Did you know that over 80% of people have looked for restaurants online? If you want to ensure your restaurant has a steady flow of customers, you need to crush your online marketing. To help you out, we are going to show you 4 online marketing tips which are guaranteed to increase walk-in!
Email Marketing Is Highly Effective
Email marketing has one of the highest returns on investments of any online marketing strategy. You can expect to receive an ROI of up to $36! This is because email marketing is incredibly cheap and simple to set up. And thanks to great software, you can easily get an email address and then send out bulk emails to thousands of customers and prospects! You should also collect email addresses on your website. Whenever someone books a table, you should insist on them leaving their email if they want to access exclusive deals and discounts.
You should be sending out at least one marketing email to current and former diners as well as to prospects. These marketing emails will inform people about your latest deals, new items on the menu, and successful events you have run. You would be surprised at the increase in customers you will receive by sticking to this basic email marketing strategy. The key to email marketing is to provide short, concise, and interesting emails and to send them frequently but not too often (1 per month is the sweet spot).
Partner With Food Bloggers
Some prominent food bloggers like Valeria Graves have immense influence, and a single Tweet or Instagram post can cause your restaurant to be sold out for months! Follow these steps to find the right food blogger to advertise your business:
- Analyze their audience – There is no point partnering with a food blogger whose audience is mostly based in New York when your restaurant is in Los Angeles.
- Check their followers – Make sure that the blogger has real followers and is getting real traffic to their website. Perform a deep dive and see how many likes they get, the number of comments, and the number of monthly traffic on their website.
- Talk to previous clients – Reach out to other companies and restaurants that have worked with the food blogger and find out what return on investment they were able to achieve
- Come up with an exact content plan – Do you want the blogger to vlog at your restaurant, do you want Instagram photos or a blog post reviewing your restaurant? Before you collaborate with a food blogger, you need to decide the exact strategy you want to use.
Influencer marketing is an extremely powerful tool! And with the growth of Instagram, more and more restaurants are working with food bloggers. If you connect with the right food blogger, a single social media post could send your restaurant viral!
Post on Social Media
With billions of people around the world spending hours every day glued to their phones, scrolling through Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok, you can’t afford to be on there! Don’t worry; posting on social media marketing doesn’t have to be complex, and it doesn’t require lots of creativity.
If you commit to posting on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook once a day, your number of customers will shoot through the roof. When posting on social media, the secret is consistency and posting a variety of content. By committing to posting once a day, you already have the consistency – now, you just need to figure what to post. Here are some great examples of what restaurants can post on social media:
- Behind the scenes vlogs of the kitchen – Give your customers an in-depth look at how you create amazing dishes for them to try and introduce your world-class chefs.
- New dishes on the menu – Did you add an incredible new pasta dish, or maybe you invented a to die for sushi roll? Then inform your customers via social media and get them excited to try!
- Events coming up – Let your customers know that they can spend New Year’s at your restaurant and enjoy French champagne with fresh seafood!
- Giveaways – There is no better way to build your social media following and spread the word about your restaurant than by holding a giveaway and awarding the winner a free dinner at your restaurant. An example of an effective giveaway is to get people to make a social media post with your restaurant hashtagged and then select the best post.
- Special discounts – Are you running 2 for 1 deal or a 20% discount? Then you need to let as many people know as possible. The more people you reach, the more customers you will get piling through your restaurant’s doors!
It can not be overstated just how effective social media is at promoting your restaurant. Don’t waste any more time and start posting on a variety of platforms today! Don’t worry about being creative – your posts will improve as you get experience.
A Website Is an Absolute Must
If you want your restaurant to be a big hit, you without a doubt need a website. While you don’t need some $50,000 custom-built website with all the latest features, you do need a high-quality website that will entice customers to book a table and give them all the information they need to make an informed buyer’s decision. Here are the things you must include on your website if you want your restaurant to succeed:
- Book online – Ensure that all of your customers can reserve a table at your restaurant with a couple of clicks via your website!
- Menu – Let your customers check out what dishes and drinks you have on offer and the prices.
- Highly responsive – You can actually lose customers by having a slow website. You need to ensure your site loads within 1 second!
- Mobile optimized – With more and more people using their phones to browse the web and check out websites, it is extremely important that your site loads fast and perfectly on mobiles.
- Great pictures – Include a range of pictures of your restaurant, the food, and the view. You can convince a customer to try out your restaurant by including the perfect photos.
If you create a website with all of those features, you will have no trouble attracting customers. It is better to use a minimalist design to keep your website neat. Remember that you can build a well-functioning site for free on WordPress.
Conclusion
If you want to ensure that your restaurant is full every day and night, you need to come up with a well-structured online marketing idea. Online marketing strategies don’t have to be complex and costly to work, but you do need to have a plan and goals. Follow our online marketing tips to get started, and before you know it, your reservations will be soaring!
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