This episode covers Marketing Technology for your Restaurant, or Restaurant Martec – free or cheap tools that many Restaurants use to increase the effectiveness of their Restaurant Marketing and increase Restaurant Profitability.
In the last episode, we discussed the future of restaurant online ordering systems. We talked about how it makes the purchasing experience seamless for customers and how it brings value to food establishments.
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What is Restaurant Martec?
There are just so many things you can do to spread the word about your restaurant and Martec (marketing technology) is essential in doing this. These days, technology helps a lot in how businesses simplify business operations. There are several tools available which you can use to boost your restaurant marketing campaigns. We’ll focus on free platforms which small businesses can take advantage of.
Content Management System
One of the things you need to make a strong online presence is a well-performing website, and WordPress helps make that happen for you. It’s a great tool to build your site without having to pay a huge amount of money to a web developer.
WordPress is one of the biggest platforms available and can handle all sorts of complexity. There are plug-ins available to achieve your website’s needs, run updates, and make it more versatile.
Restaurant SEO
Marketing is not just about posting content for the sake of being active online, you need to strategize how you’re going to do it to avoid wasting time and resources. Yoast is your go-to tool to boost your SEO campaigns. It provides you data on which keywords are performing well on Google. This tool shows you what people are looking for when they search for things related to your niche. Having that information allows you to highlight the solutions you provide for their needs. You can then use the best-performing keywords for your content so people can discover your business faster. It uses a traffic light system to show you the performance of other websites, which you can use to compare with how your page is doing.
Web Analytics Service
After building your website, you have to see how it’s performing, and Google Analytics gives you everything you need to know about your page’s performance. It has a dashboard that shows your website’s traffic. You can even have a live report flashed on your monitor to keep the whole team updated. These detailed reports from Google Analytics can help you strategize for your restaurant’s marketing content. It gives you a good understanding of how effective your marketing campaigns are. It even shows you the devices your website’s visitors use so you can optimize your pages for mobile, tablet, and desktop.
You can also utilize Google Search Console to see how many clicks your website is getting, how many times you appeared in search results, and how well your keywords are performing. It also analyzes other aspects of your site’s performance like speed, as Google gives better rankings to websites that load faster to provide the best experience for its users.
Another great tool you can make use of for web analytics is Matomo (formerly Piwik). It provides more detailed information regarding your visitors. The tool can show the location, the browser they’re using, and the user’s activity on your website. With all these at your fingertips, you can directly reach out to that visitor via email with a good idea of what he or she is looking for.
E-Commerce Platform
As a restaurant, you need to make online ordering seamless for your customers. An open-source e-commerce tool like Magento is what you need to pull this off. It allows you to set up a flexible shopping cart system and manage the functions and content of your online store. It probably involves tons of work from your team, but you’ll get the conversions you’re aiming for once everything’s set up.
Email Automation
One of the biggest mistakes restaurants commit is not running enough email campaigns. This is important to spread the word about your business. It’s not exactly spamming as you’re reaching out to people in your network. Your target market’s initial reaction upon receiving an offer is ‘what’s in it for me’, so you have to tell them how they can take advantage of what you offer.
Mailchimp is the best tool we can recommend to make your email campaigns successful. It provides a detailed report on the open rate, click-through rate, and engagement of the emails you send out.
These are some of the best Restaurant Martec tools you can try to boost your marketing efforts. We’ll cover more helpful tools for your restaurant in our next episode so make sure to tune in!
You don't want to be the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of.
There are 2 types of Restaurant Website visitor – those who know your Restaurant and those who don’t. If your website isn’t set up properly, your regular customers will find your site, but new customers will be going to your competitors down the road.
Our free 7 point audit is designed to help you understand if your website is is bringing in the new customers that your Restaurant deserves.