9 Awesome Restaurant Marketing Strategies to Ensure Greater Success

The ever-evolving domain of digital marketing has redefined the landscape of restaurant businesses inrecent years. The age-old ‘word of mouth’ approach is now obsolete in restaurant marketing. Rather, electronic media and mobile technology prove more reliable to promote restaurant business.

In this circumstance, it is relevant to discuss a few crucial factors that will help restaurateurs implement their restaurant marketing strategies properly.  

But before we start, here’re some words of caution:

• Restaurant business is fiercely competitive.
• 6 out of every 10 restaurants eventually wind up in failure.

These facts tell you in a different way that there’s no margin of error to select the best possible marketing strategy for your restaurant business.

If you believe that high-quality cooking and great tasting food will help your restaurant grow, you will be disappointed. Don’t get us wrong, that is a vital component of your business, however, with the right implementation of an online marketing strategy, your business will boom.

Resturant-marketing strategies

• Explore the social media: Social media channels offer an ideal platform to promote restaurants online. Among the large number of social media platforms that exist today, Instagram and Facebook are the two most ideal for promoting restaurants. The key is to keep the social channels churning with high-quality pictures and videos that your restaurant serves.
• Get a professional website for your restaurant: Having a great looking and professional website will help potential customers determine whether your business is worthy of visiting or not. Your restaurant website taps on a larger market of consumers, which in turn increases the chances of greater conversion and higher revenue. If you think putting up a professional restaurant website is a difficult job, you should hire web design and development professionals to do it for you.
• Launch contests both online and offline: If you’re aware about the on-going restaurant marketing ideas and trends then launching contests is going to be your perfect opportunity. You should offer contests both online and offline to reap greater rewards. Now, don’t make it too complicated. Just launch a contest at the physical location of your restaurant which the participants (who’re also your customers) can share online. This approach is time tested and proven to be effective to set the grapevine abuzz about your restaurant like wildfire.
• Good old e-mail marketing: You can’t ignore traditional e-mail marketing if you’re serious about promoting your restaurant. There are two options to keep your e-mail list growing. Either by getting customers to fill in forms physically or online. It is better to get them to fill it up online. E-mail marketing will help you stay in touch with your customers easily. You can keep updating them about any new menu addition and other exciting offers. A strong and carefully customised e-Mail marketing strategy can do wonders to promote your restaurant to next the next level of success.
• Impact of local food bloggers and influencers: Leveraging on the network of other businesses is itself a great marketing strategy. Local food bloggers and influencers can contribute substantially to take your restaurant to higher success levels. Connect with them and get them to share content related to your restaurant. Ofcourse, you’ve to consider giving them incentives, like complementary drinks and meals, free passes to events that you organise at your restaurant and so on.
• Remember the food apps: Browsing through the directory or surfing the net to find a suitable eatery is not only boring but also time-consuming. Users install a food app in their smartphone, which finds them the nearest restaurant. Connect with these food apps so that your restaurant is listed and you don’t lose potential customers.
• Social paying: A larger number of diners walk into a restaurant just because the place was recommended by a friend. You can tap on this option through social paying. In simple words, social paying means allowing your customers a free meal or a hefty discount in the bill in exchange of sharing your restaurant’s delicacies across their social media profiles. Calculate the dividends from this strategy in the following way: 5 customers with descent number of 100 followers each share one of your restaurant’s dishes on their social media network. Thus, your delicacy reaches out to almost 500 people in almost no time. Out of that 500 you can expect at least 5 to come over to dine at your restaurant.
• Marketing through social media: In this time and age, social media marketing is a tool of fundamental importance for any business. SMM can expose your restaurant to thousands of potential customers and it delivers much more than building brand awareness. It is a tried and tested tool to gain insight about your targeted consumer sector.
• ORM or managing your online reputation: A single bad review can deliver a fatal blow to your restaurant business. Your entire investment and effort can go down the drain in absence of a well-planned online reputation management strategy. ORM for restaurants is pretty simple. Respond to both positive and negative reviews in a pro-active approach. For more insights it is better to hire a reliable SEO agency like DubSEO.

Basic offline activities are also crucial to promote restaurants. Apart from sticking to the tips discussed above, never lose focus from those activities to drive your restaurant business to higher levels of success.