Consider this when you are thinking about how to market a restaurant and get customers flooding your doors after this coronavirus pandemic.
The competition among restaurants is usually quite high and is going to be very competitive after the coronavirus. People are already started preparing for what marketing strategy they should take.
Whether it’s an international or local restaurant, there is no doubt that you do face heavy competition from other restaurants near you.
So, what is the best way to attract and retain more customers?
To succeed in this type of restaurant business, you need to employ the best marketing techniques. You need to know that marketing a restaurant online is different from marketing other types of businesses.
Since you are dealing with the distribution of drinks and food, you need to have a unique marketing approach.
Below are the best ways to market a restaurant to get lots of customers flooding your doors after this coronavirus outbreak.
1. Take and Upload Lots of Food Photos
Food photos have never been as popular as they are today. Instagram users can bear witness to this. Taking food photos is one of the best ways to market your restaurant.
Not just any photos. High-quality photos!
Currently, visual content is in high demand in the online world. Having high-quality photos of delicious meals posted on your social media accounts can attract many customers to your restaurant.
Beyond social sites, you can use them on your blog, your website, in any online ads you run, and even offline. High-quality photos of the food you offer can be used on billboards, direct mail, t.v., buses, and on and on I can go!
Despite being an effective way of marketing your restaurant, you should never lie to your customers. It would help if you made sure that the food posted can be prepared and served as it is to your customers.
This is why you take high-quality photos of your food yourself. Do not use stock photos and images from Pixabay or Pexels and a free shared image website.
One other thing on photos. Take quality photos of the inside and outside of your restaurant and your employees, chefs, and even if you as the owner. This presents you and your company in a very positive way.
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2. Try Out Loyalty Programs
There is nothing that people love more than free food. However, this does not mean you let everyone take free lunch from your restaurant.
Loyalty programs are an ideal restaurant marketing strategy. The idea is to partner with online apps and give free meals or discounts who complete a certain action, such as tweeting about the restaurant or some game.
3. Give Email Marketing A Go
Email marketing can also significantly benefit your restaurant. All you have to do is ask customers to sign up for a monthly email when they dine at your restaurant.
You can then craft a newsletter showing the meals you have to offer and any discounts available. This can be sent out at a scheduled time, such as weekly.
An even better idea is to use your email list to market new products, sales, and other incentives your subscribers might like. When you do this, you are really using TOMA advertising.
Top Of Mind Awareness is a great way to keep in front of your customers. An email newsletter is perfect for this.
It is natural for human beings to get bored with certain things over time. For you to counter the ‘boredom syndrome,’ you should update your menu regularly.
Ensure that you add new meals and use a graphic designer who will help create a stunning menu. You can also send the updated menu to your clients via your email newsletter or share it on social media.
5. Run Contests and Games
Another way for you to market your restaurant is by hosting food contests or games. There is no better way for you to interact with customers than by allowing them to participate in a game or contest.
This can significantly help build your brand as well. Contests and games can turn into viral marketing, which is shared and does not cost you anything.
6. Ask Local Food Bloggers to Promote Your Site
Leveraging food bloggers could also help market your restaurant to potential customers. Make a habit of inviting food bloggers to review your restaurant and always send press releases when you have news to share about your restaurant.
Companies that you buy products from would love to see your restaurant grows cause it means you will buy more products from them. So feel free to ask them to add you to their blog and let them know you would do the same for them. It is all about networking.
Start A Blog
A blog can be used as your company website. This is the logical place to post your high-quality photos outside of your social site.
You can also link to your sites and vice versa, giving people more ways to find you. Plus, you can use targeted keywords so search engines like Google and Bing can tell your local market how to find you.
A blog is cheap advertising costing no more than $5-$10 a month to host. Write blog posts and use keywords to describe your photos that tell the search engines who you are, what you do, and where to find you.
To get more ideas on blogging, see if any of your competitors have a blog and how they are doing it. Use the best ideas from all of them to create the most outstanding restaurant blog in your niche!
Hire Someone To Do All The Above For Your Restaurant
If you are too busy, you can hire someone to do all I mentioned above for your restaurant. If you want to do it, you can leave a detailed message below in the comment box below, and I will address your concern.
Someone can do that for your restaurant, and they will start for free with their hosting account, and as your business grows, you can work out a monthly contribution. I have seen businesses excel within months with that approach.
Or…
You can start it off yourself and just pay them a commission to drive traffic to your restaurant. Lots of restaurants have doubled, sometimes tripled, with that approach within six months. So if this is something you would like to consider, state it in the comment box below.
Conclusion
With these seven tips, you are assured of effectively marketing your restaurant to a targeted audience. Don’t forget to monitor your social media press and make an attempt to respond to reviews, both positive and negative.
Also, make sure your restaurant details online are accurate. This will give you a higher ranking on search engine result pages.
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Hi,
I was quite surprised on some of a few of the points you have brought up as I never thought that could be a marketing option for a restaurant.
I didn’t know the following 2 options work too.
1. Email marketing
2. Run Contests and Games
It will be useful to the reader if you could go in-depth into these 2 marketing options.
ZhengYu
Thank you for the comment and your concerns. The two options that you spoke about I touch briefly because I did not want to go into details cause each restaurant are different and what would work for one may not work for the other.
Email marketing is a good way to get feedback from your customers and also to let them know when you have a new addition to your menu, which you need to be updating regularly.
Although contest and games can cause excitement to your customer’s ones have to be very careful how you go about it, maybe in the future, I would go into details on the approaches of these two options on how to market your restaurant. Hope this helps!
Hi there,
Really nice article on how to use marketing to get traffic to your restaurant. I’m pretty sure these tips will bring a lot of people to your place, but as you mentioned, you need to make sure all the pictures you upload are real and your customer will see the same ones when they order something on the restaurant.
However, I don’t know how expensive will it be to pay for some advertising on the internet to become a great restaurant, also in some other ways like Tv or radio. Although, I think if you follow those tips step by step you can be successful with your restaurant business and after some time, you won’t have to pay for any advertising as the restaurant will be famous or at least will have a lot of people coming in.
A friend of mine will start soon his own restaurant and I will give those ideas to him so he can promote his place.
Thank you very much for the info.
The restaurant business can be very competitive, but if you have a unique style of marketing you can outrank your competition and drive more customers to your business.
Television and radion can be very costly but there are clever ways you can get some free or low-cost advertising if you provide discounts to those stations in your local areas.
Thank you for sharing these tips with your friends and if you need further assistance please feel free to contact me. thank you for the comment.
I like this, having an online marketing service can really set you apart. I know there are restaurants that have an online ordering/appointment service, but I haven’t heard of many restaurants that actually market themselves online.
You’ve listed many suggestions with regards to doing this. Sounds interesting. I can really see this having some good potential.
Never thought that ordering food online would reach that far, but it is definitely growing and if you own a restaurant today is something that you should carefully consider doing to boost your business and sales.
to keep up with the trend is important to try many different ways to reach out to your customers, and if you do not have the time, hiring someone to market for you should be considered.. Thank you for the input.
Very nice ideas laid out in this post. Actually, these are powerful tips for restaurants and it should help anyone in that line if well followed. With the constant increment in the level of involvement online by people, blogging would seem a very ideal way for anyone who wants to follow the tips here so as to be able to reach out to more people and get more patronage. Maintaining an online presence really helps a lot too in the physical world.
Thank you for your comment and input here. Marketing any business should always live up to the trend of the online world if one is to stay in business and marketing a restaurant is no different. Blogging would be the ideal trend because is a good way to get feedback from your customers which will improve the overall function of your restaurant. Thank you.
In any business you build you need to get customers to your business and owning a restaurant is no difference, I have seen lots of restaurants went out of business because they had no marketing strategy like the ones you outlined.
The ones that grab my attention are trying out loyalty programs and using email marketing to build your clientele and a good way to reach out to them on specials through email marketing.
I personally believe that if those owners had come across your article you would have saved if not all, most of those restaurants. I will definitely share this on my social media following and i hope that this article is reached by many, Thanks for the information.
Building any business is a serious business and one should not jump into things without first learning the necessary skills that they would need to build their restaurant successfully.
I have done this for a few retail stores and all the strategies that I mention works. And if they do not want to possess the skills themselves, they should hire someone to do it for them. Thank you for wanting to share this article with your social media following.