How to Promote Your Restaurant – 8 Promotional Tips for Your Restaurant Business
Learning how to promote your restaurant is one of the most vital skills a restaurant owner needs if they’re going to be successful.
Restaurants give you a chance to be connected with your local community.
When you run or manage a restaurant, you meet several different people.
Sometimes you have to engage with regular customers, tourists, or the locals of your city, and many more. It’s interesting to see how people expect a myriad of different things from a restaurant.
Therefore, you need to experiment with marketing techniques to rate highly, at least in your local community.
Today, with so many digital marketing tools right at our tips, learning how to promote your restaurant effortlessly isn’t impossible.
If you have opened a new restaurant, and the business is slow, don’t worry about it because this is normal and expected for a new restaurant.
Until people know about your restaurant, they won’t come to it.
The first thing you need to do is get people to know about your restaurant.
Here are 8 promotional tips that will teach you how to promote your restaurant. You can jump to the section you want to read about:
1. Get on Google
2. Build a website
3. Update your website frequently
4. Talk to local bloggers
5. Get on social media platforms
6. Provide delivery services
7. Have a bar section
8. Promote your restaurant on Bloc
1. Get on Google
Get your restaurant online.
Nowadays, one of the most common ways of looking for a restaurant is through Google, and if you don’t have an online presence, chances are people will miss your restaurant entirely.
Google offers plenty of tools that can help you make your restaurant’s presence known both in the online and offline community.
For example, make sure that your restaurant has a Google My Business account.
This will make it easier for you to promote your restaurant from behind your manager’s desk.
A Google My Business account allows prospective customers to have easy access to information like operation hours, contact numbers, directions to the restaurant, etc.
However, just having an account will not promote your restaurant.
You have to make constant efforts to update it with photos, so customers can see what to expect from your restaurant.
Ensure you update it with other important information like changed operating hours, contact information, or your restaurant’s website.
Your current customers can also help with the promotion of your restaurant on Google.
Ask them to leave good reviews on Google so that your restaurant can rank high on Google.
If your Google account shows positive reviews of your restaurant, people are more likely to try it out.
2. Build a website
Having an online presence is not enough for the promotion of your restaurant.
You need to have a fully functional website to promote your restaurant online.
Make use of as many digital marketing tools as possible.
Building your website is just one of those tools that can make you rank high on Google and give your business the boost it requires.
Today, we are all online.
Online trends inspire our personalities, and you can use that to your advantage.
Therefore, SEO optimization of your website is essential. While building a website for your restaurant, you have to make sure you don’t miss the mark with these three things:
– Your website should be SEO-friendly. This means that you need to optimize your website to have content that makes it rank high on Google. It can include blogs, DIY videos, recipes, etc.
– Google ranks your website based on keywords, the index of your website, etc. If you want to be higher up on the search page when someone Google’s “best restaurants near me,” you need to be on top of things and keep updating your website.
– Another thing you need to keep in mind is the technical construction of your website. Your website needs to be accessible from wherever and whenever. It means that your website needs to be fast and mobile-friendly because, more often than not, people will come across your website during a mobile search. So, if the loading time of your website is slow, they might leave the page before it even opens.
3. Update your website frequently
Nobody likes to go to a restaurant website and see the same old and outdated content.
So now that you have your website and have done everything you can to make it SEO-friendly, you have to update your website content.
The content of your website refers to blogs, videos, photos, testimonials, recipes, etc.
Hire a content writer to help your write blogs that are also optimized for SEO.
Make sure that you keep posting new photos. If your website starts getting enough traffic, uploading some of the chef’s recipes is an excellent way of showcasing what customers can expect from your restaurant.
Testimonials are also crucial when it comes to promoting your restaurant.
If your restaurant is that good and people have good things to say about it, flaunt it. Show off how people feel about your restaurant through website testimonials.
4. Talk to local bloggers
Now, before your restaurant becomes a worldwide name, you have to start small.
Local bloggers of your city will always be looking for something to promote, and there’s no reason why it can’t be your restaurant.
Collaborating with local bloggers for the social promotion of your website can get you out there and build your online profile.
Invite local bloggers to taste your food for free, and in return, they will rate and review your restaurant on their social media platforms.
If they have a substantial social media presence, then this move can be a game-changer for your restaurant. This is essentially influencer marketing.
Like we mentioned before, people are more likely to come to your restaurant if it has good reviews.
Local blogging through platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter is one of the most effective ways of making sure that your online presence is doing its work in the background.
This is because such platforms run the media right now. Nobody turns on news channels or opens the newspapers these days. We just turn our phones on and tune in to whatever social media exposes us to.
If you can pull off getting good reviews from local bloggers, then you can rest assured that more and more people will start coming to your restaurant. If you make the right moves, then it will be mostly uphill from there. Have as many social influencers as you can.
People are on social media platforms like Instagram all day, and they believe their favorite influencers’ word over anything.
So, get out there and start using these digital marketing tools to help you promote your restaurant business.
Remember that influencers also need to taste your food before they boast about it.
Ensure that the food tasting process is for free and give them the space to click pictures so they can talk about your restaurant on their social media platforms.
While local blogging and influencer marketing are great ways to promote your restaurant, remember that one person cannot do the job properly.
You need more than one influencer or blogger working to help build your restaurant business.
Therefore, you need to expose your restaurant to other bloggers in your area to fully use influencer marketing.
5. Get on social media platforms
By social media platforms, we mean everything people are using right now.
Create Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter platforms, and if possible, ask local bloggers to direct their audience to your social profiles.
One thing you need to remember here is that just getting on these platforms will not help with the promotion of your website.
Your social media platforms also need to have user-friendly content that attracts customers.
For example, want to show off your interiors? Post a photo on Instagram. Have a funny restaurant-related meme to share? Facebook is your pal. Do you have any important updates about your restaurant? Tweet them.
In simple words, content is vital.
Your online presence depends on your content, and that’s what you need to focus on if you want to attract customers. However, from a managerial point of view, if doing all of this is too much hustle for you, then you can hire a social media content creator and marketer for your restaurant.
This would be a great investment as it allows you to be on the frontline managing the business physically while someone does the virtual work for you.
When it comes to social media presence, your customers must know that you have one.
Therefore, add links to your social media platforms so that they can easily access them and make up their mind about your business.
6. Provide delivery services
Often, restaurants overlook this point because it may seem like a hassle. However, offering delivery services can do wonders for the promotions of your restaurant business.
Why?
Because it gives people a chance to taste your food before physically coming to your restaurant.
You can partner up with delivery services to deliver your food to people’s doorstep.
Delivery services also often rate your restaurant on their platforms based on how much people like your food.
If you have high ratings, chances are people will start turning up at your restaurant doors more frequently than ever.
Either way, it’s business, and as a new restaurant manager, you have to grab any opportunities that come your way.
7. Have a bar section
People love bars.
They love spending time in bars, drinking with their friends and family, and having fun.
Sometimes people like to drink alone.
The fact is that having a bar at your restaurant can seriously take your ratings up.
There are several reasons for this. Whenever people dine-in, especially when someone is on a date, they like to have drinks with their appetizers.
With the online dating game sky-rocketing these days, you can use that to your advantage.
Whenever someone’s waiting for their date, they can do so at the bar and drink while they are at it.
This is good business, and whether you’re an old name in the community or a new player in the locality, tapping the online dating angle can only work in your favor.
So, start by curating a physical space in your restaurant that’s just a bar.
Make sure you have the best of drinks to serve. Whether it’s an old-fashioned or a daiquiri, tell your customers if there’s something special about it.
By doing this, you’re telling them how versatile your restaurant is. This, in turn, will lead to positive reviews that generate revenue.
Pro tip – If you’re emptying a space for a bar at your restaurant as a promotion technique, make sure you put in bar stools.
Not only do bar stools allow people to relax and have a drink while they wait for their date, but they also add to the overall aesthetics of your restaurant.
8. Promote your restaurant on Bloc
Bloc is a social media events platform where you can easily promote your restaurant business.
Think of it like Tinder, but for restaurants, pubs, bars, lounges, etc. Bloc is essentially an advertising platform for such establishments, and it’s practically free to post an advertisement for your restaurant.
The first thing you need to do when you get on Bloc is to create an advert for your restaurant.
Once the advert is out there, it becomes visible to anybody using the application within 10 miles of your restaurant.
You will only have to pay for your advert if a user decides to go to your restaurant. Hence, it’s a unique pay-per-customer advertising platform that is incredibly convenient to use.
Using geolocation, whenever someone uses Bloc to find and go to your restaurant, you have to pay a minimal fee of £2, including taxes.
If you’re skeptical about using Bloc for promoting your restaurant, you can join our free trial offer that comes with a total of £150 ad credit.
It means that your trial run with Bloc can get you up to 75 free customers.
Once you’re sure that Bloc is good for the promotion of your restaurant business, you can go on to be a premium member.
In conclusion
We understand how daunting it can be to promote your restaurant business when you’re a new establishment.
You can go for countless methods to promote your restaurant business and attract as many customers as possible, and Bloc is one of them.
We hope that you can reach great heights with your restaurant business with the help of these tips.
Get started today!
