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How to Market a Restaurant: Ideas, Tips and Trends
The ideas, tips and trends in restaurant marketing are immeasurable. As technology evolves and consumer preferences modify themselves to keep up, successful marketing strategies need to be tested and adjusted, as well.
While the still tried-and-tested traditional marketing strategies remain quite powerful, digital and online marketing strategies are constantly evolving and challenging marketers to come up with new ideas and clever, customer-engaging campaigns.
These digital marketing techniques are not solely attached to your website and what you can do with it. They also include other channels, such as your social media pages, your pages on ratings websites, search engines, and your mobile app. Even your guest WiFi can be used as a powerful restaurant marketing tool.
Today’s restaurant industry is as competitive as ever. With this amount of stiff competition, it is imperative to be on top of your marketing game at all times and gain any advantage you can get over your competitors. If you haven’t paid special attention to learning how to market a restaurant, you’re probably leaving money on the table.
Below, you’ll find 20 effective ways to market your restaurant in 2020. Keep in mind that as you branch out into various marketing channels, it is important to keep a consistent brand voice and personality. Likewise, you should aim to keep your look and feel as consistent as possible, including imagery.
Restaurant Marketing Starts with Your Website
Your company website is the virtual epicenter of your brand. This is where customers go to see your menu, order take-out, discover upcoming specials and events, and more. It should also be the source of your brand identity in terms of look, feel, and personality.
SEO
To maximize the traffic to your website, and garner the attention of potential new customers, special attention should be paid to the website to help it rank highly in the search engines. This is known as search engine optimization, or SEO. While there are entire college degrees designed for SEO professionals, the main idea is to provide original, educational, entertaining and compelling content for your customers.
Make sure to include keyword phrases that your customers would be searching for, such as Italian Restaurant in Atlanta. Make sure the phrase flows naturally in a sentence and doesn’t sound forced. Just write naturally and you should be fine.
It is also important that other websites are linking to yours. Find local directories and other websites to link to yours. A good way to think about this is that if you publish entertaining, educational, compelling content, others will naturally link back to it.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. It allows you to manage your own information, which will appear when someone searches for your brand name, or your location on Google Maps (see image). Plus, businesses that verify their information with Google My Business are twice as likely to be considered reputable by consumers.
All you need to do is create a free Google account (if you don’t have one already), log in and claim your business. You’ll immediately be able to enter all of your company information. You can even create events and posts that will appear in your search results. This is also great for attracting new customers.
Newsletters and Email Marketing
If you’re not building a customer list with contact information, you are simply leaving money on the table. Place a form on your website that allows customers and potential customers to sign up for a newsletter.
Then, send out an email newsletter to them on a consistent basis with relevant, compelling content. Some restaurateurs will include coupons or specials in the newsletter to entice readers to visit. This is a very powerful form of email marketing that has been highly effective for decades. The most important thing to remember is to be consistent. If you choose to send it monthly, make sure it is sent out on the same day every month.
The more people who sign up to your email marketing newsletter, the better. So, consider adding an incentive, such as a free dessert, to all new subscribers. Also, make sure the sign-up form is displayed prominently on every website page, if possible.
Social Media Restaurant Marketing
Social media is a necessary part of running any business today. Even if you do not have pages on any of the popular social media channels like Facebook and Instagram, you can bet that your customers are out there posting, tweeting, and Instagramming things about your restaurant. You can also bet that potential customers are reading it.
The more engaged you are with your clientele, the more loyal they become, and the more they’ll spread the good word. A well-developed social media marketing plan can bring a large percentage of business through your door.
From making improvements to driving sales, customer engagement is key when you market a restaurant. What if you don’t have an audience? There are many ways to engage fans over social media. Here are some tips for boosting your Facebook followers:
- If you don’t have a Facebook group, consider making one. If you have one but don’t participate, start. This gives you a built-in audience to respond to the content you share.
- When you need people to like your page or join your group, one thing you could do is host a contest. To get 100,000 likes on their Facebook page, Qwertee gave away 1,000 free shirts in a week. This approach works when you have multiple platforms you can boost the signal for your content on. Create graphics, videos, blog posts and more that people can share to spread the word. 35% of fans on Facebook like a page so that they can enter the contests.
- Videos less than a minute can have big results. The best length for Facebook engagement is around 1 minute and 30 seconds, and Facebook users watch 100 million hours of video each day. Your videos could be about anything from promotional content, to food and drink items, to a behind-the scenes look at your restaurant.
- People like sharing their opinion, especially if it’s easy and fun. Before you start innovating, you could have fun polls. You might ask people to decide between your two most popular desserts. For one option, people could like the post. For the other, they could share it.
Photos and videos are a win-win for social media, especially Instagram. Obviously, you should use them on your networks, but try these tricks for an added bonus:
- Attract customers with shareable photos and videos on your Wi-Fi landing page. It’s the first thing they see, so make it worth the sign-in.
- Make your splash page social-friendly with like, share, pin and tweet buttons.
- Spread the word by asking customers to check-in with social sites when they sign into your Wi-Fi.
- Engage customers with shareable deals, customized for each social media site so their friends can share, too.
- Retain customers and gain new ones by asking for reviews.
All of these capabilities are native features in the DIGIMAX Intelligence platform, and they help build positive connections between your customers and the members of their social networks.
Twitter is another great platform for restaurant marketing. It allows you to post images and text, so you can share a quick message with any image you’d like to share. Twitter gives you the opportunity to engage with your guests using quick, simple messages. If you’re short on time and want to get started, Twitter is a great option.
Restaurant Marketing with Online Paid Advertising
This is more of an advanced strategy, and one that will require an investment. Paid advertising is most often done using Google (Google Ads) and Facebook (Facebook Ads). These can be quite powerful, as they can be configured with unique targeting features, personalized ads, and a thorough dashboard to monitor and analyze results.
You can even tell them the type of person you want the ads to be displayed to, based on their internet browsing history, or their demographic information.
Google Ads
Google Ads is the most used and most popular online paid advertising platform to market a restaurant. When you do a search in Google, many times you will see advertisements at the very top and/or the very bottom of the results page. These are Google Ads, and you can advertise your restaurant in this space.
Google allows you to configure where you want your ads to be seen, meaning you can display your ads only to searchers who are in a specific distance of your restaurant(s).
Once you’ve created your ads, you can tell the system which searches you’d like your ads to appear on. There is no limit to the amount of search phrases you can enter. When someone searches for any of the phrases, your ad will appear.
Then, you set a budget cap. You’ll never pay more than the monthly cap you set, and you can adjust it or pause the campaign anytime. Ads are displayed in order using a Google algorithm which considers the relevancy to the search term, and the maximum bid per click you have set in the system.
As mentioned above, this is an advanced strategy for most restaurateurs. It is necessary to keep a constant eye on the performance of your account. You’ll want to tailor your settings to be as high on the search page as possible, without spending too much per click. Results can be powerful using Google Ads, but if attention is not paid to the account, your monthly budget cap can be spent with very minimal ROI.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is very similar to Google Ads. Configuration can be as simple, or as complex as you’d like it to be. With more than 2 billion people using Facebook every month, it is entirely possible to narrow down your desired audience to the specific type of customer you want the ads to appear to. Facebook Ads are generally less expensive than Google ads. However, Google Ads can reach a much larger audience.
You Must Know Your Audience
With any type of marketing campaign, knowing your audience is crucial. The best campaigns start and end with the audience in mind. Since paid advertising takes a bite out of your marketing budget, you obviously want to make sure you gain the highest ROI possible.
To do this, you need accurate, reliable, and comprehensive data about your actual customers. For brick-and-mortar business owners, WiFi marketing and analytics can gather this powerful data for you – whether customers log into your WiFi or not. Then you can sort and filter the data to make accurate, data-driven decisions about who your ideal customers are, and for whom you should configure your paid advertising audiences.
Ratings and Reviews Websites for Restaurant Marketing
In today’s digital age, reviews on sites like TripAdvisor or Yelp are archived and available instantaneously to anyone with an internet connection. In fact, when searching for a restaurant or hotel online, customer reviews on these popular sites are among the first to pop up in the search results.
Because of this, many potential customers make up their mind about the quality of an establishment as soon as they see the highlighted rating appear on their screen, before they’ve seen any marketing materials, visited the location’s website, or even visited the location itself.
TripAdvisor tallies up a staggering 390 million unique visits a month, with 435 million available reviews on nearly seven million restaurants, accommodations and attractions. Yelp, though not at quite the same level, still attracts an impressive user total, about 174 million figuring in monthly mobile and desktop visits, with about 115 million posted reviews.
The popularity of these sites speaks clearly to their importance.
Given these numbers, it is obviously important to stay on top of your ratings and reviews on these powerful websites. So, whenever you see a bad rating or review, respond with T.A.C.T. And whenever you see a great rating, respond in T.I.M.E.