Knowing how to market your restaurant is an essential component of your enterprise’s overall success. Even if you have a great restaurant with an accommodating ambiance and a diverse, mouth-watering menu, you’ll still need to do proper marketing. After all, people will not likely eat at places they can’t find online.
Unfortunately, many restaurateurs often focus on just the sales and forget to engage the customers. What they don’t realize is it is much cheaper to retain an old customer than to attract a new one.
Marketing your restaurant will involve you identifying the most convenient methods and strategies for promoting your business and defining clear plans for every one of them. Your restaurant will look smarter if you follow some restaurant marketing tips and techniques.
Let’s take a close look into the fundamental techniques you need to know to better engage and retain your customers in today’s highly competitive business environment. You can also click here to learn how to market a restaurant.
1. Get Into Social Media Marketing
Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook are three social media platforms every restaurant should be on. Billions of people use these platforms to network, and these are the kinds of spaces you want to position your business.
Make sure your restaurant’s social media accounts contain important information such as phone number, business hours, your location, and a link to your website. The information you provide on these social media accounts should be consistent with your local listings, such as TripAdvisor, Google My Business, and Yelp.
2. Consider Email Marketing
Emails effectively reach new and existing customers, and email marketing can deliver instantaneous results at a meager investment. All you need to start is your clients’ email information updated in your database, as well as the consent to communicate.
Compared to text messaging, email messaging will give you the creative freedom to put in as much image and text in your emails and make it as engaging as possible. You can send out newsletters on the highlights of the month, upcoming offers and discounts, and more information about your service.
3. Defining Your Brand Identity Through Your Website
A company’s website is the virtual epicenter of its brand. Therefore, your restaurant’s website should be the source of your brand identity in terms of feel, look, and personality.
Your website is the ideal place to share information about the strong vision for your restaurant and the beliefs that have shaped your restaurant’s approach to decisions, like the concept of your business and the types of food you have available for your customers.
4. Improve SEO Efforts to Improve Restaurant Online Visibility
SEO, or search engine optimization, involves various techniques to help your website rank highly on search engine results such as Yahoo and Google. The end goal of SEO is to get increased traffic to your restaurant’s site. More traffic translates to more potential customers and more revenue for your business.
You can maximize your site’s traffic and gain new customers by focusing on your site content. Make sure that it is educational, entertaining, compelling, and original. Include keyword phrases that your customers would ideally search for and incorporate them organically within your content.
5. Enable Mobile Ordering and Deliveries
With a lot of people working or schooling at home because of the pandemic, restaurants are not getting as much traffic as they used to and have had to adapt to keep the business afloat.
One shift restaurants have had to make is taking up home deliveries. You can grab your customer’s attention by highlighting home delivery services for your restaurant on your website and social media channels. By developing relationships with food delivery services such as Uber Eats, you’ll also gain from the visibility of being promoted on their delivery apps and websites.
Another incentive you’ll come to realize is that customers who order from a particular restaurant online are more likely to visit the restaurant more frequently.
6. List Your Restaurant on Google My Business
Creating a Google My Business profile for your restaurant will undoubtedly increase your chances of grabbing the attention of your customers. Google My Business is a free-to-use tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence and make them appear more reputable.
Including information such as your restaurant’s contacts and address will make it much easier for customers to locate you on apps such as Google Maps and Google Search.
7. Leverage User-Generated Content
User-generated content is content shared online by people who’ve interacted with your business. For your restaurant, this could involve people taking beautiful pictures of your food and posting them on social media or dropping great reviews online regarding your service.
A good way of going about it is running a contest where customers submit and share photos online, and you can give random prizes such as discounts or free meals and drinks.
By using your loyal customers as ‘influencers, you’ll show that you value your customers’ opinions, improving your odds of customer retention. You’ll also benefit from the free advertising to potential customers who value word-of-mouth recommendations.
8. Get Involved With the Local Community
With so much focus on social media marketing nowadays, you can easily forget to look around you. Restaurants depend on local customers within the community perhaps more than most businesses. As such, you need to develop ways that will make people within the neighborhood become your regulars.
For example, you could create offers such as Monday discounts on breakfast or supporting local events that attract a lot of people from within the neighborhood. Engage with local food bloggers from within the area since they can influence their followers to check out your restaurant.
Good Restaurant Marketing Makes Your Restaurant Look Smart Makes Your Restaurant Look Smart
Setting up the restaurant and placing a big sign outside may not be enough to make your business visible to your target market. Although restaurant marketing tips and strategies can prove to be quite dynamic, the restaurant marketing tips highlighted above should help get more customers through your doors.
Successful marketing is all about taking calculated and strategic risks. Even as you tap into the potential of various marketing channels, you must maintain a consistent brand personality and voice.
Hope you enjoyed the restaurant marketing tips and techniques.
I’m a tech enthusiast, entrepreneur, digital marketer and professional blogger equipped with skills in Digital Marketing, SEO, SEM, SMM, and lead generation. My objective is to simplify technology for you through detailed guides and reviews. I discovered WordPress while setting up my first business site and instantly became enamored. When not crafting websites, making content, or helping clients enhance their online ventures, I usually take care of my health and spend time with family, and explore the world. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or read my complete biography.