According to a post on the Instagram Business blog the number one driver of visits to restaurants is the act of craving. In advertising this simply means making people hungry for what your are selling. Restaurants love Instagram because of its visualness, its frequent use of video in posts and probably most importantly, its primarily consumed on a mobile device.
A 2015 study showed that 53% of frequent diners and 41% of occasional diners use their mobile phone to decide on a fast-food restaurant. You have to assume that’s just as prevalent with restaurants in general. Instagram says that for restaurant goers on mobile, 23% take a photo purely to remember the experience, and 15% share that experience on their social channels. They report that after seeing friends’ photos and videos of fast-food restaurants on Instagram, 66% of frequent diners want to visit.
Interestingly, Instagram users that follow restaurants are 1.4 times more active on Instagram than average, indicating that they use the platform for more than just posting photos. Instagram reports that they like 4.5 times more content, post 3 times more than the average user and comment 7 times more frequently than typical. That’s amazing. One wonders if there is some other common variable other than liking restaurants, but we’ll go with that for now.
Since Instagram was launched food has been a big part of the app, with people posting millions of photos and videos of what they were about to eat. Restaurant have taken note of this posting fetish and thought, what can we do to feed into this without becoming another unwanted ad? That’s where the concept of crave comes in. Restaurants are focusing posts and ads on making people hungry, using Italian music when showing a video of a pizza being made, showing extreme closeups of a Ruby Tuesday hamburger so that people can almost taste it, in the case of Fridays showing a very satisfied person eating their ribs. The point is to focus on the food in order to create the crave.
Instagram says that Ruby Tuesday ran a series of 5 video ads and saw a 22-point lift in ad recall—outperforming similar campaigns by 96%. They say it also drove a 10-point lift in purchase intent among 45-54 year olds—which outperformed nearly 75% of similar campaigns for the same demographic.
“TGI Friday’s developed a two-phased campaign that used video and carousel ads, as well as local awareness ads on Facebook, to promote its ribs and encourage people to enjoy them at a physical location,” noted the Instagram ad team. “The six-week company not only drove a 3-point lift in purchase intent, but more than 50,000 restaurant visits were attributed to the campaign.”
Dairy Queen’s Instagram campaign reach 20 million people, driving an 18 point lift in ad recall among 25-34 year olds. They say it also drove an 8 point lift in awareness of its “Upside Down or Free” promotion and a 3 point lift in purchase intent. Not much in purchase intent but it definitely drove the crave.
“We wanted to build up our presence on Instagram and occupy the currently sparse dessert space,” said Jenell Lammers, Digital Marketing Manager, Dairy Queen (View photo at top). “We’ve done just that with this campaign, which further proved that Instagram is not only great for organic posts but can really drive results.”