Social Media Marketing For Restaurants
Digital Marketing for Restaurants is vital for a restaurant to grow its reach and retain more loyal customers. As discussed in the previous article, where we listed the different ways of marketing your restaurant online, social media marketing takes the king's share of the pie. A well-thought-out strategy must be put in place for your business to grow and expand its presence on social media.
We've come a long way from the times marketing your restaurant involved depending on word of mouth of customers that loved the food or distributing pamphlets containing promotions to visit your restaurant. In a world where most of the decisions taken by millennials are driven by something they see on social media or online, it is a compelling enough reason for your restaurant to pursue social media marketing. Having a social media first centric approach has a lot of benefits for your restaurants in the form of
- Higher reach among people who use social media
- Loyal customers return to your restaurant.
- Brand Recognition that leads to higher footfall
- Word of mouth from customers that visit your restaurant
It can be challenging to find a restaurant social media marketing strategy that works for you. Here are some tips and tricks for you to have the upper hand when it comes to outlining.
Determine how you want to portray yourself online:
When getting started with your restaurant's social media marketing strategy, you need to think about how you want to portray yourself. Do you want to prioritize the food you're going to serve in your restaurant or, showcase the ambiance in your restaurant?
You need to figure it out initially as you need to maintain your consistent image across social media for your customers not to get confused. Study the customer base that would like to attract to your restaurant and make your decision upon that.
Use the bio at the top of your social media page to display the necessary details for your customers to see. It could be a phone number or a link to signup for your email list. It could also indicate the ongoing offers you have at your restaurants. Use that reserved space at the top wisely.
Social Media Content:
The general rule of thumb with the use of photos or videos for your restaurant social media marketing strategy is as follows,
- When you are posting something on your social media, always use high-quality images. This rule is very critical because customers generally associate a restaurant that posts low-quality photos as being inferior.
- Post a lot of photos. It can be of your restaurant or the food that you serve but post a load of them. Some customers need a lot of information before deciding upon coming to your restaurant and, having a lot of photos on your social media certainly helps.
- Add links to videos when you are posting an update on your restaurant. This video can be a behind-the-scenes video or a video on how a particular dish is made.
- Create a carousel post on Facebook and Instagram with your most recent menu. A customer that's going through your social media will have a look at your menu and might find something that they like and decide to come to your restaurant.
- Post content on some of the seasonal items in your restaurant and create a sense of urgency for your social media followers to order that particular item before the season ends.
- Showcase your follower's content. Repost the content they have shared on their private social media account with all of your followers. It will make the follower that created the content feel special and, your social media account will be associated with a friendly vibe.
- Your followers love to know what is happening behind the scenes in your restaurant. Show them a little snippet of it from time to time in the form of updates. It helps boost their confidence in coming back to the restaurant for more and brews loyalty.
- Champion the people who help you run your restaurant. Share the story of the staff that handles the front of your house. You can also bring in the head chef of your restaurant and share some of the tips he employs in his kitchen. By showing the effort, they put into running your restaurant, you can share the less forgotten side of your restaurant and make sure their struggles don't go in vain.
- Maintain a consistent design theme across all your platforms. Often the same set of followers follow your page on multiple social media platforms and, it throws them off if they see a different theme of content posted across various platforms. It also helps to have a consistent voice on all the social media platforms. Limit the handling of social media accounts to one person as it allows for the same person's voice to be represented.
- For Twitter, you can use trending or some niche hashtags on some of your tweets. If you are running a campaign on Twitter, you can create specific hashtags that your followers can use to retweet or share. The same hashtags could be used in Instagram as well for consistency.
- Add a link to your menu on Twitter and tweet it out for your followers to see.
Social Media Marketing
Sometimes relying on organic growth for your restaurant's social media marketing is slow. Choosing to promote your brand in the form of paid ads or other strategies is the way to go if you want aggressive growth. Here are some tips in that manner
- When deciding to run campaigns on social media, you must understand your customer base clearly. Choosing the wrong details for your campaign could result in the incorrect people targeted.
- Another thing to note while running campaigns is to geo-target your ads, targeting a location where you are not present results in a campaign that is above the budget.
General Social Media Marketing Tips
Here are some general tips that you would like to follow for your restaurant's social media marketing strategy.
- Reply to all of your customers to drive engagement. Your followers form a special bond with your restaurant when you reply to more of their comments. Take in the criticism if they give and act upon it to make changes in your restaurant. It shows to your followers that you are listening to them and that their suggestions are valued.
- Drive email signups using your social media account. Having an email list is vital for your business as it grows. You must be able to share new information about changes taking place in your restaurant and the ongoing offers at the click of a button. Having an email list accomplishes just that.
Feel free to let us know what you think about this article. While you're here, you can have a look at some of our other articles. They're all related to the F&B industry. Feel free to contact us if you need any more information.
