How do you market an experience someone has to see, taste, and be part of to really understand?
That was the fun challenge behind my work with U-Feast, a food and hospitality brand creating one-night-only experiences in Toronto and Vancouver with restaurants, chefs, beverage brands, and event spaces.
For this project, photography and visual content weren't just there to make the feed look good. They helped us show people what it actually felt like to be at a U-Feast event and gave us a way to keep telling the story long after dinner was over.
About U-Feast
U-Feast brought food lovers together for communal, interactive food and drink experiences that usually couldn't be booked from a restaurant's regular menu. Experiences included chef-led dinners, wine events, beverage partnerships, cooking workshops, restaurant collaborations, and other experiential events.
Because each event was temporary, social media played an important role in keeping the community connected between experiences and helping people discover what was coming next.
My Role
I supported U-Feast's social media and content strategy across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for its Toronto and Vancouver communities.
My work included social and visual content strategy, photography selection and curation, user-generated content sourcing, event storytelling, campaign development, community engagement, and reporting.
I also developed content concepts around individual experiences and looked for ways to tell a bigger story than simply, “Here's an event. Buy a ticket.”
The Visual Content Strategy
Food and hospitality marketing gives you a lot to work with visually, but the most useful image isn't always the prettiest plate of food.
For U-Feast, I looked for images that helped communicate the full experience: the food, the people making it, the restaurant or venue, guests interacting, behind-the-scenes moments, beverage pairings, and the atmosphere surrounding the event.
We worked with a mix of event photography, partner imagery, and user-generated content. I selected and curated photography for social campaigns, built content around those assets, and used post-event imagery to extend the life of each experience.
Event photos could become Facebook albums, Instagram content, Stories, restaurant and chef features, promotional posts, and material that helped sell future U-Feast experiences.
Turning Experiences Into Stories
The strategy also meant finding stories inside each event.
Instead of relying only on promotional posts, I developed content around chefs, restaurants, food traditions, wine and beverage education, cooking techniques, partners, and the cultural context behind different experiences.
That gave us more ways to stay connected with the audience between events while keeping the content rooted in what made U-Feast interesting in the first place: discovery, food, people, and shared experiences.
What I Was Responsible For
- Social and visual content strategy
- Photography selection and curation
- User-generated content sourcing
- Event storytelling and content direction
- Social copy and campaign development
- Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter management
- Community engagement
- Content performance reporting
The Results
The social community grew across the engagement, with reporting periods showing increases in audience size, reach, engagement, clicks, and video views across U-Feast's Toronto and Vancouver channels.
In the November 12 to December 12 reporting period alone, cross-channel engagement increased 17%, activity increased 18%, and the audience grew by more than 200 people across Facebook and Instagram.
Earlier reporting also showed strong individual-channel growth, including a 59% increase in U-Feast Vancouver's Instagram audience during one monthly reporting period and substantial increases in Facebook reach and video views.
What This Project Taught Me About Hospitality Marketing
People don't experience a restaurant, brewery, event, or destination as a collection of isolated products. They remember how the whole thing felt.
That's why I approach photography and visual content as part of the marketing strategy. The goal is to capture enough of the details, people, setting, and energy that someone scrolling past can start imagining themselves there.
U-Feast gave me the opportunity to apply that approach across food, beverage, restaurants, live events, and experiential marketing, while building a visual content system that could keep working before, during, and after each experience.
Photography shown or referenced in this project included U-Feast event, partner, and user-generated imagery. My role included visual direction, image selection and curation, content development, and social campaign execution.
