Marketing Ideas For Restaurants
Whenever you want to go to a new restaurant, what’s the first thing you do? Most people tend to look on the internet to discover new places, look through menus, read reviews and book a table. With this in mind, it’s so important to ensure you’re marketing your restaurant across multiple platforms. It’s very easy to be creative with the food and drink industry but if you need help getting some ideas together then read the rest of this article for your inspiration.
Competitions
Everyone loves winning a competition so why not use this to your advantage? A lot of restaurants now run competitions that offer a free meal for two or a package deal of food and drinks. By doing this, it allows you to gain more of a following online and also boosts your brand identity. The more people who share and tag their friends, the more people will get to know about your business. It’s also a great way to get people to visit your restaurant if they haven’t tried it before. Overall it’s perfect to drill up interest on social media.
User Generated Content
One way to market your restaurant to your audience is to use content that they provide. When people go to a restaurant, they usually post about it on social media which is great for you as it supplies you with more content to promote. User generated content will usually work really well as people tend to trust other people rather than just a sales post. Not only is this more personal but it can also bring some authenticity to your brand which is what customers want to see. A lot of places will also reshare stories their audience has posted on Instagram to build up that content as well.
Local SEO
Local SEO is perfect for restaurants. If you want to show up in your local area on the search results, then you need to make sure you are at the top. It’s important to focus locally as people will usually specify a certain area when looking for restaurants and there’s not much point marketing for areas that will be too far away for customers to travel. To boost your local SEO ranking, you need to ensure your Google My Business is up to date with your opening hours, address, contact details, photos and reviews. This will help massively with your ranking in the search engine results and build a trusting relationship between you and your customers. However, it is important to get those reviews in! You also want to make sure you update your website regularly so it keeps both customers and the search engines happy.
Sponsored Adverts
It’s great to post on social media but creating sponsored social media adverts will give you that boost against your competitors. Facebook is a perfect platform for creating adverts as it allows you to customise your audience such as gender, age, location and interests. This will save you a lot of time and money in the long run. You could use video or images to promote your services and maybe even add a discount for the people who see the advert.
Insta-worthy Images
When it comes to the food and drink industry, Instagram is the perfect platform to promote your services. As it focuses on visuals, you will be able to showcase stunning images of the food to entice your audience in. However, it’s important to make sure the photos you use are eye catching. To do this, you want to ensure the photos are high quality and taken in good lighting as this will highlight the deliciousness of the food. You also want to post unique photos of your food so think about what type of food you offer and work around that. Props and backgrounds are a great way to get your overall branding across and will really help your audience understand what type of restaurant you are.
These are just a few examples of marketing ideas for your restaurant but there are many different tactics you can try. It’s all about finding what is best for you.