5 Best Marketing Strategy Tips for Restaurants
The restaurant industry is fiercely competitive (if ya know, ya know!), so it’s important to make sure you’ve given yourself a good marketing strategy foundation. Particularly in cities and suburbs, the local restaurant market can often be terribly oversaturated. So keep up with your competition, and hopefully leave them behind, with these 5 tips to ensure your marketing game is strong.
Get Your Google Business Profile Right
Get. It. RIGHT. As a restaurant, this is probably the most important thing you can do for your business. Get your business verified, fill out as much information as possible on your profile, and upload high quality images that showcase your food, your drinks, and your space.
But don’t just set up your profile and forget about it. Your Google Business Profile will display your customer reviews, which can literally make or break your business. Which brings us to tip #2…
2. Establish a Customer Review Monitoring Practice
Online customer reviews have changed the way restaurants need to interact with their customers on the internet. Apps like Yelp and Google Maps display customer ratings right up front, and most people use them to determine whether or not they will eat at a particular restaurant. So here’s what you’ve got to do to make the most of reviews (and not get burned by them):
Be responsive. Whenever someone leaves a review on your Yelp or Google Business Profile, respond within a day or two! The sooner the better, and respond whether it’s positive or negative. Responding with a peace offering can change the way people interpret negative reviews.
Encourage reviews. Put signs up in your restaurants with QR codes so customers can easily submit a review. The more reviews the better! People trust restaurants with more reviews.
Reward reviews. You can even incentivize reviews with discounts or raffles to collect more of them.
Highlight positive reviews. You can post them on your social media and website to build trust with viewers.
3. Post Your Food on Social Media
You’re a restaurant! You have unlimited access to the most popular imagery on social media other than puppies! Your entire social media account can JUST be photos and videos of your food and it will likely be successful. Be sure to use local-specific hashtags to get into the right people’s feeds. And if there’s anything unique or visually striking about the way your food is prepared, that will definitely help you succeed on social media.
Take it to the next step by partnering with local food bloggers and influencers, so you can be featured on their social media accounts or websites.
4. Brand Your Restaurant Cohesively Across All Channels
Cohesive branding means using repetition so that people easily recognize your company no matter where they are encountering it. You can achieve that by:
Using the same logo on your Google Business Profile, social media profile images, and website.
Choosing a set color palette and using it on your website, social media, and all marketing materials. You can even incorporate it into the decor of your physical restaurant.
Choose a brand font set, too! This means choosing one or two fonts that you use in all your marketing materials the same way you do with the color palette.
Another way to do this is to choose a tagline or two to use throughout your marketing efforts.
5. Start a Loyalty Program (or Referral Program)
Loyalty programs and referral rewards are great tools to encourage your customers to come back and bring a friend.
This can be as simple as a punch card offering a free item every 5 visits, or it can be an online program they sign up to join. An online program can be particularly helpful, because you are also capturing their contact information and can use this to offer other deals as well.
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