Digital marketing for restaurants has become more important than ever. Restaurant goers have turned to digital means, such as online menus, pre-booking their dishes or tables, or just outright digital takeout. Therefore, restaurant businesses need to have a strong hold on digital platforms to maintain their brand value and keep potential customers satisfied and happy.
Optimize Your Restaurant Digital Marketing Tactics
Restaurants now need to be creative with their digital marketing strategies to stay ahead of the competition and aid their business growth. According to recent data, around 92% of diners consult restaurant reviews before choosing where to eat. To meet this demand for online reviews, 92% of restaurants are using Facebook to promote their brand. They are also making use of other digital marketing tactics to stay connected with their audience and perform well in their market.
Use Google My Business To Accept Reservations
Consider incorporating a Google My Business strategy in your restaurant marketing plan to boost your local SEO ranking. Reservation through a website is an effective way to enhance user experience and improve overall sales figures. Make this strategy more functional by adding reservation links to Google Business, as customers will most likely perform local searches before entering your website. Do so by simply adding your reservation system link in GMB’s ‘reservation’ field. This approach makes it easy for your customers to place a reservation with your restaurant directly from your Google profile.
Use Social Media Marketing
No matter how appetizing your cuisine is, or how well you have decorated your restaurant’s interior, your efforts might go unnoticed if you fail to drive traffic to your restaurant. Social media is one of the most powerful digital platforms that can help you promote your brand before your audience and drive traffic into your restaurant.
Social media platforms are an important part of your restaurant’s digital marketing plan. From social media ads and stories to comments, feedback, and reviews, there are ample ways you can use social media to promote your brand. It not only helps you to amass a larger audience, but also helps you to strengthen your bond with your existing one. Social media is known to be one of the most cost-effective means of digital marketing, and allows you to reach a wide audience for relatively low costs.
Run Discount and Coupon Campaigns
Looking for an effective digital marketing plan for a restaurant? Keep your online engagement high with coupon and discount campaigns. Promoting new offers, like a 10% discount on new launches or coupon discounts on next visits brings in more customers and creates a buzz around your restaurant. Such offers motivate people to visit your restaurant and thus, helps to improve your sales. Run these campaigns on your website, social media handles, and in emails for the best response. Coupon campaigns can also improve your lead base from users who are submitting their information for a discount while ordering food or pre-booking a table.
Send Out Personalized Emails
Email marketing is an important restaurant digital marketing strategy that can help you to improve your overall ROI. Here, you need to create an email list of people who have subscribed to your email. Subscribers can be collected through your website, social media handles, landing pages, and other digital touchpoints.
Once you have created an email list, send your subscribers automated emails about your new launches, offers, or discounts. Try to send your recipient’s personalized emails with a friendly tone, expressing your gratitude, and remember that email content needs to be valuable to your audience in order to create action. Email marketing is also a great way to stay connected with customers who have already dined with you, as it helps to strengthen brand-customer relationship and build brand loyalty.
Run Paid Ads
For restaurants, the majority of customers are locals. Therefore, to gain local traffic to your restaurant, direct your marketing spend to local online ads. Online advertisements enable you to target customers according to geographical locations. Whether you are using Google Ads, or social ads, all the major advertising networks offer geo-targeting to help you attract and engage local audiences. Retargeting ads are also very efficient in this matter. These ads help you to retarget people who have visited your website before but did not make any purchases. Retargeting is a very effective approach to follow up with such an audience.
To make your ads successful, it’s important that you target the right set of people, according to their location and interests. Also, do not forget to be creative with your advertising. Ads that are informative, attractive, and engaging earn you better responses. While running ads on different networks like Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc., consider monitoring the performance of your ads to make campaigns more effective.
Harnessing the Power of Digital Marketing Can Help Your Restaurant Grow
The present pandemic situation has made it important for restaurant owners to embrace innovative digital marketing strategies. No matter how dedicated you are to your service, a restaurant business without a strong restaurant digital marketing plan will not reach its potential. The tactics mentioned above are some of the common, yet effective, strategies used by digital marketers to promote restaurants. These tactics can help you maintain your restaurant’s brand identity while giving your potential audience insight into your services and specialties.
