// Marketing
Digital Marketing Ideas for Restaurants That Attract Customers
// Marketing
It is no secret that part of our activity on the Internet is the search for new restaurants, writing reviews about various establishments, viewing menus, booking tables and the like. Marketing a restaurant has never been easy, as it is very dependent on the reaction of visitors. In the digital world, it has become even more complicated. After all, information is now much more and easier to find.
To promote your restaurant, you need creative ideas. The more interesting the offer, the more customers you can attract. And a permanent online presence is one of the best ways to talk about this offer.
In doubt? Imagine: Sunday morning, you wake up and crave a pleasant breakfast, but there is no desire to cook. The first thing you do in this case is to open a browser and look for something interesting in your area.
Now people, as never before, go to the Internet to first of all learn about new restaurants and their quality. If this information about your establishment is not available, the potential client will definitely choose something else.
You are definitely promoting your restaurant. The first confirmation is that you were looking for a similar article. But before you dive into creative ideas for digital marketing, you need to determine who your target audience is? After all, your approaches will depend on this.
Who are they? Millennials? Generation Z? Older generation? Families with children? Think it over. This step is crucial in analyzing ideas that have already worked out and in finding completely new ones. Without analysis of the target audience, you definitely cannot create a creative and attractive advertising campaign.
First of all, be prepared that 80% of potential customers will doubtfully accept a restaurant that does not have a page on social networks (especially Instagram). Previously, these were people 18-30 years old. Today, this range has expanded. Very often, people under the age of 40 go to Instagram to check the restaurant’s page and evaluate the visitor’s reviews.
If there is no page, urgently get it. Provide active subscribers, create content, make your account active. First of all, fruitful work on your Instagram account puts it in the top offers on the social network itself. Thus, as soon as a person speaks with someone about restaurants or begins to search for them on the Internet, Instagram will already add your institution to the list of “Interesting” for such a user.
Understand how hashtags work. This is a great tool for creating creative ideas in restaurant marketing. They can increase brand awareness and attract new visitors.
It is important to remember that now many users (especially girls) very often mark posts that they visited. And they do it with hashtags.
Hint: use niche hashtags in combination with popular ones. If you use only popular ones, your post will be lost in hundreds of others. But if you add local hashtags, or pick up something unique based on your services, you can stay in the top.
Important: control the number of tags in each post. Too much is annoying for the user. Too little - inefficient in terms of social network.
Of course, you need to engage in the generation of content for your page (photos, signatures, stories, etc.). In this case, user content really helps. In general, it will make your life much easier, save time and money.
92% of people trust the recommendations of other visitors. At the same time, visitors are much less likely to trust commercial content from marketers. Use it for your own benefit.
To maintain the visual elegance of the page, give priority to your own developments. But in “Stories” you need to publish as many photos or videos as possible that your visitors have added to their page.
The best part is that custom content can be used for free. As a restaurant, you will have a lot of images and videos from visitors, because today people are almost obsessed with photographing their dishes or the interior of some institution.
Custom content is usually an indicator of trust and reliability. If other people promote your brand when you don’t even ask for it, this gives the best rating.
Local SEO is crucial for restaurants. If your restaurant does not appear on the user's screen when he is looking for some restaurant in his region, you will not be able to count on big profits.
Your goal should be to rank first in search results. It’s especially important to work on the “local package”, which is also known as the “first three places on the Google map”. The three sites Google displays first on the map receive the most traffic and the most visitors.
A few SEO tips for restaurants:
What should a restaurant client take care of? Opening hours, address, phone number, menu, interior and available services. Where to find this data? In reviews. But does the review give the full amount? No. The visitor will tell only about personal experience. And on the site you will post everything you need to know before visiting the institution.
It is important to understand that in this case, you do not need a trendy, animated site with vivid images, lots of animations and background music. This is all unnecessary, because in any case, the user will not stay here for long. He wants to get the necessary information as quickly as possible. Motion design and background music will only slow down page loading.
Therefore, you need a simple and intuitive website that contains consistent information:
Why is a blog an important part of digital marketing?
Very often, only news is published on a blog. This may be interesting in the case of a cryptocurrency project or, for example, a car manufacturer. On the restaurant website, it is necessary to develop thematic content:
When people read your blog, they spend time on the site. This tells search engines that your site is relevant and useful. This leads to an increase in the ranking of the website itself as well as the restaurant in the search results.
Like a website, a food or table reservation application is an important part of an income strategy. Mobile phones take over our lives more and more. In just a few years it will be really impossible to leave home without a telephone (while there is still such a chance).
Dominos owes much to its stunning growth in recent years, namely application development. Through it, the brand increased the number of orders, and was also able to realize significantly more attractive ideas for the client (discounts, gifts, etc.).
The online ordering application will help:
It is also a great opportunity to provide a new user experience. For example, a client can order food and come to a restaurant in half an hour, and by this moment the order will be already on the table.
How to eliminate the risk that the client will not come? Prepayment of the order. Having paid the bill, a person will not come only in case of real force majeure.
This move is gaining momentum and there is no unequivocal opinion about whether it is part of digital marketing. But given the ways of its implementation, we can safely say that “influence marketing” is a modern idea and is close to digital advertising.
Find popular bloggers (regardless of the platform - Twitter, Instagram, YouTube). Ask them to post photos from your restaurant or thoughts about your establishment. The best move is if such a person learns about your establishment himself and leaves a good review of his own free will.
For example, Atladventurer is an Instagram account in which a blogger talks about different restaurants and dishes. Mostly, he visits places of Atlanta, but sometimes he posts about restaurants in other cities and countries.
If you can attract such an influential person, you can get a huge number of his subscribers as your visitors. By the way, Atladventurer has 58 thousand subscribers today. Accordingly, the restaurants about which he wrote automatically go to a new level of recognition.
Never focus on one idea. If something doesn’t work, just make a change. For restaurant marketing, you can come up with an unlimited number of ideas. The more you try, the faster you will find your approach and you will be able to develop.
