The competition in the food industry is always fierce. As the lockdown in most parts of the world opens up, we expect many new restaurants to open up. People would love to start going out to eat after being stuck at home for too long. Therefore, restaurant marketing has never been more critical.
Those who own a restaurant would have to be up to speed in their restaurant marketing strategies. If you run a restaurant business, you need to develop creative restaurant marketing ideas to attract customers. If you feel overwhelmed by the competition, you could do a restaurant marketing survey to determine how others in this field are maintaining their sales levels high.
In this post, we will be discussing the best restaurant marketing strategies that you can implement at this point.
12 Awesome Restaurant Marketing Strategies
Here are twelve excellent restaurant marketing ideas to help you get more customers and sales for your restaurant business.
1. Upload a Lot of Foodie Photos
If you run a restaurant and have survived during this pandemic, you must surely have social media pages to constantly promote your business. This is the time to take it up a notch and start uploading more and more pictures on social media than ever before.
Take photos of the meals you offer that look savvy, delicious, and simply irresistible. Make sure there is proper lighting in the room where you take product photos. Edit the pictures a bit to make them look brighter and more colorful.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Then upload them on your Instagram business account and Facebook page. This is arguably the best way to do online restaurant marketing. Visual content is high in demand for almost all industries, but when you are dealing with food, it is even more effective.
Upload the foodie photos on your website as well. Let people drool as they browse through your latest deals. Draw in hungry eyes and heavy appetites to the doorstep of your restaurant.
2. Run Loyalty Programs
Another strategy that works well for restaurant marketing is running loyalty programs. Try to connect with online food apps. Partner with them and ask them to encourage their users to check out your restaurant. You can do this through customer loyalty programs and gamification. The apps could offer their users a discount or free purchase in exchange for visiting your restaurant a given number of times.
3. Set Up a Google My Busines Account
When it comes to restaurant marketing, a Google My Business account can really help. When someone searches for a business on Google, the business details are often provided in Google’s Knowledge Graph that appears in the sidebar. This feature of Google gathers a large portion of its information from the Google My Business accounts of these businesses.
Therefore, if you set up a Google My Business account designated to your restaurant business, it would allow more prime search results for your restaurant for free. Since this is a free-of-cost strategy, it is definitely one of the greatest restaurant marketing ideas.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Run Geo-targeted Ads
The location of your restaurant plays a critical role in its success or failure. Most people are usually looking around for a place to eat that is near to their house. That is why promoting your restaurant through Geo-targeted ads is among the high-value restaurant marketing strategies.
Geo-targeted ads help you save your marketing budget by reaching out to only those who live within your restaurant’s locality. You can select the radius around your restaurant to target when you set up these ads.
Most of the digital advertising services, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads, provide the option of geo-targeting. By taking advantage of this option, you can get your ads in front of your most relevant customers.
This Geo-targeting feature has gained a lot of popularity during this Covid-19 pandemic. Besides restaurants, other kinds of businesses in the food industry have also been using it to level up their marketing efforts. Be sure to make use of this restaurant marketing technique so that you can keep up with the competition.
5. Build a Strong Instagram Presence
If you have been uploading pictures of your business and meals on Instagram every alternate day, it is now time to start uploading multiple times every day. This is because Instagram is the most relevant social media platform for restaurant marketing, and these days restaurant businesses are having their peak season. Do not miss out on this chance of putting out catchy photos of your meals in front of all your Instagram followers.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
You can also choose to upload pictures of your storefront and restaurant ambiance. Attract people by getting up close with your latest bundle meal offers and top dishes. Play around with your food photographs to uplift your brand identity. You could also take pictures of your kitchen, showing your chef taking out a fresh pan of pizza from the oven, with its cheese melting deliciously around the dishes.
Have fun with hashtags to increase your reach, discoverability, and search engine optimization on Instagram. Research a bit on the latest and most popular hashtags for the kinds of meals and dishes you offer. Entice your followers by coming up with new hashtags of your own as well.
6. Send Out Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way of keeping your existing and past customers reminded about your restaurant. Include your foodie photos in the newsletters as well. Write catchy meal descriptions, give information about your deals and discount offers, and design newsletters that tempt readers to have their next of the day at your restaurant.
Your restaurant marketing will be incomplete without regular newsletters being sent out to all those who have visited your restaurant or website before.
7. Promote User-Generated Content
User-generated content helps a lot in developing the engagement of your customers with your brand. For restaurant marketing with user-generated content, you can host photograph contests among your customers by asking them to share their favorite deals at your restaurant. Ask them to share photos on a dedicated content page, such as Instagram profile with a hashtag of your restaurant name or on your blog as comments on your articles.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Surprise the participants further by announcing awards for those who share the most photographs. You can offer them a free appetizer on their next visit to your restaurant or send them a discount coupon as a token of appreciation. You can also call out random lucky contestants and surprise them with a free reservation on their birthday or anniversary.
8. Show Off Your Staff
In this highly digitized world, people often miss the human element when buying any product or service. If you have staff trained to provide fantastic customer service, feel free to show them off to your customers.
Show off the quality of service that your 5-star staff gives to your customers to enhance your restaurant marketing. Take pictures of them happily serving the customers. Smiling employees are a great means of spreading the positive word about your brand. People long to be served by smiling, joyful and humble workers.
9. Time Your Tweets
Besides Instagram and Facebook, Twitter is also an excellent platform to do your restaurant marketing. Keep tweeting about your meal deals, discount offers, top dishes, loyalty programs, and anything else that you feel could attract customers to your place.
It is best to time your tweets to have a greater influence on hungry stomachs. Schedule your tweets at specific times of the day in a way that you reach out to your followers exactly around their breakfast, lunch, and dinner time.
10. Build Partnerships with Delivery Services
In the online-driven environment that we observe these days, online delivery services rule the food industry. To make your restaurant marketing most effective, you need to partner up with popular delivery services.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Do not be surprised if many customers start discovering you and contacting you for the first time through these delivery services.
11. Provide Online Reservation Tools
One of the finest restaurant marketing ideas is to provide online reservation tools to your potential and existing customers. Due to the pandemic, people have become used to checking online to confirm if a restaurant is open before showing up at the outlet. If your customers can reserve a table beforehand, they would find it a lot more convenient to plan to dine out at your restaurant.
12. Maintain a Professional Website
Put all other restaurant marketing strategies on one side and a well-built professional website for your business on the other side. The value of your website would still be higher, especially if the website is appealing, responsive, easy to navigate, and error-free.
If you want such an attractive website for your business, build it on Strikingly. We promise you wouldn’t need to hire a web developer to help with the process. Your web design will be ready to use once you select a template from among our provided ones. You can key in all your website content without having to write any code.
Several of our users have built a restaurant website and are happily making sales directly through the site. You can sign up for our free plan first to familiarize yourself with our web development tools and later consider upgrading to our pro plan if you feel ready to use our more advanced features.
