How Vegan Brands Leverage Instagram Reels to Drive Engagement

Key Takeaways

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Reel Content — Inspire Consumers to Cook with your Products: Vegan food brands post easy recipes to inspire their followers to cook with their products. Oftentimes, brands would collaborate with influencers to share content creation efforts and tap into their audiences. Vegan brands with a sustainability agenda also help their followers to find “greener” substitutes to the products they use regularly and share some educational content that taps into the peripheral interests and values of their audience. 

Reel Content  — Share Behind-The-Scenes of the Business: Brands use Reels as an additional channel to tell their brand story. Many companies complement their communication strategy with behind-the-scenes Reels from their photoshoots, production kitchen or share their office life. Such brand expressions help to show a different side of the company, drive authenticity and build a connection with the followers. 

Reel Content — Engage Your Followers With Giveaways: Giveaways have been a proven way to elevate engagement rates and grow the account’s following. Many brands experiment with running Reel contests on Instagram. They explain the rules and conditions in the Reel video, duplicate them in the copy and ask their followers to comments, follow, share the video. Such brands, as Smart Sweet, saw quite high engagement on their reel giveaways.

Reel Content — Follow Best Practices and Maximize Reel’s Tools: Reels come with various editing features that make creating an engaging video fast and easy. Fashion and beauty bloggers set the tone for creating interesting Reel videos. Similar to TikTok, Instagram Reels enable users to choose from a library of music or record their own sound. Some vegan brands choose to accompany their recipe videos with voiceovers to add another dimension to the story. Once created, a reel can be shared to TikTok and vice versa to maximize the potential audience reach.

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After Instagram launched Reels in August 2020, brands with less than 500K followers that ventured into this format saw an average of 64.3K views on their Reel Videos.

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Fashion and Beauty brands were amongst the first ones to incorporate Reels into their regular posting.

Vegan food brands also tapped into Reel videos and experimented with various content themes.

Vegan brands regularly posting Reels:

Recipes

Recipes are by far the most popular content theme amongst food brands and influencers. Brands tend to focus on creating easy-to-follow instructions and provide the recipe in the captions of each post.

Quick Tips

Vegan brands share quick tips that align with their audience’s interests such as which sustainable products to use, how to minimize single-use plastic consumption, etc. Brands address the peripheral interests of their followers and strive to deliver value and education across those verticals.

Oddly Satisfying

Oddly satisfying types of videos popped out across different accounts, and the food brands didn’t stay away. Vegan food brands focus on texture and color to help drive the taste attributes of their products.

Behind-the-scenes

Brands drive authenticity and tell a brand story from another angle with behind-the-scenes types of Reels. Companies show everything from how they make their products to how they create advertising content.

Contextual

Brands create timely content for any celebrated occasion, from Christmas to Super Ball to National Cookie Day. Celebrating different occasions enables brands to leverage trending holiday hashtags.

Giveaways

Giveaways are designed to engage and grow followers. Brands use Reels to announce and explain their upcoming contests.

Influencers

Reels is another medium for vegan brands to collaborate with influencers. Brands can share their content creation efforts with the bloggers and benefit from their products being authentically woven into the creator’s Reels.

Humor

For the brands that have humour in their DNA, funny videos are a great way to elevate engagement and entertain their followers.

Brands also follow best practices and utilize Reel’s features to amplify the effect of their message.

Eye-catching thumbnails

Brands start their recipe Reels by showing the final result. Pictures of mouthwatering foods evoke emotions and trigger interest.

Brands rely on catchy thumbnails to inspire users to continue watching the Reel.

Voice-overs

Brands accompany their Reels with voice-overs to add another dimension to the video and strengthen the story. Oftentimes, voice-overs help to break through the clutter of overused popular music.

Reels video effects

Reels feature comes with various editing tools that enable users to easily create surprising video effects.

*non-vegan brand examples

Repost from TikTok

Brands repurpose content created for TikTok on Instagram and vice versa.

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