Restaurants keep neglecting online marketing

Marketing is one of the most common areas neglected by a restaurant. A large number of restaurateurs tend to underperform in this area, often relying on service and food alone to carry their business. As a result, this creates a handicap and often hurts the bottom line in the long run.

Restaurant owners usually tend to focus their efforts "in the business" rather than "on the business".

Don't rely on the gods of chance

While no doubt your food and service may be impeccable, don't let the gods of chance rule over your repeat business rates. This is especially true if you may have somewhat seasonal revenues. Every food business should be able to get creative and lure customers back with some incentives, promotional offers or novel offerings.

Barrier to marketing costs are much lower now

The internet has advanced over the last decade with a lot of online tools made available at little to no cost. It would be an excuse to say you can't afford it. The only aspect that needs to be considered is a little knowledge how to go about it and settings aside some time to just do it.

3 areas to get involved in online marketing

In this post, we will highlight the key areas of online marketing you should consider. Not every aspect has equal weighting, so you may find that some things will work better than others. That said, you ought to try and experiment first before calling out final conclusions right away.

1. Website Marketing

A website is the first online tool in your arsenal. This is where customers are directly exposed to the branding, marketing and initial window to your venue experience.

Keep your site up to date at all times

It is very important that you keep your website updated at all times.

No matter what press advertises, no matter what media says, customers will always seek to go to the true source of information — your website. This is their main reference point.

Customers seek an experience

To make customers pay you a visit and make subsequent repeat visits you have to provide great food, great service and a great vibe/atmosphere. This needs to be captured on your website and can only be achieved with strong visuals supplemented by your brand, colours, look and feel.

Keep your website more visual and less verbal.

Customers visit your restaurant for the experience and this will be dictated by the service, the food and the atmosphere you provide.

To deliver an attractive yet functional website aim to have the following 7 bare necessities:

1. Venue & Food Photography
2. Menu
3. About (Your story, the team behind)
4. Contact (Opening/Closing Hours, Phone and Email details)
5. Reservations and/or Online ordering
6. Customer Testimonials
7. Newsletter subscription

We will expand on these in a separate follow on post.

2. Social Media Marketing

When Social Media initially started growing traction in Australia post-2008, a lot of businesses were not sure what they were supposed to do. Some joined out of fear of missing out, while others stood on the sidelines waiting to see what others will do. Fast forward 8 years and there is a little more clarity but still no guidebook on how to use or which social media channel is more effective than the other.

Different channels for different purpose

We will share a separate post on breaking down Social Media channels, how best to use them and where they may be effective over others. They all have their purpose or point of differentiation, but not all of them will work for everyone. You have to choose the ones where your customer base likely hangs out or prefers to communicate.

Here's a list of social media channels in order of customer adoption and greatest footprint — at least in Australia. Other countries may have stronger followings on other channels.

Primary

1. Facebook
2. Instagram

Secondary

1. Twitter
2. Pinterest
3. Google+
4. Snapchat

At the very least, a restaurant should aim to have a Facebook and an Instagram account. If one over the other had to be chosen, we would recommend Instagram as it is more visually driven and also, organic reach is better than Facebook's. As Facebook owns Instagram — time has come where organic reach is slowly being suppressed on this channel also. More on this in another post.

Online Media

1. TripAdvisor
2. Yelp
3. Google Search Listing
4. Apple Maps Listing

We feel for you, customer's shouldn't hide behind screens.

We do think and agree with you that hiding behind a computer screen is weak. Every customer should have the liberty to share their opinion while at the venue. This gives a manager on duty a chance to resolve customer's problem promptly. As opposed to a post-mortem exercise a few days later.

Use the reviews as testimonials

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Online customer reviews are a double edge sword, however, it is better to claim your restaurant online and have the ability to respond to customer reviews with your own voice rather than choosing to ignore it. You can also use it as a research ground to see what you're doing well or find out areas where you could improve on. Don't forget, you can use feedbacks on your site as testimonials. These can be a very powerful customer accolade.

3. Email Marketing

One of the most important aspects, possibly even more important than social media side of things, is Email Marketing.

Social Media's organic reach is diminishing

The growth of Social Media channels has exploded in the last few years. To sustain their large traffic growth, each channel introduced steps to produce a revenue stream. The decision was to suppress posts by business pages, unless they opt in to pay for each post. This enables a wider audience and a further reach.

Organic reach via social media such as Facebook is declining quickly¹. In 2016 it is anywhere between 2-7%².

Take control of a channel you actually can

Don't be held hostage by respective changes in policy and usage rights of social media. You should always strive to take control over aspects you can govern. This means at the very least you should get hold of your customers' names and their contact details.

Build out your customer database

For every customer interaction you have, you should build out a customer database whether orders are made in-venue, online or 3rd party delivery companies. Seek to get their email address. This way you can share important details with them, such as News, Promotions, Loyalty incentives and other marketing initiatives.

Provide value and don't just sell all the time

Most customers will be happy to provide you with an email address, as long as you can provide them with value. Bear in mind you do not want to flood them with email either, this will have just the opposite effect. Always seek to provide useful information.

Final Wrap

Learn. Apply. Repeat.

If you have the capacity to go at it on your own and execute all of the above, then empower yourself to learn, apply and change things along the way. This should be an iterative process, meaning that you apply small incremental changes and you monitor for results. Anything you learn, feed it back into the previous steps and then repeat the process to gather new learnings. There are plenty of free resources online to learn and apply new things. You really can't run dry of reading material.

Seek help if you are stuck

If you are finding plenty of online resources technically daunting and you would much rather all of this be looked after and managed for you, feel free to reach out to us. We will likely be able to help you directly. Where we may not be able to help, we will find someone that can.

Look out for our upcoming How-To posts

In our next series of posts, we will expand each of the online marketing areas we touched on above. We will provide suggestions, examples and tools you can utilise to help you advance forward, ranging from free to paid ones.

Keep smiling and continue serving great food!

Till next time.

FOOTNOTES