4 Hacks To Help Restaurants Improve Their Digital Marketing Efforts

Believe it or not, operating restaurants in this competitive digital space is a challenging task. The massive growth of social media and smartphones makes it easier for your audience to publicly criticize or appreciate the quality and taste of your food.

And you can’t stop everyone from criticizing, especially millennials. Running a restaurant has now become a challenge as it is all about providing quality food with great taste and a pleasant atmosphere. This is why a perfect digital marketing strategy is what every restaurant owner should devise to succeed.

A Fully-Functional Website

Your business website should have easy navigation and be fully functional. Make sure the website is mobile optimized as there are still many restaurants that are not mobile optimized or even the menus can’t be downloadable. And low-quality or blurred images or numbers can’t be clickable.

Having a nonfunctional or poorly designed website is just like having a bland steak in a steak house. If truth be told, a website is the foundation of your business. You want people to visit your website and place an order or make a reservation. Make it intuitive and friendly.

Your website should be structured in a way that people can easily find desired information for the deals you offer, contact information, menus, customer reviews, an image gallery, and more. Do you know the restaurants industry is one of the top industries that get the highest mobile traffic? So, it makes perfect sense to design and develop your website to be mobile-friendly and offer an intuitive-to-user experience.

Google Map Listing

This is one of the most important steps that can improve your rankings on SERPs. Google usually displays Local 3-Pack  search results with a map that contains three suggestions.

For instance, if you type Italian restaurants in New York in the Google search bar, you will find list of three restaurants.   

There are many factors that Google considers to figure out which restaurant to display in the Local 3-Pack listings and it is constantly changing.

According to Moz, proximity to the user’s place is one of the main factors at 19% and customer reviews contribute to 13% of the search listings.

Owning your Google business listing greatly helps restaurants businesses gain online visibility and increase their local search rankings. Make sure you secure your listing and all the contact details are accurate. Simply check Google My Business and you are all set to own your Google Maps listing.

Social Media Strategy

A perfect social media strategy is a vital part of your restaurants business strategy. And you already know that. But what you don’t know is the process of implementation. Many restaurants hire the wrong person to manage their social media which usually results in low rankings, blurry or mediocre images, no user base, no customer engagement, meaningless posts, and neglected pages.

Social media can lead your business to new heights of success. All you need is the right person who knows how to devise a perfect social media strategy and execute it properly. Otherwise, you have a simple option, hire a professional digital marketing agency. Boost your restaurant’s success with a perfect social media strategy; avoid pitfalls seen on a poorly managed restaurant business card.

Social media channels provide you with a great opportunity to engage with your customers and promote your restaurant’s amazing food deals to new customers.

It is something that must be taken seriously – avoid these common social media marketing mistakes:

•         Synchronizing social media feeds with your website.
•         Using excessive and irrelevant hashtags
•         Posting mediocre and blurry images
•         Lacking a system to create new images

If truth be told, social media is not as difficult as it sounds. A thought-out and comprehensive approach with proper execution can do wonders.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a robust type of digital marketing that experiences many ups and downs from time to time. It was totally neglected by digital marketers a decade ago when spam emails became a major issue for all. And with the advent of Facebook, it also gained a massive drop as businesses find Facebook a great option to connect with their target audience.

But when Facebook changed its policies and started charging money to boost your posts to a wider audience, email marketing was revived once again.

Being a restaurant owner, you are supposed to send limited discount offers, special deals, new menu additions, event information, and anything special to your customers via email. You can use MailChimp which allows send emails to 2,000 contacts for free. You will soon get better click-through rates with your email marketing efforts.

Strengthen your email marketing efforts by collecting more email addresses of your prospects. Forget about all the cold strategies of collecting email addresses. Simply install Wi-Fi that asks your customers their email address to gain access. And you are all done!

Over to You

Digital marketing for restaurants is terribly complex. But if you mainly focus on your customers, improve the quality of food, and follow the above-cited tips and tricks. You can really hit the revenue graph. Concentrate on quality and delicious food. A pleasant environment, and cleanliness – along with the perfect digital marketing strategy and you are all set to reach new heights of success.