You must have heard about Salt bae and CZN Burak, chefs that are known worldwide for their food and presenting skills. Their restaurants are always houseful and filled with celebrities. And social media marketing has a large contribution to that success.
If you’re a restaurant owner and not using social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube to increase engagement, you’re missing out big times.
Social media platforms can do wonders for restaurant businesses, and if you own a restaurant, then you definitely want to take a look at this guide.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ve provided some proven guidelines on social media marketing for restaurants such as how you can attract customers, engage with them, deal with negative feedback, etc.
If followed properly with consistency, your business will be going to a new height in no time.
10 Social Media Strategies for Restaurants
To be very honest, there are dozens of social media marketing strategies you’ll find, but not all of them are going to work. This is exactly why we’ve put together a list of 10 strategies that are proven and pretty easy to implement.
Post High-Quality Photos
We all are visual creatures and we respond better to visuals. In fact, visual content is more powerful than most other content forms.
Restaurant marketing on social media isn’t complete without mouth-watering food images. The better quality image you can put in social media, the more engagement you’ll get which will help you grow faster.
If you have a skilled photographer on your team, take photos of different foods with the best presentation from different angles. Pick the best ones, get them edited for better appearance, and post them on social media.
Use Reels
Instagram and YouTube reels are dynamic tools to engage and capture audiences. For restaurants that are looking forward to standing out and engaging more with the customers, reels are a great way to showcase their culinary delights.
Reels are short videos usually 20 – 60 seconds long. Capture your signature dishes, appealing food preparations, time-lapse of the chef’s chopping, cutting, mixing, baking, and plating process.
Also, capture behind-the-scenes, it can improve audience engagement. And yes, make sure to use a high-quality camera, otherwise, that won’t do any good.
Influencer Marketing
This has become a potent tool for many businesses to increase their reach. It’s an easy way to connect with new audiences, gain trust, and engagement, and improve the brand image.
Start by searching for the right influencer, someone that has a high number of followers and also has a good image. It’s best if you could find someone who is genuinely interested in food and dining experiences.
Approach the influencer with an offer that’ll be profitable for both. Set a meeting, discuss how you want to execute the campaign, take suggestions, and finally come up with a plan.
Maintaining Brand Voice
When you have a large team managing different social media pages, it’s pretty normal that each team will have a different tone unless it’s predefined.
A team might give serious posts on Twitter where another is being a little funny. And this can hurt the brand’s growth. There is a chance of customers getting confused about whether both are the same brand or not.
Why take that chance? Instead, develop a brand guideline on messaging and posting style and tone. Train employees so that every team follows the same style and tone when responding to the customers.
According to research, maintaining consistency in branding across various social media platforms can increase growth.
Monitor Brand Mentions
In social media platforms, when the customers are talking about your restaurants, that’s free marketing. But if you want, you can take advantage of that to get more engagement.
Use social media tools to monitor all the mentions of your restaurant, you can use Hootsuite, Google Alerts, Reputology, Talkwalker, etc.
Whenever a customer on a social media platform will mention the name of your restaurant, you’ll be notified instantly.
And what you can do is, if that mention is positive, take a screenshot and post it on the restaurant’s social media. This will increase the trust and reliability of the restaurant.
Engage with Customers
Many businesses are happy to respond to positive comments about their products but don’t respond to negative ones. In fact, they tend to hide the negative comments which makes them look unethical.
Even though you hide the comments, can you do anything about the posts people make? No, you can’t!
So the best strategy is to respond to both positive and negative feedback. If a customer posts, their food was served late, you can take the blame, apologize for the inconvenience, and promise to solve the issue as soon as possible.
This shows that you care about your customers and you’re ready to go the extra mile for their comfort.
Create Contents that Are Shareable
If you want to create a brand on social media, make sure to come up with some content that is worthy and shareable. The content needs to be highly informative and interesting, otherwise, no one will watch or read let alone share.
For a restaurant’s social media, recipes can be good content. Post the general recipes of the most popular foods.
Use Hashtags
Hashtags are an amazing way to reach a larger pool of audiences on social media platforms. For example, as a restaurant owner, you can use hashtags like #newrestaurantsintown #uniquefoods #juicyburgers #beststeaks, etc.
These hashtags can help your brand to reach newer and wider vareity of potential customers, without any extra effort
Social Ads
Whether it is a restaurant or clothing company, social media ads work like a charm in building a brand.
What makes social media ad campaigns best for the restaurant business is it allows you to target a specific demographic and even location. And also interesting.
This makes sure the right people are getting the ads and this can increase the profitability.
Leveraging User-Generated Content
Another marvelous way to increase engagement with customers is to post something that they created. Day by day the use of user-generated content to enhance engagement is increasing.
You’ll see many people tagging different brands on their posts, some of them might be paid but not all.
In the case of a restaurant brand, user-generated content would be a photo a customer took or a video customer made in the restaurant. You can repost them on the restaurant’s social profile.
Plus, you can share the feedback of the customers about your restaurants or ask customers to make a short video telling how good the overall experience was.
FAQs:
A
If the marketing is done well and the food quality is up to the mark, then definitely social media can skyrocket the sales of restaurants.
A
It actually depends on the influencer you’re thinking about approaching. If it’s not a big shot then offering a free meal in the restaurant might work. Otherwise, you’d need to spend big bucks.
A
A restaurant should post attractive images and videos of the food and the restaurant’s environment. Plus, it can also reel on different foods and the making process.
Conclusion
Well, are some of the top guidelines on social media marketing for restaurants you can follow. It might take time for the result to be visible, don’t lose hope, just be consistent.
But in the end, it all comes down to the quality that hooks your customers.
It doesn’t matter how aggressively you’re marketing your restaurant, or how big of an influencer promoting your brand, if the food quality isn’t excellent or at least up to the mark, you aren’t going anywhere.
So ensure top-of-the-line quality first and then invest in marketing.
