Some restaurants are getting really good at this. There are a lot of tools out there now to manage your online marketing – Pages Manager for Facebook, Tweetdeck for Twitter, email programs for your database and great analytics packages for your website. By combining them, restaurants are increasing the ROI of their marketing and we are seeing a big uptake in restaurants owners who are interested in this and getting a lot more proactive about it. Content for each of the marketing campaigns can be reused in a different formats across different marketing channels, both online and offline. The hard bit with marketing is coming up and executing the campaign. Pushing it out through channels is easy and having multiple channels ensures more people see it, the message is reinforced and overall marketing effectiveness is increased.
An example of this is a restaurant doing a special nose to tail Pork night. They create the artwork and the details which can be emailed out, put up on the website, Facebook and Tweet it. Each channel will hit different people, some people multiple times, some messages will work better than others, but overall the effect is much stronger with multiple channels than if they had only used on channel
It now isn’t enough to just have a website or a Facebook page. Successful restaurants are building their followings, their databases and online communities and reaping the benefits.
The trick to online marketing is to get in, get it done, and get out. Too many people waste too much time, but as the level of social media marketing increases, more chefs are winning big with their online marketing. Because of the lack of profitability and level of competition, it isn’t enough to just provide great food. The level of effort in the online marketing is starting to create a clear distinction between the digital haves and have nots. This is only going to increase over the next 12 months.
Pages Manager for Facebook makes it a lot easier to run your Facebook page without spending all day on it.
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Is Poor SEO Killing Your Restaurant?
Too many times we see customers with websites that are costing restaurants thousands of dollars every month through poor design, poor messaging and poor SEO. If your website could be improved to bring in 200 extra visits per month and just 10% of those made a booking, and each booking was for 2.5 seats on average at $50 a seat, you would have an extra $2,500 in revenue a month. A 30% food cost, that is $1,750 in profit extra a month. This ignores those customers coming back as regulars – which is more profit.
Remember, if these customers aren’t finding your Restaurant, they are finding your competitors.
Get one of our obligation free 7 point website SEO audits to see what you can get your web developer to fix to increase your revenue today.
One amazing way to integrate for restaurants is to go mobile with SMS marketing. Check out this blog on how mobile marketing services can benefit you when you’re in the kitchen: https://www.avidmobile.com/blog/mobile-marketing-in-the-kitchen.php