While there are a lot of marketing tools that are used widely across industries, every business has its own unique approach that works best for reaching an audience and building a customer base. For restaurants, it is important to connect to the local community near your location and to demonstrate your value as both a provider of freshly prepared food and as a gathering place for your customers to socialize and break bread. That means you need to make an impact locally, and your best strategies when approaching top online marketing platforms and services will be ones that get you traction in local searches.
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1. Opt-in Marketing via SMS or Email
Regulars are what drives a restaurant business between seasonal demand surges, and opt-in marketing allows you to create messaging targeted at them with incentives they can only get by opting in. The regular reminders about your business along with the incentives like coupons and off-menu specials that are only mentioned on-list will help motivate subscribing customers to visit more often.
2. Post Menu and Special Updates Online Regularly
Keeping customers up to date on your menu innovations and reminding them of old favorites that are rotated back into availability is an important digital marketing strategy for any restaurant. It does not matter if you are focusing on the carryout and delivery markets or building a reputation for fine dining, clear menus that are up to date communicate to prospective customers what they can expect. On top of that, regular rotation is a best practice for the industry anyway, so you may as well use it to drive engagement with your social media and website.
3. Feature Community Involvement and Charitable Works
The best way to get the community around your restaurant to invest in your success is to make them see you as a part of that community. This means engaging in networking events for local small businesses in your area, but it also means making publicly visible investments like sponsoring youth league sports teams or participating in fundraising efforts for a local cause. Any time you do this, it is an opportunity to feature that participation on your social media, so people who do not see you at events or see your sponsorship ads will still come to know that you give back to your local community.
4. Promote Events and Advertise Banquet Rooms
Your menu is not the only thing that brings customers through your doors. Often, your venue is just as important. If you have private party spaces available, featuring those on your social media and site is just as important as discussing your menu rotation and specials. If you have live entertainment of any kind, the reasons to promote it online are pretty self-evident at this point. Customers who are going to come in and spend money when a favorite act is around are not hard to find, but they need to know about the performance dates.
Putting Everything Together
If all four of these strategies look like pieces to one social media management puzzle, you are not mistaken. The best way to approach marketing in digital spaces is to weave together several efforts that use different digital tools synergistically. These are hardly the only tools available, so make sure you keep expanding your options and trying out new online strategies. There are dozens of ways to approach marketing through digital methods, but it takes time to find the right ones for a given business in a given location with the customer base you, in particular, are aiming for. Be persistent and you are sure to figure it out, though.