get our hands on it!

2. Grow Your Audience of Foodie Followers

As a food business, your niche likely consists of people who love food – food bloggers, foodies, fellow food business owners, or customers who love what you serve. Growing your audience is an important task to undertake, and it can be done by expanding your list of food-loving followers.

While this can seem like a difficult task to manage, there are services that exist to help you to get more followers on Instagram. For example, Kicksta is one such service that’ll take the work of Instagram growth off your hands, helping you to organically expand your online community without having to do all of the work yourself.

When using this type of Instagram growth service, you can select a specific audience to target, which will help you to achieve growth among the people who exist in your niche. As we mentioned earlier, your ideal audiences may include food lovers, people who live locally to your business, other businesses with which you could potentially collaborate, or even your own competitors. Becoming well-known among these audiences will help you take your food business to the next level with Instagram.

3. Use Food, Restaurant & Local Hashtags

Hashtags are one of the surefire ways to get your content seen by more people in your niche on Instagram, and the more exposure, the better. When using hashtags, there are a few rules of thumb to keep in mind in order to be as successful as possible.

First and foremost, you should use hashtags that apply to your industry. This could include hashtags regarding the food you sell, the area you are local to, or even your own restaurant. If you’re not sure how to narrow down those suggestions to the perfect tags, you can try using a free hashtag generator, which will help you come up with the perfect hashtags to help you grow in the world of Instagram food business.

Another thing to keep in mind with hashtags is that you shouldn’t use too many per post. It can be helpful to have a list of hashtags that work well for your brand and then choose a few to include on each post. It’s also important to make sure that your hashtags are not too broad (they’ll get lost in the shuffle) or too narrow (very few people will end up seeing them).

4. Partner With Influencers & Food Bloggers

Another great way to ensure that a wider audience sees your content is to partner with social media users who already have well-established platforms. Creating a partnership with a social media influencer on Instagram is a great way for you to boost awareness, followers, and engagement on your page.

To partner with an influencer, you should simply reach out to them and create a relationship. This will lead to some sort of agreement in which the influencer will remote your company, which gets your brand name and account in front of a whole new audience. Influencers are known for being successful on social media, which means they tend to lead their followers to interact with new accounts. Partnering with an influencer in your niche will help you to gain popularity and Instagram followers.

Another great idea is to partner with a food blogger. These foodies are also typically widely-followed and well-trusted by people within your niche, so it would be beneficial to you to have a food blogger promoting your products to their followers.

5. Use Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads are another very handy tool for you to employ in your journey to Instagram food business success. These ads are shown specifically to people who have visited your site or shown interest in your business. As opposed to typical ads that are shown to just anyone, these are created for current and potential customers who have shown an interest in your company.

Since you know that retargeting ads are created for a specific audience, you can tailor them specifically for that audience. When creating marketing materials, it’s always important to keep in mind who your intended audience is. With retargeting ads, you know that they’ll reach people who have interacted with your brand or shown an interest in your products.

Using retargeting ads will help you to expand your following on Instagram because you will be sending specific advertisements to users who have shown preliminary interest in your brand. Sending such advertisements to these current/potential customers, keeps your business on their minds and causes them to continually consider your products.

6. Run Contests & Giveaways

Contests and giveaways are fantastic ways to improve your account’s engagement rates, which will help your account to grow overall. What this means is that your followers (and other users) will be viewing, liking, and commenting on your posts more than usual due to the contest or giveaway that you are running. This increases the engagement rate for your account since more people are engaging with it. And, the higher your account’s engagement rate, the more likely it is that your account will be seen by potential followers. Having good engagement also helps you to look more credible when users view your page.

It’s fairly simple to increase our engagement rates by running a contest or giveaway. When hosting one of these, you’ll create a list of rules that users must follow in order to enter the competition. Since you set the rules, it’s up to you – you can require users to follow your account, comment on a post, tag a set number of friends, or do anything else that you would like to include.

Having rules such as those suggested above forces engagement from people who wish to enter the competition, and it might even get your brand in front of new audiences, depending on your rules. For example, if you require users to tag three friends in one of your posts or share one of your posts on their own Instagram story, then more users will automatically be seeing content from your brand – greater awareness leads to more followers!

7. Excel in Food Photography

At the end of the day, Instagram is a photography-based app, and you’re running a food-based business. Naturally, these two elements (food and photography) must come together in order for you to create as successful an Instagram food business account as possible.

Don’t be overwhelmed by this task, however. You don’t necessarily need to hold extended photoshoots with multiple types of professional-grade equipment. All you really need to know are the basic tips and tricks for success in food photography, and you can begin there!

By doing some research on how to take the best food pictures with the equipment you have available to you (even if that’s just your own smartphone!), you’ll be able to begin the process of improving your food photos and, therefore, the content on your Instagram feed. Once you have a good place to start, you can always practice, research, and invest in order to continually improve the content you publish.

Elevating Your Instagram Food Business Game

Hopefully, these top seven practical tips for elevating your game in the Instagram food business industry have been helpful. If you feel overwhelmed, try implementing just one strategy at a time and seeing what results come from it.

Before you know it, you’ll be dominating the Instagram food business niche – and when that happens, come back and let us know. We’d love to hear all about your social media success!