How to Market Your Restaurant – Restaurant Marketing Agency 2024

1. Get Social – Don’t Fall Behind. 

With the average user spending well over 2 hours on social media a day, we are in the digital area. Social media platforms are flooding with pictures of delicacies, and yours need to be among them. If you want to increase the buzz around your location, then you have to take advantage of social media. 

But how do you start? 

There are so many social media platforms, and it can intimidating when getting started. From our experience when it comes to food, Instagram is at the top, Facebook is a close second, and the rest are “eh.” The key to going social and churning in profit is posting good quality food pictures and video clips that will make your customer want to bite the screen. If you don’t know where or how to start, consider 

hiring a social media expert to give you valuable insight.

2. Utilize your website – Yes, you NEED one. 

A website is not only an online business card, but it’s also a tool! It can collect emails, make announcements, collect user data, run a blog, host a digital menu, and much more! It should be used as the primary source to tie all of your digital platforms together. 

You can link all your social media and make it easy for customers to follow you on other platforms as well as connect any online ordering platforms you’re using like GrubHub or DoorDash.

3. Don’t be stingy with the photos

If you log onto Instagram, you will understand that food porn is real and thriving.

Arguably, quality food photos are the most beneficial way to market your restaurant online. People are incredibly visual creatures, so it makes sense that having a lot of delicious-looking images on your web page and across several social media platforms is essential to drawing hungry customers to your location.

Investing in professional photography is a smart idea, or invest in a camera and try it yourself. Be warned, though – taking great food photos can be more complicated than it looks. 

4. Establish an Ad Strategy and Budget

It’s essential to have a good idea of what your marketing goals are, before any marketing for restaurants takes place. You must know what you’re going to do when your post begins to get eyes from customers.

A few things to consider when creating your ad strategy :

1. Define your target market – This is one of the most critical steps when creating a marketing strategy. 
2. Ad Design & Wordage – People see countless ads every day; you must make sure your ad is visually appealing to capture the person’s interest. From there, you have their attention for a few seconds to create your headline/message, quick, powerful, and useful. 
3. Management – You or a team member will need to check on or manage the ad campaign at least two or three times a week to ensure the campaign continues to run smoothly and is performing well. 
4. Set up your analytics – Depending on where you’re sending traffic, make sure you have an analytics software set up.  Here are several you can use: Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and SEMrush
5. Re-Target – It’s essential to study the data from your ads and social pages. You need to understand your customers characteristics so that you can re-target them more efficiently.

5. Engage with your followers

Social media is not just a place to promote your specials; it’s a social place. People love to interact with your brand, use this wisely. Reply to comments and messages promptly. Always respond to reviews, (even the bad ones) people will view this and it will promote more page interaction. 

Having to reply to all comments and messages may seem like a time-costly process, but it’s entirely worth the effort. You will see the difference in your page engagement almost instantly. 

Make sure you share the post that you like from your users, give them random shot outs(with consent), and utilize the “top fan badge” that Facebook recently released in 2019.

6. Set up and manage your Google account

You need to manage your Google My Business account; your google business page is one of the first things people will click on after finding you on the map. Always keep it up to date with your business hours, menus, specials, pictures, and any post you mike like to share with your visitors. 

Encourage visitors to leave reviews on your page. Most people decide where they want to eat by looking at what’s near them, after a quick google search other restaurants will pop up, if you stand out with your 4+ star rating and over 200 reviews, it will increase your chances of being picked! 

You can upload pictures as the owner, so make sure you upload quality pictures that stand out. Don’t forget you’re also able to give out special offers via Google My Business. 

7. Utilize Email Marketing

As daunting as this may seem, keep in mind that your restaurant newsletter doesn’t have to be weekly. Most users prefer email campaigns to be important as opposed to just random newsletters that will flood their inbox. 

Your website should be one of the main tools used for collecting emails from visitors, pop up’s as annoying as they may sound, actually have a high success rate when it comes to receiving emails. 

If you’re having trouble with coming up with email template ideas, 

check out some of these examples. 

Digital Marketing for Restaurants

Are you new in town? Do you have empty seats during dinner? Digital marketing for restaurants will help fix that.

Having a strong digital presence is more than just having an online profile. You have to optimize your profile, create engaging content, and interact with your users. Run Facebook ads that have been pointed to the correct target market & increase your reach among possible patrons. A strong presence will keep your restaurant in the back of your visitors’ minds, increasing the likeliness of them visiting you more constantly.

Are you looking for better ways to market your restaurant online? 

Contact us today.

Do you feel like we missed some restaurant digital marketing ideas that we didn’t cover in our post? Feel free to share any thoughts with us in the comments! We love hearing what other marketing opportunities people have found in restaurant digital marketing.