When you have a restaurant with a unique interior, good cuisine, loyal customers and great staff, but you see this as just the beginning of a successful journey – it’s time to seriously strengthen the marketing of the restaurant.
Until the start of the business, the owners set the most realistic goals for the near future: to recoup the investment, to reach a stable income. After achieving these goals, we need to go further and develop the potential of a successful institution. With good internet marketing, your business can be much more profitable without much investment. Current capabilities of social networks and search engines make it possible to increase the demand and interest of new visitors on a local scale much more effectively than offline advertising. Of course, advertising pizza delivery in New York will be much more expensive than the same advertising in Fargo, but in any case it will give a more efficient and, most importantly, measurable result compared to the same billboard.
Advertising a restaurant online is not the easiest task. Improperly setting up an advertising campaign or ineffective email marketing for an institution will only waste your budget and you won’t notice the difference before and after. To avoid this, we’ve put together all the important tips from Gather Survey in one article.
SMM restaurant promotion, Google My Business, TripAdvisor and other mapping services
- Create groups on all popular social networks: Facebook, Instagram (of course, if you do not already have them). At first, you can lead the groups yourself, but it’s best to hire an individual to monitor them: post photos and videos, reports, menu updates, interiors, etc., and respond to customer feedback, comments, and questions.
- Add your place to Google My Business, Google Maps – the most popular search resource – and make sure your online restaurant information is true.
- Do not be afraid to repost, respond to the records of regular visitors – everything that in one way or another relates to your institution or its kitchen. This can and should be used as advertising, especially if the initiator of the post or dialogue is not you or your manager.
- Track mentions of your establishment by hashtags and geolocations. Try not to miss any discussions on your cafe, bar or restaurant on social media.
How do I keep track of your institution?
- Twitter search. This service allows you to manually monitor any mention of the name of your institution. Remember to do this quickly, because the information is constantly updated and you will have to spend a long time looking for the right comment or feedback.
- Google Alerts service. It allows you to subscribe to the right keywords and receive messages in the mail mentioning these words.
- Use a service that tracks social activity. For example, such as Gather Survey. It helps track changes in the number of reviews and the average rating.
All these services are free and provide very detailed information about the number of consumers of your brand or orders, as well as allow you to quickly respond to negative and positive feedback from regular visitors and future guests.
Work with negative feedback
One of the key features of SMM for a restaurant. Positive feedback should not be ignored either – the answers to them will only strengthen the already positive effect, which is undoubtedly nice. And an unanswered negative response can, like a snowball, multiply a crowd of disgruntled guests. Read more about working with feedback in our article “How to work with negative feedback.”
Food photo
Effective advertising for a restaurant is mainly based on the promotion of food and beverages, because this is the product you sell. Every year something changes, but food is photographed by everyone. Start publishing interestingly decorated dishes from your menu – it always works. It is best, of course, to post them on Instagram, but especially successful and discussed photos can be shared on other social networks.
Do not spam the same posts on all social networks! If customers subscribe to all of your groups, they will simply hide such posts or unsubscribe altogether. Try to make different content and even the same news about promotions and competitions, which one way or another should be announced everywhere, submit with different pictures and tags.
Create a TripAdvisor account, don’t spare money for a good photographer and post beautiful photos in your profile to make potential visitors want to visit you. Describe the concept and cuisine, but leave some secret or secret so that they have a reason to come and see or try something in person only in the institution. To get started, you can upload a profile with feedback from your social media audience. Offer them a discount, free coffee or a cocktail.
You can use the gathersurvey.com service to increase the number of positive reviews. The service interviews customers, and if the customer is satisfied, the service offers to leave feedback on cards or social networks. Otherwise, it sends the client’s response to the institution’s manager’s e-mail.
Survey
One of the best types of communication with visitors. To do this, you will need a special application. Ask your loyal customers about the quality of service, who they would choose as the waiter of the month, which cocktail they liked the most, etc. The most popular and useful questions are what else they would like to see in your establishment. It’s not necessarily new food and drink, they may want to hear other background music, extend their work on Fridays, or listen to a live concert at your place.
It’s an active and convenient way to get feedback, more objective than private customer feedback, which takes much longer to process and then prove that he or she wanted it. Anyway, what could be better than changes based on real feedback and wishes from your visitors?
Posts with working photos of your employees
As well as stories about their hobbies, work experience and unique skills. Once a week, you can less often (depending on the number of employees), create posts about staff. By spreading interesting information and positive news about your employees, you increase not only the reputation of the team itself, but also the prestige of your institution in general.
Believe me, each of them has something to tell about themselves, because many have unusual hobbies that you do not even guess. And such stories are always well endowed with likes by both friends and regular customers.
And one more piece of advice on how to promote a restaurant
Do not forget about the usual advertising and promotion of restaurant services. First of all, try to promote your unique service with the help of paid advertising on social networks, such as takeaway food, food delivery from a restaurant, a special room for children with a babysitter, bicycle parking, the opportunity to go with an animal and more. Such advertising is much easier to target and show only to the target audience to reduce costs and get the most out of your investment.
