How to turn pastry into a social media star

Working with social networks is an integral part of marketing these days. Artic Bakehouse knows this, their content on these platforms can be a great inspiration for other businesses. In the following interview, the owners of Prague's Artic Bakehouse bakeries – Davíð Arnórsson and Gudbjartur Gudbjartsson – will share their experiences.

What impact do social networks have on your business?

I can say that social networks have a really significant impact on our business. Speaking for myself, I have to say that I have never used social networks much. Before we moved to the Czech Republic, I had a company in Iceland and at that time these technologies did not exist or were in their very beginning stages. But here in the Czech Republic, social networks have helped us become a really popular business in the Prague gastronomy field. Nowadays, our Instagram lives a life of its own, thanks to our fans, who constantly supply us with a huge number of great photos. Thanks to our fans, our content is created really naturally, and, above all, we have a constant supply of material for our posts and stories. I still can't believe the numbers myself when I see how many people our posts have reached and how many views we have. So, our posts reach roughly 150,000 users a month. It's amazing that people from all over the world come to see us thanks to social media. And that's just because they found out about us on Instagram or read a travel blog that mentions our bakery. In short, this method of presentation has incredible power. But at the same time, it is important to remember that this way of presentation can help you a lot, but if your product or services are not 100%, it can also destroy you.

Do you use the services of professional photographers, copywriters or marketers?

I have to say that basically we don't use these services much. We have a lady who does Facebook and Instagram for us lightly, but it's not a major marketing job. As for photos, as I mentioned before, most of our content comes directly from our fans.

However, if we need to shoot a product on a white background, we use a small photo booth and we shoot practically everything ourselves on our phone.

Have you worked with other foodie entities? If so, have these foreign entities attracted new fans from their side?

We supply baked goods to various restaurants, but we have never promoted this type of cooperation in an official way. Of course, some of our customers are also restaurant owners and use our bakery products in their restaurants. On their menus you will find a mention that the pastries come from Artic Bakehouse. But as I said, we do not promote these collaborations in any way. Of course, we are happy that these restaurants mention us in their menus and that they like to use our bakery products, knowing that they already have a certain name in the world of Prague gastronomy

Do you have any experience working with influencers? If not, are you thinking about a similar collaboration?

We have never officially collaborated with any influencers. Of course, we have been approached by some, but we have never entered into a paid collaboration with anyone. To be honest, I remember one lady who traveled to the Czech Republic, she told me she was an influencer for a living, but we only offered her to get some of our products for free. But even without paid collaboration, influencers mention us quite often. Just do your craft honestly and these things will come.

You have over 11 thousand followers on Instagram. How long did it take you to build that fan base?

Our fan base has been slowly building for something like three years. Fortunately, in our case, everything happens naturally, and we didn't have to focus so much on reaching out to new fans. The best way we do this is through our loyal customers, who are amazing at this and are constantly tagging and promoting us on Instagram. Our new fans come to us so naturally thanks to the positive reviews and support of our current fan base.

Do you also use paid advertising on Instagram?

We‚ve used this method of promotion two or three times on our Facebook page, but we haven't ventured further into similar paid advertising.

Do you notice that as the number of followers grows, it's getting harder to gain new ones organically?

We know that you can pay for advertising and many other services on social networks. But we don't think that fans gained from advertising are as valuable as those who start following you naturally through their friends or acquaintances. That's why we insist that less is sometimes more. Our fans really care about and value our work. I‚m not entirely sure if it would work this way for users who started following us just based on advertising and had never heard of our work before. We simply really appreciate the fans from the other side of the world, but more importantly for us is the hard-core group who visit us every week and know our work and team personally.

In the future, are you thinking about making any changes to the presentation of your business or even to your presence on other social media sites such as TikTok?

I think that time will probably come soon, and we will have to hire a person to take care of our social networks professionally. Our reach is constantly increasing and since we are primarily bakers, we have never been completely good about responding to people on our social media. This is largely due to the fact that we are not Czech and find it difficult to reply in Czech. So, in my opinion, the time will soon come when we will have to start addressing this situation and if we hire a professional, they will start addressing our content on other social networks like TikTok.

Are customers from other cities and countries visiting you because of your social networks?

Absolutely, we have customers from all over the world stopping by. I have personally met people from South Africa and Japan, for example, who have come to our bakery because of social media. That's where social media has incredible power. People from the other side of the planet come to us without ever having been to Prague or the Czech Republic at all. At the same time, we are also followed by a large number of people from different parts of the world who have never visited us, but who may visit us one day. :)

Do you have any experience with negative reactions on Instagram? How do you react to them?

Of course, we do. Overall, we have very good reviews, both on Google and Facebook, but there are always some negative ones. We do our best to respond to everything, but it often depends on what the criticism is. If someone doesn't like that our range is a bit more expensive, we have nothing to say about that. Yes, our products are more expensive than in a traditional bakery, but you still have plenty of bakeries all over Prague to choose from that are cheaper than us. We simply have nothing to say about these objections. But if our customers have a bad experience with the quality of our products or customer service, we always try to track down the problem, find out what went wrong and fix it. After all, not every piece of baked goods will always turn out the same, and our employees are flesh-and-blood people who can make mistakes or simply may not be having their best day.

How do you feel about Instagram competitions? Have you ever used this form of promotion?

We‚ve never tried this form of promotion; in fact we haven't even needed anything like it yet.

Do you have any loyal fans who tag you regularly, re-share your posts and naturally promote your work?

There are a lot of customers like that, and our work on Instagram is built on them. We‚re so happy that these people promote us naturally and out of their own conviction, without us asking them to do so. I‚ve even met a lot of them in person at our store. It's a very nice feeling to meet customers who root for you like that. Anyone running a business should be in a personal connection with their customers. After five years of running our bakery, we have found a lot of great customers who have become good friends. There are also customers who have been shopping with us almost every day for many years, and some of them have been with us since the very beginning. We are also very happy with customers who are from Brno or Ostrava, for example, but every time they come to Prague, they stop by for something good. One of the nicest things that happened to us from our customers was when one of our loyal customers went on holiday to the seaside with his family and they carved a big heart and the Artic bakehouse sign into the sand.

Are you looking for inspiration from other international bakeries and gastro entities?

Of course, we‚re always trying to soak up inspiration! It's not that we specifically go after other bakeries, but if something appeals to us taste-wise, we‚re happy to try it. It happens to us that some bakers are inspired by us. But I would like to say one important thing, I like it when people inspire each other, and it makes me happy when other bakers are inspired by our work. But what I really don't like is if one doesn't have certain knowledge or experience and tries to make up for these shortcomings by copying recipes and products. Maybe the country we come from has a big influence on us as bakers are really important in Iceland and it takes 6 years to train as a baker here. Our view of baking is more like an art than an industry. We can use this example in this situation as well, if I paint a picture to inspire another painter, I will be very happy, but if another painter copies my picture I probably won't be very happy about it.

In your opinion, do stories or classic feed posts have more influence on your fans?

It's hard to say which type of posts works better on our fans. But we think it's more likely to be our feed photos, which are more constant in nature. As for stories, those are almost exclusively reposts from our customers.

Are you working with new trends in gastronomy, such as vegan or gluten-free products?

No, you won't find this range in our bakery. We try to go the traditional way, of course it happens that customers come to us and look for this kind of bakery products. As for vegan baked goods, you won't find that in our range. As far as gluten-free baked goods are concerned, thanks to the quality of our ingredients and the fermentation process, our products are really low in gluten. Thus, unless you suffer from a really serious intolerance, our products will not cause you any problems. We have tested this in Iceland, where our customers tried one slice of bread on the first day, two slices on the second day and so on. Above all, we want to bake our products in a way that is close to our hearts and to the best of our ability, and customers who have specific needs in this regard have plenty of options in Prague where to buy these pastries. But at Artic bakehouse, we don't concentrate on all possible assortment, and we don't want to. We believe that we have taken a path that we understand, and it is more important for us to stick to what we know than to try to go against all the new trends.

Do you keep any stats to help you make your Instagram even better?

We don't keep detailed statistics, but in the time we‚ve been using social media to promote ourselves, we already know which products work better than others on our Instagram. But as we‚ve already said, the time is gradually coming when we‚ll need to hire a professional to manage our social networks, and at that point we‚d certainly like to track that data. So when we find a person who has a similar perspective to ours, we‚ll definitely take those methods into account.

Have you thought about using Czech along with English in your posts?

Of course, we are a Czech company, and we should write our posts in Czech as well. Unfortunately, we are currently not fully capable of writing all our content in Czech and we know that this factor is our weakness. In the future we plan to change this approach and write everything in English as well as in Czech.

Do you also share stories of your employees so that your customers get to know the personalities who work on their favorite pastries?

Yes, we have had a few of these posts in the past, and we would like to focus more on sharing our employees‘ stories in the future as well.

Do you only use certain filters to keep your posts coherent?

In most cases, we don't use filters at all. Because the light in our stores is very constant, which makes all the photos from this environment have a similar character.

Have you thought about creating custom gifs on Instagram that your fans can use when tagging your account on their stories?

Ha-ha, we have to say that we were very interested in this question, even though we hadn't thought about something like this until today. We think this way of promoting our bakery is a good idea and will definitely consider creating something similar for our fans and customers.