Digital marketing ideas for your restaurant
Using the internet to promote a restaurant
Successful restaurants today use both organic and paid advertising to promote their interests online. Digital marketing has become hugely important as consumers use their phones with GPS to find nearby businesses and restaurants, check menus, and read reviews.
Customers can use their phone to reserve a table, order takeout or schedule a food delivery. Digital methods are also used to recruit staff, build loyalty and promote your restaurant.
Optimizing your restaurant for local searches is critical if you want to realize your full potential. Ideally, you want to be one of the first names to appear on a search engine return page or a SERP. Organic searches are online-
requests with keyword terms such as ‘pizza restaurant’ or ‘fusion cuisine nearby’. Optimizing your restaurant for organic searches is called search engine optimization or SEO. Digital marketing campaigns often consist of paid advertising and SEO.
Paid ads are usually pay per click or PPC
ads. This method is effective for generating web traffic quickly. You only pay for ads when customers click on them. You can write the ads yourself or hire an agent to do the job. It’s important to attract attention, write a concise description and use keyphrases that your customers are likely to use in their search requests. Paid search engine ads have become the fourth most popular digital marketing for restaurants.
SEO Marketing
Your organic marketing efforts will take time, but they can deliver a steady stream of customers. The key to success is building an attractive online profile. You do this by optimizing your on-site content for searches by following Google and other search engine guidelines.
Google is the most popular search engine, so most restaurateurs optimize for Google. You can find information about Google SEO Best Practices by clicking on the highlighted text.
coupon companies and local media. Organic marketing is free, but there are costs associated with creating and posting new content, researching the Internet, and networking with potential customers. The following efforts should help you drive more website traffic, orders, and bookings:
Claim your free online realestate
Local citations are important for building an online profile for your restaurant. Quotes are listings, mentions and website links to other sites. Online directories include yellow page type listings, generic business directories, restaurant review sites such as Yelp, Google Maps, and local media such as newspapers, city magazines,
etc.
Most of these sites provide free listings from local businesses and a lot of print information from other sources without checking whether this information is current or correct. Hence, it is important to research what appears online about your business. You can correct inaccuracies, update contact information and respond to negative reviews, blog posts and news articles.
One study found that consumers appreciated restaurants that responded quickly to complaints. By tracking your reputation, you can respond to negative messages and impress customers with your commitment to customer service.
Optimizing local digital marketing campaigns for restaurants
There is a wealth of local marketing opportunities available online. You can use GPS technology to promote nearby customers for your breakfast, lunch and dinner deals. If you have claimed your free listings on the web,
these regular customers and tourists can bring them to your door. Local marketing is a great way to promote specials, menu changes, restaurant events such as tastings, and business milestones. You can also digitally promote your restaurant in local factories and office buildings. If you can connect to festivals, sports competitions and nearby schools, you can promote your restaurant with compelling content about your kitchen, staff, supply chain and entertaining behind-the-scenes stories.
Create social media promotions
The first step to promoting your restaurant on social media is to choose which platforms are the most important. If you use business types, LinkedIn is probably a good choice. Using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is great for almost all types of restaurants as you can target your audience,
Post attractive photos and videos of your food and write engaging content that your ideal audience is likely to share with like-minded friends.
You should always include social sharing buttons in clearly visible positions on your website and web pages. Customize your content by channel -
such as choosing visual content for Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Short messages are ideal for Twitter marketing. If you have an email list where customers have agreed to receive text messages, you can send timely marketing messages such as the daily special, information about upcoming events, and so on.
Using your website and marketing your menu
Your website needs to be functional and easy to navigate with high quality content for two reasons. The first is that potential customers only know you through what they see online,
so the design and functionality of your website are critical to forming a favorable impression. Second, responsive design, easy navigability, and quality content is important if you want to rank close to the top in SEO searches.
Today’s websites need to be optimized for cell phones. This is called responsive design and what it means is that your screen adapts for maximum appeal on any screen and browser. Large buttons for easy clicking on smaller phone screens,
help your customers reserve tables and order food. If parts of your website download slowly or don’t work, you will lose business.
Posting your menu on your website and other platforms is also important. Your menu is your most important marketing tool, so optimize it with attractive photos, smart descriptions and menu
engineering to drive higher sales.
You can also use electronic boards to display your menu, specials and content on large screens for your customers to read when in the dining room. The immediacy of these messages helps to ensure higher response rates.
Press releases and blog posts
Sending out press releases can be an effective digital marketing tool. The key to success is to make your post appear newsworthy by announcing a new menu item, staff change, seasonal wine list, or company milestone. You can write press releases about different cuisines, wine,
top quality beer and liqueurs and liqueurs. Nutritional and diet information are also hot topics.
Personalized marketing messages
Using inbound marketing analytics, you can demographically profile your existing customers with a high degree of accuracy. This allows you to personalize marketing messages,
such as sending a birthday email, congratulating a couple on their birthday, promoting school dance and prom dinner specials, and targeting customers based on their culinary preferences, gender, age, income and other data.
Create a loyalty program with automated internal records
Loyalty programs have gone through different stages since digital marketing became common. Once upon a time, people collected so many loyalty cards that they gave up. Digital technology allows restaurants to automate loyalty rewards by collecting information from your POS system. That’s easy when your POS system, like the simple and inexpensive Waiterio interface, delivers crucial information to your CRM software. You can manage a seamless loyalty program that automatically records a customer’s purchases. Digital technology allows you to offer a wider range of incentives and redemption options.
Online networks to build sales
Spending time on online networking can generate sales and build customer loyalty. For example, if you own a sports bar, you can post or advertise articles on sports-related websites. You can also contact local business organizations,
Join the Chamber of Commerce and participate in programs that bring together business leaders from the region for lunch. Local chambers and business organizations often have newsletters promoting your restaurant. Many business organizations provide access to fax and email lists of their members,
that you can use to market your restaurant.
Many restaurateurs create cross-promotional events and promote them with digital marketing campaigns. You can partner with like-minded companies that complement your restaurant business. These cross promotions can be very effective.
Examples of this type of promotion include:
- Sponsoring a bike and / or ride sharing option to visit the restaurant
- Team up with a florist or candy company to promote special occasions such as Valentine’s Day, spring promotions, and other holidays.
Organizing tourist packages with dining options, hotel accommodations and tickets to local museums and attractions - Promote branded sports equipment for local teams and feature celebrity athletes in the restaurant
- Organize a charity event where a percentage of the proceeds are donated to the cause
These are ideal promotions to market online on your website and on social media platforms. You can also refer a reference to any promotion through traditional media and guerrilla marketing campaigns.
Ranking on Review and Coupon Sites
Restaurant review websites and coupon companies promote restaurants, post menus and publicity promotions such as daily deals. Reviews can have both positive and negative effects,
however, you can reduce the effects of negative messages by responding quickly online when you find a bad review or a customer complaint.
Yelp is especially important to restaurateurs. Regardless of whether you love or hate Yelp,
savvy owners try to get the best out of news while minimizing the impact of disparaging posts. You can set Google alerts for your restaurant name to check what others are saying about your restaurant.
The longer you work on organic SEO, the stronger your restaurant’s online profile will become.
The keys to success are regularly posting new content, monitoring your online reputation, effective networking and setting up social media campaigns.
