As anyone who’s ever scrolled through Instagram will know, food and visual elements go very well together. Photos, graphics, and other food creatives can be highly persuasive and therefore extremely effective in promoting your restaurant.
When developing online marketing campaigns for your restaurant, whether social media campaigns, website content, or Amazon marketing, it is important to use effective food creatives and graphics. These will catch the user’s attention and make them more likely to take the action you want them to take.
We are certain that some some tips for designing great food creatives will take your online marketing campaigns to the next level.
Tips and ideas to take your Food Creatives to the next level
Use On-Brand Colors
As part of your branding, you should have certain colors that you use for everything, from your restaurant logo to other marketing materials, such as posters, business cards, and customs die cuts. Your colors should reflect your brand, as well as taking into consideration common associations that people have with certain colors. For example, green is usually associated with healthy eating, and red is believed to stimulate the appetite. Bright colors are associated with high-energy establishments like fast food, whereas darker and neutral colors speak to luxury.
Weirdough, for instance, uses red, yellow, white and black as their brand colors.
Once you’ve chosen your brand colors, you should be sure to incorporate them into the food creatives you use on your online campaigns. This could be through backgrounds, borders, text color, or other elements in your images and graphics. Using your brand colors, aim for as much contrast as possible: light images usually work best on dark backgrounds, and vice versa.
Use Video
Videos can also be a powerful tool in your online campaigns. Videos are not only appealing and engaging content that users love to watch, but they also allow you to communicate more information than you could in images and graphics.
Videos can be used to showcase your menu, highlight certain dishes, or show your premises. They can convey the dining atmosphere and communicate the vibe of your restaurant, making users feel they are truly part of the experience.
Burger King just released the Moldy Whopper and its ad commercial has taken the internet by storm!
Augment Your Images with Great Copy
When designing food creatives for your online campaigns, it is important to also think about the copy that will accompany your images. A descriptive, interesting, and engaging copy will support great visual elements and make your campaign more effective.
Like images and graphics, a copy must reflect your brand: if your brand is fun and casual, keep the copy light-hearted. If your restaurant is more traditional or at the premium end of the market, stick to a more formal copy. Your copy may accompany your food creatives, in the form of captions or social media posts. You can also use text on the graphics themselves to give extra information or emphasize elements of the visual story you are telling.
Use the Right Images
Photos of food can be highly evocative and are one of the restaurant’s most powerful tools in their online marketing campaigns. However, to get the most out of your images, you need to make sure to use only the best. In general, stock images should be avoided: it is usually obvious when stock images are being used, which is far less impactful. On the other hand, hiring a professional photographer means you can showcase your products, and do so in a way that speaks to your brand.
Professional food photography may be a significant investment, but it is one that will pay you back many times with the right images. Talk to the photographer about the approach you want to make sure the photos are in keeping with your restaurant and your brand image, whether this is modern, traditional, innovative, or something else.
In general, however, there are certain criteria that all food photography should meet. Photos should be in focus, clear and sharp. They should also be well-lit, and use as many different angles, zoom, and setups as possible. Rather than having essentially the same photo over and over again just with a different dish, it is better to mix things up.
Publish user-generated content
When it comes to designing online marketing creatives, one thing that most of the restaurants don’t utilize is the user-generated content. People trust other people’s opinion, and that’s why you can use the user-generated content in your creatives.
Great copy can help you improve sales, but an honest opinion from someone who has visited your restaurant can help online social media users to connect to your restaurant. In simple terms, the sale-oriented content is going to work every time.
As a restaurant, you can also enable users to create food creatives for you! One such example of these includes Starbucks. They wanted to create a limited edition coffee cup. Rather than investing time and money into it, they started a campaign where they asked users to create one for them. People were very receptive to the idea and immediately started submitting amazing creative. They finally chose a winner, giving him $300 — and also making their design cup reach millions of Starbucks followers. You can follow the same approach and engage users to generate food creatives for you.
You can create simple creatives with food in the background and the user’s opinion on top of it. There are other modifications that you can do to the creative, including putting the customer’s photo in the creative.
User-generated content is mostly known to connect better to the audience and at a more human level.
Styling
It is also important to impeccably style your shots and images. Some dishes may taste delicious, but they don’t always look as good as they taste. Some dishes are naturally photogenic, so these are good candidates to use in your restaurant marketing campaigns. Generally, these are dishes with dynamic colors and interesting shapes and lines. In all cases, the appearance will be helped with good styling: taking pictures against the right background, incorporating props, and plating the dish in a visually-appealing way.
Remember that you can also use images that relate more broadly to your restaurant. Along with photos of plated dishes, you can also feature shots of ingredients, food being prepared, and people eating in your restaurant. The most important thing is that all images convey your brand values and encourage people to eat at your restaurant!
Text
Creating social media graphics and creatives requires careful planning and execution of the different elements of the creative, including text. As you should know by now, creatives should be accompanied by a text(a copy).
As a restaurant owner, you should use text persuasively. If you check any good food creatives, you will see how the creatives contain text. They do not overwhelm the design by putting too much text into the creative. The best approach is to stick to a few words or a line. This will make the text co-ordinate in the design and bring the message in the best possible way.
Also, it would be best if you also focused on the other aspect of the text, including font size, contrast, and visibility on mobile devices. This leads us to our next point, typography.
Typography
Typography has more impact than you might think. Choosing the right typography and making it work with your food creative is an art. That’s why you have to choose the right font and make sure that it aligns with the background design or image that you have used. Choosing the wrong typography can ruin any creative out there. If done right, it can bring life to your creative and make it shine.
For instance, you should pick a color palette and a suitable font to go with your brand’s personality. However, be wary of going overboard. You do not want to use more than two or three fonts at the same time. Also, if you are using two fonts, try to pair fonts with high contrast. This will help you to balance the fonts and give them the necessary means to stand out in the design.
As you are doing online marketing, it is a good idea to use Sans-serif. They fit nicely with the web content.
Ready to create kick-ass Online Food Creatives?
Whatever you do, you need to keep three things in mind: simplicity, creativity, and consistency. This means that you should keep your food creative simple and easy to understand and share. The main goal is to enable the audience to get connected with your brand. The food creatives should also be consistent. Radically changing the design can reset the connection the audience has created in the past.
So, what do you think about the tips for designing food creatives? Comment and let us know.
