(This is a continuation post following Social Media for Mead’s Green Door Cafe. I managed these accounts simultaneously and both businesses have the same owners.)
I was working diligently on Mead’s Green Door Cafe’s social media presence and was offered the position manage Creative Cakes’ social media as well. With my years of photography experience I was delighted to take photos of absolutely beautiful cakes and share them online. Creative Cakes offers wedding cakes and speciality cakes, among other sweet offerings. We utilized Instagram as an online portfolio to show future patrons what we have made in the past and document for current patrons who were excited to see their cakes featured online.
Weekly, the bakery would have speciality cakes and cupcakes available for sale and we would rely on social media to advertise. These cakes were marketed to show Creative Cakes as a reliable place to purchase a celebratory treat and I would utilize Instagram Stories. I learned the importance of having as much detail as possible in our story advertisements. When I first started this campaign, I would direct the audience to the post in our feed for more information but once I started including the flavor, size, servings and price within the story post, the sales increased. Being as detailed as possible on all posts helped the audience be more actionable to make a purchase.
On each story, I would always include the Creative Cakes geotag and a Giphy image to increase the chances of our story going on to the Orange, CA story. I have found that location stories are commonly populated with video or movement, so adding a Gifphy would always increase the chances of the story being featured. When one of our stories was added to a location story, we would typically have 100 or more unique views. I should also note that it is always my intention to add a Giphy but unfortunately there are times when it would lower the quality of the image, so I would avoid it.
These images from stories translated well on Facebook being visually appealing and made it even more clear what we had available for sale.
After I would create the story showing and describing everything we had for sale, I would always create an Instagram Story Highlight. These stories would go up around Wednesday or Thursday and because stories expire after 24 hours, I would extend the advertisement by putting it in the highlights. I would regularly show on stories that there was highlight with the most up to date information on what was available for sale. I would keep the highlight updated and include stories expressing when items were sold out.
We were fortunate to have a couple of posts go viral and I believe they were put on the Instagram Explore Page. We were able to expand our reach and experienced an increase in followers during those times.
(See the full feed here. I managed the accounts from February 2nd, 2017 – October 9th, 2018. There were periods of time where I didn’t post photos during that time period as well.)
As the Instagram profile serving as an online portfolio for the variety of cakes offered, there were many times when a customer would scroll very far down the feed and would like or save photos of cakes that interested them. It’s always my intention for the full look of the profile to be esthetically pleasing and I decided to add another layer to the feed by making photos create a rainbow pattern. It served as another way to drawn the audience’s eye down the feed.
We strived to have giveaways on a regular basis and would have them align with holidays (unicorn cake for Valentine’s Day · pumpkin cake for Halloween.) We also did a cross promotion cupcake giveaway in partnership with their sister business, Mead’s Green Door Cafe.
A way to organize the different cake categories Creative Cakes had to offer, I would create an Instagram Highlight to put all the photos in one place. Two of the most popular categories were the wedding cakes and a variety of unicorn cakes. The wedding cakes story highlight was populated over time with User Generated Content (UGC) and sharing posts from the feed onto stories. Sharing posts from the feed onto stories was the primary way the unicorn story highlight was created. Because of the variety of cakes offered, we wanted to clearly express the name/description of the cake, so the customer could easily tell the bakery manager what they wanted and also be clear on how many servings each cake provided (a understandably common question). Putting all of this information in one place greatly improved the ease of ordering unicorn cakes, which happened on a weekly basis.
I believe it’s valuable to include UGC to show customer appreciation and further exude customer satisfaction. I would frequently repost UGC (with permission) to show the cakes on their big day. I would make sure to include a geotag of the location if applicable so the image would be within the location’s library of photos. So for example, if a customer is scrolling through an location tag of a wedding venue, they can see that Creative Cakes delivers to that location.
(image 2)
Creative Cakes has many loyal customers and the Yelp reviews reflect that. The reviews are very detailed and very positive so it made for perfect content to repost. I would post a clean screenshot on the feed before Instagram Stories, but after stories was developed I started to post them there. I also created a highlight so all of the reviews were together in one place.
(video)
Video is something I wished we would have participated more often during my time at the bakery. (Here are a couple of videos [video 1 · video 2] but we started to film with my DSLR and tripod towards the end of my time there.) Watching cakes being made is something commonly viewed on Instagram and can easily be added to the Explore Page. Our first full production video was very successful featuring the creation of edible succulents and how they were arranged on a birthday cake. It was a very interesting lesson in social media video. My first draft of the video was 3 minutes and after showing the video to employees, I would actually witness when they started to loose interest. I was able to continue to edit the video down to 1 minute to give it the best results.
I really enjoyed my time at Creative Cakes. The team there were truly a joy to work with and I saw vast improvements in all aspects of content creation. It gave me the opportunity to flex my creativity and continue to grow as a social media marketer and for that I will always be appreciative.
– Christina