You know an Instagram presence is important for your brand, but how do you create the right brand presence to get your audience excited about using your products?

Successful brands go beyond just talking about features and benefits because they know brand storytelling is about more than the retail value of their products–it’s about how people feel using them. Think of Instagram as a content platform for generating high perceived value.

A good example of brand success is the energy bar company, Clif Bar. The company was founded by a cyclist who had trouble finding a high-performance bar that tasted good. You’re probably already familiar with their protein bars and associate their brand with outdoor adventure. Super fans also know their stance on preserving the environment and sustainable food production practices.

If you go to Clif Bar’s Instagram account, you barely see their product. You might even mistake it for a nature photographer’s personal account.

Clif Bar’s Instagram has 150,000 followers and counting, with high engagement on each post.

Let’s take a look at why it does so well:

Showcase the Lifestyle, Not the Product

These days, especially with Millennial customers, transparently showing who you are and your values is essential. Clif Bar is great at showing, rather than telling why they exist and who they exist for. One way is by capturing where their fans use their products and what kind of lifestyle they enjoy. If you want to have a long runway with your target audience, look beyond simply selling a product. Capture a few core values you can convey visually to tell a consistent story.

Understand Your Style Principles

A quick way to get a sense of a brand’s style is to scroll through all the thumbnails on the page.

What kind of colors pop out at you?

Is the style very minimalist, or is it bright and colorful with a lot going on?

Are there more photos of objects or people?

Do you see a lot of text overlay or do the images speak for themselves?

A glance at Clif Bar’s page and it’s clear they are all about the outdoors. You see different seasons, mostly colors found in nature, saturated hues, and a stillness that is found only in nature. When you do see people they are often very small in the photo surrounded by wilderness, or they’re captured in action in an outdoor environment.

Just like any marketing communication channel you should have a plan before you post. Discuss what color schemes represent your brand well. Understand what themes tell your brand’s story. And, don’t forget that the words you use should be chosen carefully (even sounds!). Create a basic style guide that defines your brand’s voice. Is it playful, sarcastic, serious, or youthful? This will make your audience feel it’s consistently engaging with a single character, not a corporation.

Engage Your Audience with User Generated Content

There are many great ways to engage your audience, like posting tutorials or generating buzz with user-generated content contests. Something you can do with regularity is repost content from your already happy customers. Many of Clif Bar’s stunning Instagram photos come from their fans. This is a great way to establish a sense of community that remains true both online and out in the real world. Pro tip: remember to always credit the photographer!

Show Your Product as It’s Meant to be Used

A genius way to show value is to post content from your happy customers that show them using your products in the way you want them to be used. In Clif Bar’s case, it’s out in nature, having fun.

Use A Unique Brand Hashtag to Curate the Conversation

Clif Bar’s tagline is “Feed Your Adventure” and they use it as a hashtag. Doing this helps with a couple things. First, it makes their tagline stick. Second, it helps direct traffic back to their page when their fans use it. Creating a long-form hashtag is a not only a useful way to find fans who are engaging with your product, but you can also find great fan-generated content to then repost on your own page.

Be sure to use a hashtag that people can easily associate with your brand, rather than settling on something generic.

Remember that your Instagram page is an opportunity to visually translate the story you want your brand to tell your audience. Your content should always be answering the question of why you exist, who you’re here for, and how you want your customers to feel when they use your products and engage with your brand.

Take a look at the ChuckJoe and Vegetarian Dude Instagram accounts for additional inspiration, and reach out to us with questions at any time!

User Generated Content (UGC) Contests are a powerful strategy to drive brand awareness. These are campaigns that people run when they want to have certain products shared on social media, posts shared using a hashtag, as well as generate engagement from the general public. They usually include actions such as “share a post/photo, tag a friend, or use a hashtag for a chance to win”.

So why do so many of them go wrong?

Fear not! Here are 5 of the most common mistakes that are made throughout these campaigns and strategies to rectify them.

1. Asking Too Much

The most common mistake that brands make is asking a ridiculous amount from contest participants. The best approach to finding an appropriate ask is to think about the bare minimum entry.

While setting up UGC campaigns, try to think about what people are already doing throughout their day. Where could they easily include a hashtag to have it be a part of the campaign or conversation? Does it only require a slight tweak or variation in their day-to-day activities?

For example: You are a food brand that has a beverage that you want to promote. You decide to run a UGC contest where the goal is to have people share photos for a chance to win a month’s supply of your beverage.

One approach for entry requirement could be, “Build a birdhouse using 30 empty bottles of our brand’s beverage”. However, no one is going to do that. Would you? It’s too much work and takes too much time out of their busy day.

Assuming that you have product on shelves, an alternative approach would be reaching out to existing customers and say, “Share a photo of how you enjoy your fill-in-the-blank beverage during your day, using hashtag “#blank”, for a chance to win something amazing”.

In that example, people are already using the product at some point during the day, so asking them to take a photo and use the hashtag is a simple way to incentivize them to create user-generated content.

The point is, step back and think about who your target customers are. What is their day-to-day like? How can you integrate your campaign so that it’s not forcing them to do a bunch of other work?

2. Giving Too Little

An additional mistake that people make is not completely thinking about the prize value in relation to what you’re asking participants to do. Flashback to my first example. You have decided that you really want someone to build that birdhouse out of the beverage bottles. If you were giving them much larger value, like a car, for example, it is much more likely that they’re going to put in extra effort for a chance to win.

Take time to think through the prize to ask ratio:

• What are you asking people to do?
• What is the value of the prize that they can win?
• Do those things make sense together?
• Does the prize balance out the ask?
• Is it worth their time?

People are willing to do a lot more work for a much higher prize value. Keep in mind that value is not just a dollar amount. It can also be how valuable this is perceived in their life. Is this going to make their life better? Is it something that you know your target audience really wants? These are all things to think about while crafting these campaigns.

3. Flying Solo

During UGC contests, brands often make the mistake of exclusively using their product as the prize. This especially rings true for food brands that have a lower priced product but are trying to create a higher prize value. If you are aiming to create a $250 prize and your product costs $5, do people really want 50 products? This result might be overkill for most people.

Get out of the mindset that your product is the only thing that you can give away as part of a UGC campaign. For example, you can partner with other non-competitive brands or offer gift cards. There are a wide variety of things that you can do but at the end of the day, you want to get your audience to engage. Collaborations are a great way to incentivize participation, especially if you are asking your audience to do more work than sharing a photo and hashtag.

4. Expecting An Immediate Viral Sensation

If you build it, they will not come.

Forgetting to pre-seed content for UGC campaigns is a costly mistake. When your UGC contest goes live and people check the hashtag, there needs to be something for them absorb.

All too often, companies will launch contests while thinking, “Okay, everybody share, using our hashtag, it’s going to be great, look at all these entries,” and then there aren’t any entries to show the type of content you want.

Before you make the competition public, pre-seed your social media accounts by having posts 100% ready to go live as soon as the campaign launches. At the very lowest end, this could mean working with your team to create a few initial posts that help give participants a sense of what you want them to submit.

Another great way to pre-seed content is by working with influencers. This could mean paying influencers or you could be offering them exposure, but whatever the exchange is there are a few steps to remember before you launch the contest:

• Connect with a variety of influencers and get them on board for the campaign.
• Confirm that they are clear about the campaign launch date.
• Confirm the day, time, and platforms that they are going to be posting their content.
• Structure what you ask of influencers so that they are calling out what the contest is, what participants need to share, the rules and requirements, when the deadline is, etc.

The influencer strategy is powerful because you are going to get awesome content from those influencers while simultaneously reaching their fanbase. Your brand will instantly have an audience that’s seeing the contest, getting them excited to participate, and have great content created to seed your overall campaign. Using this strategy, anywhere the campaign is announced, people can go to their feed, check the hashtag and immediately absorb content.

5. Setting and Forgetting

Don’t anticipate launching your campaign and then leaving it unattended until the final date. Setting and forgetting can bring any UGC momentum to a screeching halt. There are a few ways to stay on top of the process and ensure a successful contest.

• No one likes a one-sided conversation. Engage with participants by checking brand mentions and uses of your hashtag. Like photos and comment on their posts, letting them know that you love their entry and appreciate them taking time to participate in the contest.
• Tied into the above tip is sharing more than just the winner’s post. Throughout the entire contest, share a variety of UGC content as it is posted. Often the photos that you share encourages the user to re-share saying “Look, this brand re-posted my photo! How cool!”.
• Also by engaging, you are able to control the conversations around your contest and turn potentially negative situations into a positive customer service experience.
• Double check that your influencers are posting when and where they are supposed to be. Influencers are human beings and sometimes even the best-intentioned people get distracted with life and occasionally forget. If they do forget a post, it usually only takes a friendly reminder to have them get the post out.
• When influencers share a photo, be sure to comment on their post, thanking them and letting their audience how excited you are about the collaboration.

Turning a campaign to auto-pilot can turn into a disaster quickly. The results from engagement and spot checking will be worth every moment of extra effort.

Didn’t read the entire post? To recap:

• Don’t ask too much or give too little.
• Pre-seed by collaborating with non-competitive brands and influencers.
• Stay on top of your contest as it progresses!

By avoiding these 5 mistakes, you will be well on the way to running a successful UGC contest. Any tips that we missed? Let us know in the comments!

The welcome email you send to your newly subscribed customers is an opportunity to make a great first impression–one that you don’t get to make twice.

When you meet a new customer in person, you probably want to show your best self, and you want them to get to know you. As in any good business relationship, you follow-up quickly and deliver on your promise.

You want to aim to do the same with your emails. Once someone submits their email on your website to subscribe to your newsletter or offer, be sure your welcome email reaches their inbox within ten minutes. Make that first impression count.

But what about the content of the email? How do you start the relationship? Here are 5 great examples of email templates from socially conscious food brands big and small, along with breakdowns of why their ideas are worth stealing.

1.  Amy’s Kitchen

Amy’s uses beautiful design and earthy colors, which helps shape their warm, friendly personality created by the copy. Words like “family” and “we’re so happy to have you join us” work together to invite you to further engage with them with clear calls to action to follow them on social media and to “start cooking” with recipes.

2.  Organic Valley

Discounts or coupons are great first impressions too. But first, be sure to make it clear on your website what your customer will get before they sign up.

You also want to set expectations for your customer by telling them in your email how often you’ll be emailing them and about what. It’s a better idea to set these expectations on the website so customers aren’t worried about whether they’ll get too many emails.

Here, Organic Valley lets you know they’ll email you about 2-4 times a month about various topics, including coupons exclusive to subscribers.

3. Erewhon Grocer & Cafe

This local grocer does a great job by thanking you first, both in their subject line and in their email. According to research by the marketing automation platform MailChimp, word pairings like “thank you” have a positive impact on email open rates. Surprise! People love to be thanked.

At the top of their welcome email, they ask subscribers to add them to their contacts. This helps make sure the emails get delivered to the subscriber’s inbox and do not get flagged as spam.

Erewhon also has a nice CTA calling attention to learn more about its loyalty membership without pressuring signup.

4. Bob’s Red Mill

The best traits of Bob’s welcome email is how personal and personalized it is in its first message. You’re greeted by name in the subject line and email, there’s a photo of Bob, he tells you his story, and he signs off personally. In the same research by MailChimp, the team found this type of personalization works well, especially for open rates.

5.  Santa Cruz Organic

When you write your subject line, it doesn’t pay to be too cute. Say what’s in the email, if you want to decrease the chances it’ll be trashed without being opened at all. Build trust. Deliver what the customer thinks they signed up for.

Bonus: These days you have to make sure your emails are mobile-friendly. This means they don’t just look good on a desktop computer, they are also formatted for and easily readable on a smartphone.

Your welcome email is an essential part of your marketing communications and can be the first impression someone has of your brand.

Key Points to Remember

• Get your customer excited about joining.
• Take the time to create the look and feel of your design, and make sure the content matches the substance of your offering and the flow of the customer experience.
• Automate your email to be in the customer’s inbox within ten minutes of signup.
• Set expectations. Before asking for emails, let customers know what you’ll be emailing them and how often. In your subject lines, say what’s in the email.
• Thank your customers for signing up.
• Personalize with your customer’s name.

Use these welcome emails as inspiration to create your own campaign and you’ll be on your way to building a beautiful relationship with your new customers!

Most customers will stay loyal to a brand they admire even in a sea of competitive products. Businesses that achieve this relationship with their customers also enjoy more financial reward when they prioritize retention. According to one study, even a 5% increase in the rate of customers you retain can increase profits by more than 25%.

How can your marketing strategy turn your customers into superfans? Here are three digital strategies these social impact food brands have used successfully to do just that.

Customer-Informed Content Can Refine Your Target Audience

In 2017, top baby food brand Plum Organics surveyed their core audience of parents and found that intimacy was a common concern. Plum Organics created a bold digital campaign around this problem, which included an online well-being pledge with high conversion rates, as well as a cheeky video that racked up over 11 million views. The company took something that felt very true but hard to talk about and gave it an edge that resonated with people, as seen from the video comments.

In 2012, food photo sharing was becoming increasingly popular. Plum Organics discovered that their customers were incorporating their food products into recipes and sharing them on the company’s Facebook page. Seeing an opportunity, Plum created a four-week Facebook campaign posting recipes written by influential mom bloggers that featured their products. By the end of the campaign, they had gained an “over 900% increase in fans and a 500% engagement.” It was an incredibly effective platform for their existing customers to share how they creatively use Plum Organics products to improve their families’ lives.

They’ve recently continued pushing this with their Helping New Parents Keep it Together in Year One campaign.

Build Trust Through Transparency

At the core of building trust in customer relationships, is a consistency of trustworthy information that’s easy to find. Customers trust people and values more than brand names; knowing who you are as a business, what you do, and being able to convey this to your customers is crucial.

Numi Tea is one food brand whose identity often transcends that of a simple tea company. On their website, their core values of celebrating people, the planet, and tea, are thoughtfully built onto every page. It has well-organized categories showcasing not only their products but their social impact methods and results.

Numi highlights their business partners and how they work together to fulfill Numi’s commitment to a sustainable farming community. If you’re building a conscious food brand, your target customer’s values should align with yours. Full transparency about your business practices, wherever you talk to your customers, is a great way to build trust. Strategically laying out information about how your product is made, who you partner with, and how you operate helps your current customers believe in your message, and potential customers learn more about your brand.

Stand Up For What You Believe In

People respond best when everything you communicate has a unifying, original voice. What you put on your website should have the same style and voice as your Twitter page, your customer support channels and any other place you’re communicating with current or potential customers.

Ben and Jerry’s is one socially conscious brand famous for its unorthodox marketing and loyal fan base. Everything they do feels authentic because they understand their core values, and they use the same light-hearted quirky style in all their campaigns.

During the 2016 presidential election year, Ben and Jerry’s launched their “Democracy is in Your Hands” campaign. It proved to be controversial since they were taking a political stance, but it also received plenty of press for their creative spin taking on a political issue using their core product: ice cream. To bring awareness to issues like voting rights, they launched a new flavor called Empower Mint. As the company put it, “Sometimes when we’re passionate about something, we express it through ice cream. It’s our own special way of showing how much we care.”

Ben and Jerry’s utilized several social media channels to bring awareness to their campaign to register at least 30,000 new voters. This included Facebook for events, and Instagram (one post getting over 15,000 likes).

Not everyone believes in Ben and Jerry’s message, but the people who share their values, and love their ice cream, are likely to become even more invested in their brand.

The most successful socially conscious businesses have a lot of these digital strategies in common. They are good at reaching their target audience by tapping into their customer community. They build trust through transparent communication that shows clearly how they operate according to their values. And they always stay true to themselves and their beliefs through every social media interaction. Implementing these three strategies into your natural food product marketing campaigns can also help you create a solid foundation for a loyal fanbase.