7 Marketing Strategies Perfect For Promoting Your Restaurant

Since its inception, marketing has been a competitive field. But with the digitalisation of almost everything, it has now become more important than ever for businesses to make their presence felt. For restaurants, it’s all about the online menus, the insta-worthy pictures and customers being able to make reservations without any hitches.

With digitalisation, crafting marketing strategies to help promote your restaurant has become a bit tricky. But the good news is, there are several ways and methods that you can use to attract customers. All you have to do is channel a bit of creativity when brainstorming ideas to market your restaurant. When you find the sweet spot, you’ll be able to hook your customers in while keeping them coming back for more.

So, with that thought in mind, let’s take a look at 6 marketing strategies that will help you promote your restaurant.

1. Get on the Social Network Bandwagon

We live in an era of foodgasm and social media is key to breathing life into pictures of the delicacies you prepare in your restaurant. The power of these enticing food images is so strong and alluring that it makes the thriftiest people spend some extra bucks. 

If your dream is to get a truckload of orders, you have to get on social media platforms to create a buzz online. Now the question is which platform is the best to promote your restaurant online. Given the popularity, Instagram is where you must go all out to promote yourself. You can use Facebook as well but not as extensively.

Ensure that you get a great content creator on board, someone who has a way with words to appeal to your target audience. Invest in food photography to get high-resolution pictures of your delicacies and add some amazing video content in the mix as well. Get a social media expert on board for valuable insights on social promotions.

2. Create Your Own Website

If you have big plans for your restaurant, then it would do you good to have your own website. Having a website opens up a world of opportunities for you so you can take advantage of this. When you are on Google’s radar, your chances of being on your potential customer’s radar increases exponentially.

The key is to be found and with a website, you can make it happen although there’s so much more to it than that. Initially, you might think that this is excessive work that you can absolutely do without. But once you take into account the mountain of rewards waiting for you on the other side, you would scramble to find a web developer to get the job done!

3. Collaborate with Local Influencers and Bloggers

One of the greatest marketing techniques of the digital world is to make the most of the influence of other business networks. As a restaurant, you can reach out to popular bloggers and influencers in your vicinity. Connect with them and get them to share content related to your business. This works as barter as you can provide discounts, free meals, goodies or promotional beer mats in exchange of popularity for your brand in their established network.

4. Make the Most of Contests

Once your social media is all set,  its time to make the most of contests. The power of freebies cannot be underestimated and with social media contests, you can restaurant promotion fun and entertaining. You can organize a giveaway contest where you ask people to tag their foodie buddies.  This will help add to your following and give your brand visibility a boost. If the winner has never dined in your restaurant, you can offer a free meal or an impressive discount.

5. Pay Special Attention to Your NAPs

Your name, address and phone number and the way it appears online is extremely important. Google’s spiders crawl the web looking for basic information relating to your business. So it’s crucial that these three elements appear consistently everywhere on the web. Google gives preference to information that’s consistent thereby improving your chances of ranking higher on the search engine result pages.

6. Get Listed on Food Applications

Food applications have become extremely popular as its more convenient for customers to simply look for a place online. Ordering online saves a lot of effort as there’s no following of directions involved and food can be enjoyed within the comforts of one’s home. This makes it really important for restaurants to be listed on popular applications like UberEats and Yelp to not miss out on a potential business.

When you are listed on food apps, consumers don’t have to scroll through boring directories or search the web for several minutes to find something they like. All they have to do is to hit a search on one of these popular food applications and rest is taken care of.

Make the most of this technological wave by partnering with food apps to ensure that your restaurant gets listed.

7. Take Good Care of Your Online Reputation

One bad review can tarnish the image of your restaurant business. Think about it, who wants to come to eat at a place that is known for the blandness of its food or bad customer service? All your online efforts will count for naught if you don’t pay attention to your online presence and persona.

Put emphasis on online reputation management simply by responding to queries and reviews posted online by customers. Respond to both positive and negative reviews in a manner that paints your restaurant in a good light.

You can hire someone specifically to manage and take care of your online reputation.

Try New Things and See What Sticks

As is the case with most businesses, being flexible with your marketing strategies is very important. At times, some tactics might just not work no matter how hard you try. When this happens, the whole point is to not get stuck and tweak things to see if it works. You can always fall back on techniques you know are bound to work. It’s about finding your corner and it’s going to happen only when you dabble with a few things.

There are so many creative ideas out there just waiting to be tried out.

Note: Amidst, the COVID-19 breakout, it’d be a good idea to look into automatic door installation in your restaurant to promote minimum touching of communal surfaces.