With new restaurants opening every week we can all agree that the competition is fierce. With 17,533 restaurants in London alone it’s quite clear that it’s hard to reach to new audience and keep loyal clients. In this blog article I want to share with you some restaurant digital marketing tips to increase your brand awareness, loyalty and alternatively sales.

1. Identify your core audience

The first step is to identify who your core target audience is. Do you want families, couples, singles, friends coming over? You have to decide who you want to attract. Based on your target audience you will have a clear vision on what content to create and what campaign to run. Single people have a different behaviour pattern from married people, so the messaging on your campaign to attract single people will be different.

If you want to attract foodies for example you need to be using and understand the #FoodPorn hashtag, which is alive and well.

2. Make it Insta-Hungry 

Instagram is a very good social media platform for restaurants to brand themselves. Again, based on your core target audience your ‘picture game’ should be different. Foodies for example are fanatics with food, they want to see burger pictures, steak pictures and basically everything food.

You will need to jump on some very popular hashtags like #ThrowBackThursday or #WednesdayMotivation and play with it. You might even want to create your own hashtag. The point with hashtags is that you have to jump on them and test drive what works for you. It’s time to execute.

restaurantmarketingtip1

For restaurants it’s a no-brainer that Instagram has a huge potential. Now it’s harder to get followers because of all the noise when people don’t like something they just unfollow the account instantly, you must make sure that you deliver great content.

Another great strategy you can use on Instagram is share behind the scenes pictures. You can share your team, your kitchen, the chef and any activities that happen after closed doors.

3. Email Marketing, yeah newsletter campaigns

Newsletters still work if done properly, now don’t go out there and start sending weekly newsletter campaigns with special offers, that’s a big NO NO. You can send once per month or every two months one great email campaign with value. By value I mean you can inform your audience about your latest news and inspire people with your food.

You might not have a mailing list so I would suggest you start building a valid list rather than buying some bulk data. The reason is because it’s better to have 1,000 people that are really interested in your restaurant than 10k people who don’t know who you are. If you are starting from zero you can ask people for their details and communicate that you will send them special email campaign.

You can go even more advanced by using a loyalty programme and send campaigns to your clients as soon as they visit your restaurant with a simple thank you message.

reservation

4. Reviews, Reviews & Reviews

I know a lot of restaurant managers and owners complain about TripAdvisor and reviews in general because some are fake and some are not real. Reviews can make or break your restaurant, we all know that and heard hundreds of stories how business’s suffer from bad reviews. Some say that people only leave a review if they are not satisfied, if they are happy they won’t leave a review. YES, I agree and it’s human nature, if we are not happy with a service we are more likely to complain on social media.

I had a client in Central London once that had some bad reviews on TripAdvisor and asked me to ‘delete them’. I suggested to him to reply to all his negative comments and ask people to come back for a free meal or try to solve their problem over the phone. He didn’t want to do that and said to me that TripAdvisor is destroying his business. I replied honestly to him, if your service and food is not that good social media nor trip advisor will save you, it will do the opposite, it will destroy you faster. When you advertise and use social media people will come to your restaurant but then it can backfire. What will happen if they are NOT satisfied? It means you will get more and more negative experiences, right?  So the best solution is to fix your service and food quality and then think of your advertising strategy. In the end I said I can’t work with him because I can’t help him with his problem.

quality

I would suggest creating elegant cards and ask your clients to leave their honest reviews on TripAdvisor and Facebook. Don’t just give them out a card without actually asking them in person. It’s more personal and you can actually get a feedback.

I always prefer an honest feedback from a client because if somebody tells me that I’m perfect there is nothing to improve I know for sure that I can’t learn anything from that, I can’t improve. If somebody tells me you are perfect in this areas but this area needs improvement, that is gold for me because NOW I can work and improve myself in that area. Nobody is perfect and there is always room for improvement. I advice you to do the same.

5. Make your clients stars

People love it when somebody mentions them (for good reasons) on social media channels. Social media grows because of this endless opportunity to become a celebrity and have your own voice. Knowing that, you can use your clients pictures on your own social media channels (always give credit), user generated content is a great way to promote your business.

You can take pictures while your clients are eating or waiting for their food and share those images on your own social media channels. If you want to go deeper go and ask for their @username and @mention them in your post. I know, some of you might say that you don’t have the time to do that. That’s why I suggest you hire a digital agency (IQDigital), hire a community manager as well and create this connection. Invest in your business.

hero

It’s not just about posting one picture of them and that’s it, you have to listen as well, that’s what’s most important, listening and interacting with people to build engagement.

6. Use online reservation tools 

If you are not using Open Table or any other tool for online reservations I suggest you start using it. People’s time is valuable, they want to get on with their lives and digital makes it so much better. Rather than calling and waiting just intergrade it on your website and communicate it.

7. Inspiring Campaigns 

Last but not least, create inspiring and creative campaigns. It’s a cliche but I will say it: Stand Out From The Crowd. Usually restaurants make the same campaigns over and over again. Why not create something different. We can see on a daily basis how some different pubs create funny signs outside their venue and people love it.

77d565489cdcf801f392002cdaa1d383

Create a campaign that will be interesting and unique. There is one campaign that I liked a lot that Comodo NYC created. An Instagram menu:

Now how cool is this? It’s unique, fresh and drives attention. This campaign received thousands of mentions on social media channels from media companies and people.

Bonus Tip:

Create a snapchat account. Taco Bell is doing a great job on their snapchat and I have been following them for a while now. Create different stories that are happening in your restaurant with your clients and share them on snapchat. You can build leverage now on snapchat because it’s still new and not a lot of restaurants use it yet. Build your audience on snapchat now that it’s early.

For those of you who are willing to go ALL IN, I would highly recommend Periscope/Meerkat. If you don’t know what Periscope is I created a video for you, you can watch it here and if you know what Periscope is and need content ideas for Periscope I did another video for you.

Now, I hope you enjoyed this article and got some ideas on how to to increase loyalty, brand awareness and sales to your restaurant. If you need help executing this ideas please do give me a call so we can discuss and see if I can help you. You can call me on UK Office: 020 3130 0451 Cyprus Office: 22 101 935  or just drop me an email an at alexnovicov dot com.

Follow me on Twitter for daily marketing and business insights, Instagram for inspiration, YouTube for my educational videos, Periscope for my live shows on success and marketing and Facebook if you are Facebook Fan.