PRODUCING FIRST IMPRESSIONS THAT DELIVER A POSITIVE IMPACT

ITS-Food.ca: Professional Food Photographer Helping Businesses Succeed

NANAIMO – You never have a second chance to make a good first impression – is a message professional food photographer and marketing consultant Tim McGrath regularly tells his clients. For someone operating in the hospitality or food services industries that first impression might be an image on a website, in an advertisement or on a menu – if that image is appealing you’ll make the sale, if not, you may have lost a customer.

Tim McGrath has worked as a professional food photographer and marketing consultant for more than a decade.

“Great images of your culinary dishes and delights can make significant improvements to your success. The purpose of these images is to increase your business, so my job as the photographer is to make you, the client, successful! How your food is presented, in a photo or on the plate, will ultimately be critical to your success. You want that first impression to be the best that it can be.”

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HOW TO BRAND YOUR NEW RESTAURANT

ITS-Food: Food Photographer discusses RESTAURANT specific branding and its importance

NANAIMO – Your brand differentiates you from your competitors. Your brand is created from who you are, who you want to be and how customers perceive you to be. Branding is your communication of the restaurant’s ‘personality’. It is portrayed through logo, menu’s, staff uniforms, website and social media. Branding includes the people and the atmosphere that is created. The restaurant that thrives makes a commitment to controlling, fostering and promoting their ‘brand’.

there is a difference between marketing and branding

A brand will help encourage someone to buy a product, and it directly supports whatever sales or marketing activities, but the brand does not just say “buy me.” Instead, it says “This is what I am. This is why I exist. This is my personality, if you like me, buy me, support me, and recommend me to your friends.”

Marketing is actively promoting a product or service. It’s a push tactic. It’s pushing out a message to get sales results: buy this product because of these features, or the cost.

Marketing may convince you to buy a particular Jeep, but it is the brand that will determine if you will only buy “jeeps” for the rest of your life.

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PHOTOGRAPHER NOTICES A RESURGENCE IN PRINT ADVERTISING ACTIVITY

ITS-Food: Food Photographer Increasingly Producing Images For Trade Publications

NANAIMO – For a business to effectively market its services or products it must be willing to use all of the communication mediums available to it, with consistency and with a continuity of branding and imagery. But for many, according to professional photographer Tim McGrath, the world of Social Media may have lost some of its luster. Increasingly he has found that a return to more traditional forms of advertising – such as magazines and newspapers – is becoming increasingly effective.

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“I would never dissuade any business from using Social Media. It remains a key part of my business, and has the potential to reach specific audiences with focused messages and with an immediacy that can’t be attained any other way. But branding, and carrying your branding to a more traditional type of exposure is proving to be increasingly important as well,” McGrath, the owner of ITS-Food.ca explained.

Specializing in food photography, McGrath has been working for clients as diverse as restaurants, grocery stores and publishing houses for more than a decade.  His work has appeared in everything from newspaper and magazine advertisements, to cookbooks, menus, Social Media marketing campaigns and even on posters.

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