4.2M organic Reel views and 340% follower growth in 6 months

Services delivered

The Brief

Sevilla Hospitality Group operates four restaurant venues across Dubai — a Spanish tapas bar in DIFC, a rooftop Mediterranean concept in JLR, a casual brunch venue in Business Bay, and a late-night lounge in Downtown. Each venue had its own Instagram account with between 2,000 and 8,000 followers. The group's marketing budget was being spent on paid promotions that delivered impression numbers but were not converting to reservations or walk-in traffic.

The brief when we met the Operations Director was refreshingly specific: we are producing content that looks like everyone else's restaurant content in Dubai, and it is not working. We need content that stops the scroll. The group had tried working with individual freelance photographers for each venue and found the inconsistency in quality and style was damaging the brand perception across venues. They wanted a single production partner who could maintain a consistent visual identity across all four accounts while giving each venue its own distinct character.

What We Delivered

We established a monthly production rhythm: three shoot days per month, each covering one or two venues, producing a mix of still photography and short-form video content. Each shoot day produced 20-25 hero food and drink images, 3-4 Reels (60-90 seconds each), 6-8 Instagram Stories sequences, and 2-3 TikTok cuts from the same footage.

The content calendar was built around Dubai's hospitality calendar — Ramadan, the cooler outdoor season (October to April), key international events, and the brunch culture that drives weekend traffic. We produced themed content series: a Friday brunch series for the Business Bay venue, a sunset cocktail series for the JLR rooftop, a chef's table series for the DIFC tapas bar, and a late-night scene series for the Downtown lounge.

In addition to the monthly production, we produced two campaign shoots per quarter — more ambitious one-day productions with talent, styled food displays, and multiple outfit or set changes — that produced the hero content for paid amplification and press materials.

The Creative Approach

The single most impactful creative decision we made was to shoot food in motion rather than at rest. Static hero shots of plated dishes are the standard format for restaurant social media in Dubai — they are also the least effective at driving engagement on Reels and TikTok. We built our Reel production around dynamic sequences: the hand placing the last garnish, the sauce being poured, the dish sliding across the pass, the bartender's pour in slow motion. These sequences were technically more demanding to shoot but dramatically more effective at stopping the scroll.

For food photography, we worked closely with each venue's head chef on plating specifically for camera rather than table. Restaurant plates are often plated to look three-dimensional from above a table, not from the 45-degree hero angle that photographs best. Two hours of plating direction at the start of each shoot relationship produced a step-change in the quality of still images.

Lighting for each venue was calibrated to the actual ambient environment rather than overriding it with production lighting. The rooftop venue's natural light at golden hour was the strongest asset — we scheduled shoots to capture it specifically. The DIFC tapas bar's warm low lighting was a character asset, not a technical problem to solve with flash. Working with the space's natural character produced images that felt authentic to the dining experience rather than overly produced.

The Result

Six months into the engagement, aggregate Instagram followers across the four accounts had grown from approximately 22,000 to 97,000 — a 340% increase with zero paid follower acquisition. Reel views across all accounts reached 4.2 million, with three individual Reels exceeding 200,000 views each. The rooftop sunset cocktail Reel series consistently outperformed all other content formats across every metric.

The venue operations team reported a 28% increase in walk-in customers specifically citing seeing the restaurant on social media. Reservation enquiries through the venues' Instagram DMs increased to the point where a dedicated response resource was required. The group has since expanded the engagement to include campaign content for a fifth venue opening in Q1 2026.