Social media marketing is effective for businesses in just about any industry, and it can be especially effective for marketing restaurants. However, you have to know how to do it. These are some of the tips that you should remember about social media for restaurants.
Tempt Them With Their Eyes
When it comes to social media marketing for restaurants, one really important thing to do is to tempt potential customers with their eyes. Obviously, they can’t smell your delicious food through their screens (YET!), but you can still make their mouths water. Adding photos is always important with social media, but it’s especially important when you’re trying to get your customers excited about your food. Invest in a good camera, and really get in some practice of taking good, drool-worthy photos of your offerings. You may even find that it’s worth it to work with a professional restaurant and food photographer to get some great pics of your most popular dishes. When you post good photos, your followers will be more engaged and hopefully enticed to drop in or place an order.
Offer Coupons
Everyone loves a good deal, especially when it’s a good deal on food. To gain followers, consider offering coupons to those who follow your restaurant on social media. When you are creating these incentives, be sure to make them exclusive to certain terms such as “only when ordering through our website” or “in store” – depending on your restaurants goal. Also, periodically, offer coupons or coupon codes to those who follow your page. It’s a great way to get people to want to follow you on social media, and those who are hungry and looking for something to eat just might decide to place an order with your restaurant if they see a coupon code in their newsfeed. Timing is quite important and therefore a little trial and error (a/b testing) of sending out incentives multiple times will provide the best results that you can learn from.
Advertise Specials
Let your customers know about various short-term or ongoing specials that your restaurant has to offer. Time-sensitive incentives should be a part of your arsenal in order to drive some sense of urgency and shake things up a bit. Along with being a great way to bring in customers, offering specials on new menu items or items that haven’t been selling well can be a good way to generate interest.
Respond to Customer Comments and Complaints
Once you start getting followers, you can expect for your customers to leave comments and complaints. This is actually a good thing for a few reasons. It allows you to determine what your customers love and don’t love about your restaurant, which can help you make positive changes. It also allows you to build a better relationship with your customers, which can go a long way at bringing people through the door.
It is important not to ignore the comments and complaints that people leave. People love hearing from their favorite business owners, so leaving a response to positive comments is always a good thing. However, you should not ignore complaints. Other followers and customers will take notice to these complaints and how you respond to them, so take the time to respond in a positive, professional manner. Doing what you can to make things right after a complaint can help you retain a customer who might not have been very happy with how things went on his or her last visit and can show other followers that your restaurant does care about the satisfaction of your customers.
Facebook ordering for your restaurant?
Social media for restaurants can be very effective, particularly if you use the right strategies. One last tip, your restaurant should place an “Order Now” call to action button on the restaurant Facebook page. Although the jury is still out as to the effectiveness of orders being completed from within Facebook, it is at the very least a good way to let fans and potential customer know that you receive online orders for your restaurant. It may entice them to head over directly your website to check out what you offer. Contact us at 9Fold to find out about our restaurant online ordering system which also provides integrated email marketing as a basic part of the online ordering system – part of which focuses on driving your customers in front of your social media after they place an order in order to continue customer engagement.
