Marketing on Instagram

Address: 21 Fountain St Alexandria 2015

Website: http://www.breadandcircus.com.au/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breadcircus/

Positioning: healthy, nutritional, veg-centric and organic canteen

Instagram marketing strategy analysis

1. Instagram profile design

Bread & Circus owns 15.3K followers on Instagram. On its profile, it clearly lists detailed information including its positioning, origin, website link, address and two ways of contact (phone & email). In addition, it uses a pink picture as its café’s profile picture to emphasize its ‘all kinds of pink’ positioning and indicate the pink vibe inside of the canteen for consumer recognition and differentiating itself from other competitors.

Having a clearly structured profile page creates a seamless journey for consumers from researching to make the final decisions. Firstly, by clicking into its Instagram page, consumers can easily access its website page where opening timetable and detailed menus are provided as a format of PDF. Additionally, by clicking the address, it will direct customers to the google map for the accurate location of the café. Finally, if they want to get in contact with the café, simply click the ‘contact’ button on the profile page which will show them both the phone number and email address of the cafe.

2. Customer engagement on Instagram

Instead of making Instagram pictures by themselves, Bread & Circus chose to hand over this job to its customers. How do they do that? At first, they chose a warehouse canteen and designed an organic and foodie layout for their café to encourage photo taking and sharing from customers. By focusing on the current healthy lifestyle trend, it illustrates a variety of fresh produce inside of their café to provide a fresh, healthy and well-fed feeling for customers who dine in their store.

When customers post an Instagram photo in the café, they would usually @/hashtag the café or add the location of it. By following those hashtags or location link, the café owner can easily trace back to the original post of a specific customer. After that, Bread & Circus would re-gram that picture to their official account and write a brief thanks letter and @ back to that customer. As such, it co-creates this content related to the café with its direct customers, which will increase its credibility and effectiveness in promoting its own products.

In the meantime, if the customer happens to be a social influencer with a larger fan base than Bread & Circus itself, it would become a good opportunity for it to drive more traffic to its own page as long as the influencer can @/hashtag/locate the café and even interact with it under the reposted picture. Normally, people would be happy to respond and like back the reposted picture taken by themselves and the thanks letter from the official account of Bread & Circus, which would thus get them to create more content and promote it on the cafe’s behalf.

3. Public relation (PR) marketing on Instagram

Public relations as a marketing tool refers to an organization or individual gaining exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment. How did Bread & Circus utilize this tool? For example, it donated its all year profit to the bushfires in Australia and spread this news, which then attracted some social influencers to visit their café shop and write a post for it. This is a win-win deal for both the café and the influencers because aligning with such a virtuous café can help social influencers to build up their own personal brand and reflect their own value that they care about the bushfires as well, while the café can gain more traffic from influencers’ followers.

Summary

Overall, Bread & Circus did a good job on Instagram promotion by actively interacting with both its current and potential customers, which makes customers think of its Instagram more like a human than a robotic promotion platform that only posts product information and marketing advertisements. By using pictures taken by its existing customers, Bread & Circus gains three benefits from it:

1. Save cost and time from making pictures by themselves

2. more reliable and persuasive to other customers than commercial advertising

3. Drive more traffic to their own Instagram page from their customers