In past few years, the number of restaurants and cafes on every other street in every city has considerably increased. This has lead to an upsurge of fierce competition in the food business. So in an industry that promises never ending growth, are you putting the right efforts to make your restaurant a big name in it?
To make your restaurant stand out of the crowd and be known as one of its kind, it is critical for you to adapt the most appropriate restaurant promotion ideas and tactics. Restaurant marketing trends have largely shifted from posting flyers and pamphlets to establishing strong virtual presence and networking with expedient communities.
Here we are enlisting top 8 tactics of restaurant marketing. So if you are looking for a marketing strategy for your restaurant’s promotion, have a look.
1. Get on the List
The trend states that whenever a potential customer is looking for a new place to eat or any place to eat for that matter, the first thing they do is ‘Google.’ So make sure that whenever someone does that the next time, your name pops up on the list. Therefore the first step of restaurant promotion is to get your restaurant listed in possibly all the food directories that are available and popular.
2. Get your Geographical Identity
Be local to Go Global. This ideology can turn out to be an interesting restaurant marketing idea for you. Imagine a scenario where your potential customers within your area would receive your best ads as pop-ups and notifications.
Hence, drawing the attention of your targeted audience towards your offerings and when it comes to a food Pop-up, anyone can hardly resist it. Apps and platforms like Google Adwords, Google Places, Twitter, and Facebook, provides such promotional services. So, you can use them to set up your restaurant’s geographical identity.
4. Embed Customer Content on Website
- Embedding social media content, like Instagram posts, on your restaurant’s website can be an effective marketing tactic to engage with your audience and showcase your food, ambiance, and customer experiences.
- Adding Google reviews on website is a great way to build trust and credibility with potential customers. Positive reviews can influence people’s decisions to dine at your restaurant.
4. Establish a Virtual Presence
Social media is a prominent platform for all sorts of businesses to grow. One of the most prominent industries that are highly affected by the effective use of social media is the industry of restaurant business. To optimally utilize social media, the use of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest should be very efficient.
These platforms if used with the most suitable content then it can massively trend the restaurant. As a part of a regular marketing activity, post eye-catching pictures of the delightful food you serve, the events you host or the natural environment of the restaurant and trend them with the quirky hashtags and captions. This can get you a real outreach and thus a promising customer interface.
5. Set up Indoor Social Media Walls
Social media walls are one-stop solution for effectively utilizing social media platforms for restaurant promotions. Social walls are a platform that provides a snapshot preview of all the social media activities related to your restaurant. It aggregates all the trending hashtags and real-time conversations about your posts that are published through your restaurant marketing channel on various decks.
After aggregating the preview, it publishes and promotes it among the virtual audience and displays it on the social wall screen. Setting up an indoor social media wall would help you to engage your customers by making them re-post and post the designed content through their profiles via the social wall and get them to be a part of the trend. You can try social aggregator tools like Taggbox for this.
6. Host Events
Hosting events at your restaurant is a promising way to attract customers to your restaurants. It gives people a chance to try out your ambiance and services, and if they may like it, then they would surely visit back. Besides, you do not need to invest a crunch in hosting a marketing event. In fact, it should not even seem to be a marketing event.
You can consider hosting small scale interactive events like book screening spaces, comedy nights, story sharing events, etc. A light event with reasonable investment and a fantastic customer experience delivery can be your perfect recipe of restaurant marketing.
7. Promote in communities
One vastly used and competent restraint promotion idea is promoting it in local communities and social groups. This can be done by word of mouth, publishing internal invitations and hosting community parties.
This tactic gives the advantage to reach out to many customers at once. After that, you can keep these people intact as your clients by sending them email newsletters and constant updates about the restaurants.
8. Let the Expert Bloggers and Media to Speak about you
These days when it comes to making choices relating to day-to-day lifestyle options, people trust bloggers’ advice. Therefore if a blogger mentions your restaurant and its uniqueness through his/her website or blog, it would draw much more attention and credibility. Other than connecting to bloggers, building PR is also a great marketing strategy for your restaurant’s promotion.
The most promising PR collaborations can be done with magazines, radio channels, and Social Media pages that post city-centric or generic content. Media and bloggers’ recommendations about your restaurant can be significant support for you to flourish your business. One such blog is of Craig Mathew Feigin, he is a leading restaurant marketing agent in the US.
9. Deliver amazing customer experiences:
For hospitality industry and a restaurant business, what marketing strategy can be better than treating their customers well and creating promoters? None, right? The service that you provide to your clients says a lot of how your restaurant will be growing shortly.
If the client’s experience that you deliver is amusing, then it’s a sure shot at marketing right. As a satisfied customer will always make you their first choice in restaurants and will also promote your restaurant among hundreds of potential clients.
