Anisha Holla, a 21-year-old entrepreneur at the University of Texas at Dallas, has created Foodify, a first-of-its-kind platform for small, mom-and restaurants to be matched with local food influencers.
The student, who began as a food influencer (@dallastx_foodies) herself, started the company after seeing the impact her own videos were having on small restaurants.
“I started by posting videos for restaurants here and there on my own platform, which has just under 40,000 followers,” the young entrepreneur recalls. “Once or twice, I got calls from restaurant owners–in tears–because they were seeing lines out the door from my Instagram or TikTok video when they had never seen one before. That’s when I started realizing: social media…it’s powerful, especially for small restaurant owners.”
Holla has also been a food writer for the Dallas Observer for two years. “I meet a lot of restaurant owners through my writing job,” she says. “And it hurts to see more than 80% of them shut down within a couple of years. And it’s never because their food is bad. It’s simply because they don’t have the publicity that they need. People just don’t know the restaurant is there.”
But market research shows that people aren’t checking Yelp or Google anymore to find places to eat. In this day and age, the top two platforms for restaurant discovery are actually Instagram and TikTok. 80% of consumers say that they’ve looked at social media influencer pages to find where to eat out. Influencer marketing has 17x the ROI of other marketing methods in the restaurant industry. Restaurants make an average of $13 back on every $1 spent on influencer marketing.
Holla’s platform, Foodify, is seizing the market opportunity. Restaurants simply sign up for an account, indicate their audience preferences, and they’ll be matched with different local food influencers each month, who can post about the restaurant to millions of social media followers. The company-which has only been operational for 6 months–has already created 180 unique viral social media posts, amassed 56 billion social media impressions and achieved an average 150% lift in sales for its Dallas restaurant clients.
Influencer marketing can get expensive. But Foodify is creating the first affordable, fast, easy, and effective way for restaurants to make themselves known on social media.
“By matching restaurants with a different influencer each month we’re turning this into a long-term growth strategy, where restaurants can capitalize on a different influencer’s following each month,” Holla says. “That’s something that no company has done before.”
Within the next year, Holla plans to target New York City and San Francisco, where the startup has already acquired pools of local, vetted food influencers to help them scale their business model nationally.
“This is the start of a revolution in restaurant marketing,” Holla says. “We’re allowing restaurants to grow, expand and survive among the big chains of the restaurant industry, all with this powerful tool called social media.”
More information can be found at foodifyapp.com.
Media Contact
Company Name: Foodify
Contact Person: Anisha Holla
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Country: United States
Website: http://foodifyapp.com/