Leverage Local Foodies
Let’s learn how to market your restaurant in the ever-changing digital world. To keep up with trends in the industry, tap into the local food bloggers and Instagramers to generate content for you. Use the five tips below to educate yourself on ways to grow your business.
1. Promote user-generated content
You probably already have loyal customers snapping beautiful pictures of your food. This "user-generated content,” shared freely on social media, is a valuable kind of free advertising. By leveraging loyal customers as "influencers,” you retain existing customers as well as advertise to potential customers who tend to view word-of-mouth recommendations as trustworthy.
To drum up user-generated content, consider running a social media contest. A photo contest of customers eating their favorite meal at your restaurant will generate submissions that you can share across your social networks, and you can incentivize photos with random prizes, like appetizers or drinks at your restaurant.
2. Encourage Yelp reviews
Even if you never set up a Yelp account, people can review you — so you might as well be proactive about your Yelp reputation. With a business account, you are able to fill out your profile by adding accurate photos, store hours, location, and menus.
A proactive marketing strategy for reviews is two-fold. When you need good Yelp reviews, it's usually too late to get them quickly—but making an effort to consistently solicit positive reviews, by reminding customers or by offering a free drink for a review, can have long-term benefits. When you receive negative reviews, respond to comments in a polite, professional manner. By addressing complaints, you not only increase your chances of retaining a customer by resolving their issue, but you can also show other potential and existing customers that you are a proactive, involved manager or operator.
3. Ensure mobile-friendly website + menu
With over half of site visits now taking place on mobile devices, a mobile-friendly online presence is essential.
In addition to your online search presence on review sites and search engines, your own website and menus should be optimized for mobile. With an easy-to-read, accurate menu, and easily accessible information about your hours, location, and contact information on your website, you are removing potential barriers to drawing in mobile customers.
4. Create focused social media marketing
Social media platforms (like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat to start) are everywhere. But before you stretch yourself too thin, here's the secret: you aren't required to use all of them.
Instead, the key is to understand where your audience is, and to focus on the social media platforms they are using. By focusing your marketing energy on sharing content where your customers already are, you can get the largest social media ROI.
It can be challenging to create interesting and relevant content while monitoring interactions and activity. For today's restaurant marketers, there are both paid social media management tools and some common free options like HootSuite and Buffer. If you need to outsource, consider posting jobs at a local university to offer paid internships in social media to marketing students.
5. Leverage visuals
Beautiful photos of your food are one of your best marketing tools. But while social platforms like Instagram have made snapping a plate photo the new norm, more and more restaurant owners, especially those targeting the millennial audience, are experimenting with shooting short videos for Instagram and YouTube.
With YouTube as the second-largest search engine in the world, creating a video channel about what happens at your restaurant can have a wide reach. Multiply your efforts by posting part of the video on Instagram and sending your audience to watch the full video on your website to generate more traffic for your site. With interesting, short content like behind the scenes at an event, interviews with the staff, and a chef's preview of an upcoming menu, you can grow interest in your business while growing traffic to your online presence.
Restaurant marketing strategies are complex and ever-changing, but using creative strategies, informed by data about your restaurant customers and operations, can help your restaurant marketing drive new revenue.
