Social media is a tool that offers a wide array of potential for businesses, restaurants being one of them. If not billions, it can help a restaurant reach thousands of viewers with the help of relevant and prominent hashtags, such as #foodphotography or #foodlover.
Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X(Formerly Twitter), etc, have become a staple tool for businesses to connect with their target audiences. In fact, it can help restaurant businesses understand the tastes and preferences of the customers effectively.
In this article, you will explore how a restaurant marketing agency can capitalize on the impact of social media. This will help you understand how restaurants will be able to generate more foot traffic using these platforms.
Social Media: The Most Powerful Tool For Your Restaurant Marketing Efforts
Just imagine you are keen to take your family and friends for dinner. While scrolling through social media, you discover a restaurant page that uploads delicious dishes offered at their place. The ambience, blended with the dishes and the architecture of the restaurant, will definitely tempt you.
| Did You Know?According to Statista, the number of social media users is projected to reach over 6 billion by 2028. |
That’s when you will make a decision to take your loved ones to this restaurant and enjoy a great time during dinner. This showcases the influence that social media holds in the minds of consumers.
Utilizing smart social media tactics seems to be a lot of work, but it will definitely pay off. There are some essential reasons that make social media important for restaurant marketing:
- Brand Awareness:
As the number of social media users is increasing day by day, the chances of them getting to know your brand also increase. You can leverage this as an opportunity by posting pictures of your restaurant joint, uploading cooking videos of new dishes, and showcasing behind-the-scenes of preparing a recipe in your kitchen area. These tactics are helpful to build a loyal customer base for your restaurant.
- Connecting With the Help of User-Generated Content:
Social media is known to be quite interactive in nature. Keeping such a factor in mind, you can post content generated by users. It involves pictures of people dining at your restaurant, graphics with reviews and testimonials, and stories of how people discovered your restaurant.
UGC is a great tool that encourages customers to visit your restaurant and share content created by you.
- Addressing Customer Concerns:
Customers who are left unhappy use social media to share their concerns. You can see this as a great opportunity to reach out and offer solutions to their problems. This way, you can build a positive reputation, which further increases customer loyalty.
- Receive Feedback:
Through social media, you can begin a healthy conversation and get useful insights. You can ask customers about the changes they would like to see, new dishes they would like to see on your menu, and the special offerings they would like to see.
- Improving Your Reach and Visibility:
You can tag your location on Facebook and Instagram to reach new customers living in and around your target geographical location. This will also help you attract tourists searching for a local spot to indulge in delicious food.
Strategies to Use Social Media for Marketing Your Restaurants
Here are some powerful social media strategies that will help you market your restaurants on such platforms effectively:
- Develop a Strong Brand Voice:
Maintaining a consistent brand voice can be a difficult job for your social media team. Marketing teams that hire different people to manage social media pages individually may end up achieving results that are below their expectations.
Customers may get confused if you share a funny tweet or meme, yet maintain a serious tone on social media. This is something that you need to avoid while marketing your restaurant.
According to research, you can boost the revenue of your restaurant by implementing consistent branding across various social media platforms.
Here’s how to ensure a strong and characterful brand voice to market your restaurant on social media:
- Develop a style guide that every team member has to use.
- Post images with the same colour theme.
- Write captions that have a consistent tone of voice.
- While using humour, make sure it resonates well with the audience across every social media platform.
- Optimize the Bio You Use on Every Social Media Platform:
Imagine you do everything right according to the book. You share high-quality pictures, leverage trending hashtags, and geotag the posts on your social media for improved reach levels.
Customers look at your posts, which leaves them intrigued. They then plan to reserve a table at your restaurant. However, cannot find any email, phone number, or location, as you forgot to add them on your social media handles.
This happens a lot more than you could ever think. This can even work against your social media efforts.
If you miss out on adding your contact details, you may end up losing a valuable chunk of sales.
Here is a list of information you need to have in your bio before publishing it:
- Location address
- Phone numbers
- Email address
- Map-based directions
- Information about restaurants
- Use Social Media Tools to Track Mentions of Your Brand:
Users often talk about your brand, which is usually considered to be a free word-of-mouth publicity. You can leverage this benefit by re-sharing or commenting on the posts where your restaurant is tagged.
Furthermore, there are various free or paid tools available in the market that make this process more manageable. You can automate name and mention tracking to get rapid updates whenever a customer mentions you in their conversation.
You can use the following tools to start tracking your mentions:
- Google Alerts
- Hootsuite
- Talkwalker
- Mentionlytics
- Reputology
- Share Behind-the-Scenes Content:
Even the finest pics of a well-prepared dish can feel impersonal after a while. That’s where sharing behind-the-scenes content can be extremely helpful. It will help you and your marketing team to establish a relationship with your customers.
According to a study conducted by Forbes, 55 percent of people find stories more attractive than data or facts that you share.
You can leverage this advantage by posting the things that happen behind the scenes in your restaurant’s kitchen.
- Promote New Additions in Your Menu:
Social media marketing for restaurants works well when you launch new dishes or promote seasonal menu items. People love novelty. In fact, there is a study that shows the craving for newness within humans.
You can apply this principle to market special items on your menu. Each time you alter your menu or introduce new ingredients to your daily dishes, share these additions on social media. This way, you can utilize your business’ newness as an important point for social media marketing.
These are a few strategies that will help you attract social media users to your restaurant and drive more traffic.
To Summarize
Social media is the best way to promote your business, including restaurants. It helps you connect with your target audience in a more effective manner. Every social media platform helps you reach out to your target audience through different ways, allowing you to delve deeper and showcase your products as per their preferences.
This way, you will be able to drive more foot traffic towards your restaurant, increasing your revenue effectively.
