Online Restaurant Marketing: How to Get More Customers?

Though the online world is advancing and becoming more popular over time, we all know that the restaurant industry is more of an offline place. It doesn't mean that you can't market your restaurant online. Besides, people decide where to go and eat something or just spend some time after they search for it on Google.

It is hard to find people who don't search online for the restaurants they want to visit. Even if they are 99% sure where they want to go, they still do it for hundreds of different reasons. One searches for the reservation page, the other is looking for the menu, someone else wants to read the reviews, or to check if there are other locations of his favorite local restaurant, so on and so forth. 

Now, online restaurant marketing is the tool to give you the opportunity to reach out to all of those different kinds of people individually, at once. How to do that? Easy. The solution is online content.

No matter what restaurant marketing strategies you use, content is what attracts people in the first place. The food you serve is one of the most important components of your restaurant. Similarly, quality content is important for your restaurant advertising.

In this article, you will learn the benefits of online restaurant marketing and the things to consider while choosing the right content.

1. From Offline to Online Restaurant Promotion

Bringing the offline activities online is one of the key points in attracting customers. One simple example is having an online menu as a part of your restaurant marketing plan. This can help to attract better and high-quality visitors to your restaurant.

The online menu will automatically filter those people who would come to your restaurant and leave after a couple of minutes just because they couldn’t find what they wanted or the prices were too high for them.

It almost works like those menu stands in front of the restaurants where people can have a look at the available dishes and decide if they want to go in or not.

Another good example is restaurant reservation aggregators. Having a possibility of online reservation along with accepting reservations over the phone will step up your competition game. Nowadays, many restaurants give that possibility to visitors and if you don’t do it, let’s just say you become a little less desirable than your competitors who do it.

Don’t forget about those customers who would love to order food from your restaurant. A research shows that 74% of millennials are interested in ordering online if possible. Enabling delivery service may also increase your chances of being chosen by your customers.

As you can see, going online has many benefits for customer acquisition. So, move your restaurant marketing efforts online and let your potential visitors find you.

1. Rank Your Restaurant for Local Searches at Google

The best way to get noticed by your potential customers is to have your restaurant listed on Google My Business. It’s free to use, but you must optimize your company information to rank higher and increase the chances of your restaurant to appear on Google Local Finder and Google Maps.

Add your business name, your location, choose your business category, write down your contacts and the website URL, so that the users can easily find your restaurant.

When your potential customers find you on the listing and visit your website, it’s important not to disappoint them. So, pay attention to your restaurant website content. It doesn’t matter what type of content you want to include, text, photo, video, audio, etc. Make sure to consider your customers’ best interests while creating your online content.

Besides having high quality, your online content should also be engaging and differentiated. This will ensure that all your target audience segments find something interesting or helpful in your content. And we have to say that videos are one of the best ways to do that.

Being listed as a local business will increase your restaurant visibility and will help you attract more customers. But, don’t forget about adding relevant content.

1. Attract Your Customers with High-Quality Visuals

Content is the king. You may have heard this phrase a million times, but that’s not all. The key is that content can’t be the king without quality. So, “Quality content is the king” sounds way better. The issue is that many people see the difference, but not all of them understand how crucial it is to have high-quality content.

Let us bring the example of photos to make it easy to understand. Let’s say you are scrolling your Instagram feed where you see the same photo in different qualities. One of them is awful, it’s so bad that even your eyes hurt. And, the other one is so bright and vibrant that you could look at it for days.

Of course, it’s a bit exaggerated, but it makes the example more vivid. The question is, which one will you choose to look at? The answer is obvious. The quality photos win the game. People are sensitive to the quality of the content they have in front of their eyes.

Quality applies not only to photos but also to videos, text, and any other type of content that you might come across with. If we are talking about videos, then they can become a great tool for presenting your brand to your potential customers.

So your main goal here should be making your brand look it’s best in the eyes of the customers. And again, you should pay very close attention to the quality of your video itself and the content it presents.

This Restaurant Promo video template can be a great way to promote your restaurant and the tasty dishes you serve.

Create My Promo

And, the last but not least is the text. They say people don’t like to read, but before you take that statement as a fact, please remember that hundreds of people are reading on their way to work, school, or while waiting in a queue. This means that the text you are providing should bring value to the reader.

The quality always matters. No matter if it’s a photo, a video, or a text, you must always choose the high-quality content.

As Ina Garten said, "Food is not about impressing people. It's about making them feel comfortable." Your mission is to make them feel comfortable even before tasting your food.

These were the 3 steps of moving your offline marketing efforts to online. Besides all the above-mentioned tips, you can add everything that you find effective for your restaurant promotion. These might include social media, email marketing, loyalty programs, etc.

And, if you choose to improve the environment and make it more enjoyable for your visitors (e.g. a good choice of your playlist and the design), you will end up retaining more customers than you had planned. They will be eager to come back and enjoy the great atmosphere and the tasty food. As they say, a happy customer is the greatest advertisement.