Turning an familiar visual aesthetic into a successful Instagram marketing campaign
Written by: Aaron Kho
Photographs by: Aaron Kho
eat2Explore is an award-winning education food and culture explorer box inspiring families to cook, taste and discover different world’s cuisines and cultures. Featuring foods from more than 18 countries, Eat2Explore has been able to engage children as young as 5 in the kitchen, not just with food preparation but with education around the flavors and the cuisine origins.
A sample mockup of eat2explore’s tasty style videos
Telling a story of food preparation with intention
There were two non-competing intentions when I was tasked to produced these videos.
On Instagram, the videos will need to act as a hook for audiences to capture to capture the brand value of eat2explore. This choice to seek similar visual aesthetic as the Buzzfeed Tasty videos adds familiarity and boosts engagement.
The videos will also need to be a visual reference for children and adults to show the process of preparation and how easy food can be prepared with eat2explore ingredients at home.
“Positioning the visuals specifically for Instagram has been key to attracting the audience successfully. ”
Key Ingredients for a highly effective video
To maintain high audience retention, the entire content has to be less than 30 seconds. Condensing a 30-minute meal prep to a 30 second video is not easy, especially when there are many steps involved in the preparation. With short attention spans amongst followers and a deluge of contents perpectuating the Internet, an effective visual storytelling is needed.
Begin the video with an enticing visual as a thumbnail so that the audience will be immediately attracted to food before diving into the contents of the video.
Select uplifting music that lifts the spirit of the audience and yet fitting for the eat2explore brand.
The 1:1 frame and the quick transitions to showcase the process of food preparation mimics the famous Tasty videos from Buzzfeed and evokes a sense of familiarity.
The Results
According to Hootsuite, the video views rate (referring to number of viewers who has watched the video 3s or more), is about 1.87%. So for a follower count of about 29K, getting an organic reach of over an average of 1000 video views (~3.4%) is a pretty impressive result. It also averages out to about 80% more viewership than other videos posted on the channel. This has proven that the Tasty videos aesthetic has been the correct choice of strategy and co-opting the visuals adds familiarity to the audiences.
Written by: Aaron Kho
Photographs by: Aaron Kho