Foodies Unite- The Best of Marketing for National Food Month
Calling all foodies! April is National Food Month and a great excuse to indulge in some mouth-watering snacks. It’s also the perfect opportunity to check out drool-worthy social accounts for the creme de la creme of marketing. So without further ado, here are four food and drink accounts that are rocking it online. Enjoy this scrumptious smörgåsbord of campaigns served up with top takeaways and lashings of tips for your own brand.
Bien Cuit
There’s nothing quite like the taste and smell of warm bread fresh from the oven. But how can you communicate this delightful experience to people online? Well, the marketing team at a New York City-based bread company have got it just right. Taking its name from the phrase ‘Bien Cuit’ which translates to ‘well done’ in French, this eatery regularly showcases its perfect bakes on Instagram, including the darkest, crunchiest loaves.
What really stands out is the image quality. Clean, symmetrical pictures show seasonal and favourite treats in all their glory with off-white or block-coloured backgrounds providing minimal distraction. From zoomed in shots of French sourdough to glistening snaps of raspberry coconut mousse, the photographs certainly do this brand justice.
Top Tip: When it comes to foodie marketing on Instagram, remember that this platform is predominantly an image and video sharing site. So, your images need to be of a high quality.
To draw people in further, you also need to bring the item or dish alive with irresistible language that’ll get mouths watering as they read. Be sure to promote seasonal products that people will be dying to eat at that particular time of year and give them a unique purpose in your recipes.
Pabst Blue Ribbon
Marketing a can of beer could potentially be samey and boring. But that’s not the case for Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR), a Wisconsin-established lager brand currently based in San Antonio. With roots dating back to 1844k, the brand has moved with the times and now regularly entertains its predominantly Millennial audience with fun Instagram posts.
Check out the way they jump on trends and popular topics. The solar eclipse was big news in the US and PBR used this to their advantage. They also attract engagement by using animal snaps that incorporate some kind of PBR branding. Who doesn’t love a cute pip pic? Cultural icons that appeal to a Millennial audience such as characters from smash-hit anime, Spirited Away, also pull on nostalgic heartstrings and draw audiences closer. You only need to check out the comments to see how much this resonated with PBR drinkers.
Speaking of nostalgia, check out PBR’s use of old school arcade games on TikTok. This video alone received 21.2k likes and hundreds of comments. Did anyone ever win on the grabbers, though?
Top Tip: Know your audience and find connections that will pique interest. Use data to form buyer personas and use this to shape your campaigns.
FoMu
As a plant-based, allergy-friendly, earth-inspired ice cream brand, FoMu sets itself up nicely for some unique marketing ideas. The brand consistently takes to Insta to showcase their made from scratch – or ‘scratch’ – flavours, a term that is now synonymous with FoMu. The imagery is clear, colourful and creative with bite mark snaps and vibrant ice cream cakes with sprinkles making it hard not to click and find out more.
FoMu is also great at using hashtags. While promoting a salted caramel ice cream with biscoff chunks to eat during the eclipse, they tagged both #eclipse and #biscoff for increased exposure. Other hashtags used included #vegan and #icecream to ensure the post reached the right audience. The tag #limitedbatch was used to create FOMO.
Top Tip: While you can use up to 30 hashtags on Instagram posts, they should all be relevant to your brand and what you’re trying to communicate. Brands are seeing success with as little as five hashtags, so don’t feel like you need to get too carried away without good reason. The recommended number of hashtags for Reels these days is also five.
Chobani
As a leading American Greek yoghurt brand with no genetically modified ingredients, Chobani has a unique selling point which helps them to stand out from the crowd. But how do they make their mark online? Well, not only are they regularly introducing new, exciting and innovative sugar-free flavours using bright, eye-catching imagery and strong descriptions – they love being interactive too. Take a look at their creative little game which encouraged followers to engage.
Chobani also goes behind the scenes, with this video introducing the strong female team behind the ice cream craft and giving their branding a personalised touch. Video content is a powerful way of spicing up your Insta account and offers fresh content for the algorithm to serve to like-minded followers.
Top Tip: You can upload Reels natively within Instagram. These can be up to 90-seconds long. If you upload through a scheduling tool, videos can be up to 15-minutes long. With 200 billion Reels played across Instagram and Facebook daily, it’s definitely worth incorporating video into your marketing strategy. Be sure to use captions, hashtags and product tags where necessary.
Speaking of short-form video content, Chobani is also winning at TikTok, entertaining their 32.1K followers with quirky, edgy and fun videos. From the Chobani Boo-quet at Halloween which showcased a host of delicious flavours to ‘the day in the life of a baby cow’ which introduced people to Buttercup and sent followers wild with adoration, Chobani’s marketing is on point.
Top Tip: To be successful on TikTok you need to appeal to short attention spans. Make your captions catchy, use relevant hashtags for an engagement boost, interact with followers in the comments section, provide subtitles for those watching with their sound off and communicate brand messages in a way that’s tailored to your target audience. Those interested in clean foods, for instance, will be interested in Buttercup and the backstory of Chobani.
A top social strategy can boost engagement, improve brand reputation within a competitive industry and positively impact turnover. Get in touch for social media marketing expertise.
Happy eating this National Food Month!
