"Connecting with your audience is key and by sharing their content about your restaurant is a great way to do this."
Standing out in the often saturated world of restaurants isn’t always easy, made harder when you begin to formulate ways to market yourself better. To help try and bring some clarity to your planning, we are going to take you through the best ways we’ve found to market a restaurant.
Read time 5 minutes
1. Good Photos
Everyone likes to see a well shot appetising food photo, there is an art to it, however. Choosing your best-looking dishes and really working out your style of photo. Good lighting is key and often it may be easier to hire a professional to come and take a load of photos that you can then drip through your social media accounts.
2. Loyalty Programs
Whether you use one of the apps available to restaurants or introduce your own form of loyalty program, it can be a great way to keep customers coming back. It shows that you appreciate them enough to give them incentives for you choosing your restaurant to eat at.
3. Geo-target your ads
Not only is this tactic more cost-effective, it is also more relevant for your audience. Allowing only users within a certain radius to see your ads, means that they are actually more viable to come to your restaurant whilst saving you from irrelevant clicks from those further afield (and each click costs you).
4. Utilise Emails
Sending out an email newsletter can be a great way to share your restaurants latest news, dishes, offers etc. You don’t have to be doing this weekly, opting to do this every month or every few months is perfectly enough. It also means that you won’t be flooding inboxes and potentially annoying those that you’re trying to attract.
5. Make The Most Of User Generated Content (UGC)
Connecting with your audience is key and by sharing their content about your restaurant is a great way to do this. You can take it one step further by holding a competition, asking visitors to share photos of your dishes and awarding one of them with a prize.
6. Start Blogging
A great way to share you restaurants voice and personality. It also gives another way for users to engage with you and truly understand what your restaurant is all about. You can share anything about your restaurant through your blog, try mixing it up and seeing what topic users seem to engage with the most.
7. Generate/Share Positive Press
Inviting members of the media industry to your restaurant can be a great way to gain some coverage, in the exchange of a free meal. Any press you see or generate that is positive about your restaurant be sure to share it through all of your channels and thank them for the positive review. There isn’t much more that looks good than a positive review, from a leading critic.
8. Time Your Social Media
Advertising a meal for lunch? Post it just before lunchtime then! Tactically choosing when to publish your posts is a great way to catch your audience just as they are thinking about what to eat; this can be implemented across all social media.
9. Partner With A Delivery Service
You may have noticed in the modern world of food delivery apps, that many of us no longer like to leave our homes but still want a restaurant meal. It can be a great way, if you are in a location that has this services, to generate more revenue and even attract new customers that may not have seen you before. Hopefully, these 9 tactics have helped you to start formulating your marketing plan, there are many more that can be adopted and if you would like a bit more guidance please do get in touch with us.
