We Create: Showcasing Indigenous creativity to support small businesses in Canada

We Create is an initiative that lifts up communities and small businesses by providing resources and bringing them together to collaborate on solutions that drive growth and push creativity on Instagram. We Create is back for a third time, this time with a focus on Canada’s Indigenous communities.

We paired 3 digital-first, Indigenous-owned, female-owned businesses with Indigenous creatives across the country, including 3 creators, a videographer and a creative agency. By collaborating closely with Meta’s Creative Shop and marketing experts, these teams worked with each business— @mini.tipi, Shades of Gray (@indigenoustreats) and @standingsprucefarm — to boost their marketing efforts by showing them how to build effective campaigns and create valuable content with an Instagram-first mindset.

Let’s dive into some of the best practices and tools the campaigns and businesses leveraged to help achieve their goals.

First up, meet Shades of Gray, which sells single-ingredient pet treats manufactured in Canada. The Ontario-based company’s goal is to share the health benefits of freeze-dried and dehydrated pet treats made with 100% meat to help pets live a healthy, long life.

Founder Keri Gray looked to differentiate Shades of Gray from their competitors and communicate their products’ unique value and benefits in an effort to reach new customers across Canada and the US. We partnered Shades of Gray with creator and storyteller @sarainfox and branding agency @creativefire_canada to develop a campaign that incorporated Reels to make pet humor the focus, while still communicating the product benefits in a simple way. Because Reels has creative tools like effects, music, and stickers, they’re a great way to get creative with storytelling.

Explore our how-to-guide for creating reels ads here.

Next up, meet MINI TIPI, the home of stylish, small-batch home and family goods inspired by Canadian and Indigenous heritage. Founded in 2016 by Trisha Pitura and Mélanie Bernard, the company is known for their beautiful textiles that are designed, cut and sewn in Gatineau, Quebec.

For We Create, MINI TIPI’s goal was to increase brand awareness outside of their core market of Quebec and sell their products in every province and territory across Canada. Their team was paired with creator and advocate @kendrajessie, director and cinematographer Sean Stiller (@seansecwepemc) and Creative Fire to create a campaign that highlights the variety of MINI TIPI products available for sale. Branded content was a key component to accomplish this. Think of creators as strategic partners—by featuring your products on their Instagram accounts, you can get your brand in front of new audiences beyond the marketing you’re already doing.

Explore more branded content tips for businesses, straight from creators.

Finally, meet Standing Spruce Farm & Apothecary, a wellness company steeped in traditional Indigenous values and customs. As one of the only Indigenous farms in British Columbia’s Campbell River, Standing Spruce carries a wide range of wildcrafted products, remedies and skin care products that are all harvested sustainably. Founder Lesley Assu also focuses on sharing the spiritual origins of the ingredients and the intention behind each product.

Standing Spruce looked to engage a new audience—men interested in wellness and natural grooming products—by showcasing the Standing Spruce brand and the products available tailored to them. Standing Spruce worked with our team to design a full-funnel campaign featuring both brand and conversion components to achieve Standing Spruce’s goals. With the help of creator and wellness advocate Shayla Stonechild (@shayla0h) and Sean Stiller, Standing Spruce created a campaign that educates consumers about the methods and ingredients that make up the products, so they can feel confident selecting the right product for them. They used a brand video to establish awareness among a new audience, and product ads retargeted to audiences they cared about reaching the most.

In addition to leveraging our best-in-class awareness objective to maximize showing their ads to people who are most likely to remember them, Standing Spruce also used our Conversions objective to optimize their campaigns towards driving online sales. The conversions objective uses advanced Meta signals that find the right people who are more likely to make a purchase, and serve them the right ad at the right time, optimizing towards either a higher purchase volume, or overall sales value.

Learn to leverage our tools for a full-funnel campaign that makes the most of your marketing dollars.

As these partnerships demonstrate, collaborative creativity can come in all different formats with endless possibilities and opportunities! Now it’s your business’ turn to get creative on Instagram.