If you know it’s time to get word out about your restaurant, but aren’t entirely sure how, you’re probably in need of an arsenal of marketing tips–and an overall strategy. In order to truly succeed, you’ll want to embrace the digital marketing opportunities growing for you, while also incorporating classic traditional restaurant marketing options offline. To get started, consider a blend of the most effective strategies out there today; read below for four successful marketing ideas for restaurants that you can get started on now:
Use Food for Visual Appeal on Social Media Platforms:
Social media is all-encompassing these days. If you don’t have a presence, you’re missing out on reaching a massive demographic and on opportunities to regularly communicate with them. Get involved! Luckily, social is geared towards the restaurant industry, and you can use this to your advantage. Humans are highly visual, and well-made images have been shown to perform amazingly on social media. So use your product to sell your restaurant; show images of tantalizing meals on Instagram, share recipes with those images on Pinterest, and show images with a link to the recipe on your website (to drive interest and traffic) on Facebook.
Source and Host Digital Reviews:
Word of mouth is just about everything in a business’s success. There’s no replacement for glowing reviews that are easy to find, so make this a part of your marketing strategy, and blend the online and offline components.
For the offline marketing, create flyers and designed cards that rest by the entry and exit of your restaurant, inviting visitors to visit your website and Yelp to leave reviews. Incentivize this by also including drink coupons or appetizer discounts on the designed cards as well.
For the online component, be sure to include a page on your website dedicated to showing customer reviews; visitors curious about the menu won’t have to travel across the Internet to find feedback, and your website will benefit from the keywords in the reviews for higher search engine optimization. Yelp is a fantastic and highly trafficked source, so do encourage your customers to leave review there, too. If they do, be sure to pull those reviews into your website to benefit you there as well.
Email Marketing:
Be sure to keep your customers’ emails, when submitted online for more information, and use them to create an email newsletter list that you can then grow and regularly reach out to. Regular, perhaps weekly or monthly, email outreach is a wonderful way to keep customers engaged and up-to-speed on the newest promotions and menu changes. You can regularly include links to your website and your reservation system in each email for further ease of access for your customers, which is key in this day and age.
Add customers to your email list by inviting them to leave their email addresses in a physical check-in list at the restaurant itself. Include a section on the homepage of your website, too, where visitors can share their email addresses for newsletter inclusion, and to check in and to gain information. In addition, consider the following step…
Advertise on Social and Search Engines:
Drive traffic to your website, and possibly also to your email marketing list, by taking advantage of the cost-effective digital advertising opportunities open to you. Once you’ve set up your social profile, use the advertising options available there to find potential clients on Facebook (or Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram) and send them to your website for more information–or even directly to book a table. Facebook especially offers a vast and detailed array of targeting options, ensuring that you can reach people with the age, demographic, interests, and location you want, for an option-high return on investment. Add search engine advertising to this to gather the most relevant keywords for even more consumer awareness, when they search for terms related to your restaurant.
For more information on the best restaurant marketing tactics, and to discuss your specific options, contact us today.
