In the heart of Dubai’s culinary landscape, where mesmerizing architecture binds with the food industry, Instagram is comparatively a new, yet effective marketing tool for the food businesses.

Therefore, it has become mandatory for all food businesses to have a good grasp of restaurant Instagram marketing strategies.

To promote food businesses on Instagram, one needs to follow some consecutive steps that include creating an Instagram business account, writing a good bio, making the perfect posts, generating hashtags, and many other things.

In this article, we will share all those steps with you along with some special tips to succeed faster through Instagram promotion.

Steps to Promote Food Business on Instagram in Dubai

A successful promotion of a food business on Instagram is a slow process. It requires for you to take several tiny steps to gradually reach a milestone through Instagram marketing.

Below is a guide to all those important steps you’ll need to follow during the process. Take a look!

Create an Instagram Business Account

First thing first, to promote your food business on Instagram, you need to have an Instagram business account. An Instagram business account is designed for carrying out business via Instagram.

It gives you the option to have all the necessary details required for the customer to know about your business. Such as the address in Dubai, the hours opened, the website link, email, and so on.

Your bio would be the first thing any customer would see when they visit your page. Therefore, make sure you have a bio that within a few words delivers a complete idea about your business.

This includes what you sell, your location, opening hours, and services available such as dine-in, take-out, and home delivery. Include in the bio that your restaurant is Dubai-oriented to get the right audiences. Also, make sure to give links to your other social media business accounts.

In the case of Instagram marketing, the photos of your food product are everything. You need to make sure the photos you upload are high-quality and make your food look very appetizing and enticing.

If the photos don’t look attractive, you will get very few responses. Because it’s the photos that make people buy something from Instagram before even the quality of it.

Modern Instagram works on reels. People enjoy watching reels more than normal posts. And so, most businesses take advantage of this craze for Instagram reels.

In terms of food businesses, the best prompt for making videos and reels is the preparation and serving of food.

Make very quick videos on how your food is prepared and served. This also creates a sense of trust among new customers.

Geo-Tagging

Use Relevant Hashtags
The best way to reach a wide range of customers on Instagram is via hashtags. By using appropriate hashtags below all your post captions, your posts will pop up in the searches and the Explore tab of people interested in the food items and businesses like yours.

And so, you will be able to get more and more customers. Just make sure, with the right product, you’re using the right hashtag.

Just making an account and posting creative Instagram food posts, will not be enough to get the attention of your customers.

To remind your customers of your products and make them crave them every day, posting stories is also very important.

A post does not usually make as much reach as a story. Whereas a story pops up every day on the top of the feed and helps to engage the customers with the products.

For a starting business to grow, support from friends and the known community is very crucial. Your friends and families living in Dubai are always going to be your first customers and reviewers in your businesses.

Therefore, they are also going to play a key role by spreading the word of your business to their known sphere of people. So, tag them in the comments of your post and let them know to like, share, and comment to support your business.

Who doesn’t like to get an offer? Literally, everyone. With so many food businesses growing in Dubai using Instagram promotions and everyone wondering how to get more customers in my restaurant, you need to make extra efforts to compete with them. And that’s where special offers come in.

With some monthly and weekly special offers, your customer engagement and repeats will increase. Moreover, launch special offers on special occasions as well and make a prompt for your customers to celebrate with your food.

Just like special offers, competitions and giveaways are some latest approaches adopted by restaurant owners of Dubai to increase customer engagement.

These are very effective short-cut methods where through the customers’ network and advertisement you achieve the interest of a huge population.

In Dubai, there are thousands of influencers and food bloggers who know very well how to promote restaurants on Instagram the right way. They provide reviews and recommendations of food businesses to their followers. Their fan following helps boost the reach of food businesses sky-high within just a few days.

All you need to have is a good budget to offer them. Or for some micro-influencers, a complimentary meal will simply do the trick too.

Special Tips on Promoting Food Business on Instagram

The steps mentioned above are enough to kick-start your restaurant Instagram marketing. However, if you really want to achieve visible success from it, you better note down the following tips –

Know Your Target Audience in Dubai

Before creating an Instagram page and starting off promotion, you need to decide which customers you want to target.

Such as which age, status, and background of people living in Dubai will be more attracted to the type of food you’re selling.

Because that will be important to design and shape your page and its activities keeping them in mind.

Ensure Authenticity

Never bluff or post anything that does not go with your product or business just to attract the audience.
Because once your product creates an expectation among the customers, not being able to deliver it will disappoint them. And you will get bad reviews and fewer repeats.

Provide Quality Food

Always try to maintain and improve the quality of your food. If you provide low-quality food, it will affect your image and reviews.

Sometimes, even one bad review is enough to ruin a good-going food business.

Be Responsive and Polite in DMs

How you treat your customers is very important for them to be interested in buying from you. Always remember that, no matter what, be it in calls or direct messages (DMs), you should always behave sweetly with the customers.

And always try to respond fast to the DMs, so your customer doesn’t change their mind.

Work on the Reviews and Comments

Make sure to take into account the reviews and comments your real customers provide on your posts and DMs. It will help you improve and gain more customer satisfaction.

Be Creative with Captions

Sometimes a good caption convinces the customers to buy the product they weren’t interested in initially. Because it is your only way of persuading via your posts. Make sure to be as creative and attractive as possible while writing them.

Avoid Blanket Posting

Blanket posting, which means posting something multiple times, was a very popular social media marketing strategy a few years ago. But it isn’t a good option when it comes to Instagram marketing. Rather it makes people lose interest when they scroll down a profile and see the same posts all over again.

Use Your Brand Colors

Designate 2 to 3 colors representing your business. And make sure all your posts highlight these colors. In this way, it gets easier for the customers to distinguish your posts when scrolling. And also, it adds to creating a brand value.

Encourage User Generated Content within Dubai

Make strategies to create a brand hashtag culture. For that, make a hashtag for your brand and ask your followers in Dubai to use it while reviewing or uploading pictures of the foods they ordered from you.
In this way, people searching for those hashtags will not only get your posts but the post of your followers as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Words

Now that you know how to promote food business on Instagram in Dubai, what is getting in your way to create a successful food empire in this Insta era? 

Just follow all the steps mentioned above to launch your food business on Instagram right away. And keep in mind the special tips to ensure growth and better reach.

Know a friend who’s struggling to find a way to promote his or her food business on Instagram like you? Help them too by sharing this article on your Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.