The 9 ingredients of the Secret Sauce you need to find more customers

1. Have a website:  Many restaurants haven’t got a website because they think it is too expensive, too time consuming or they don’t need one because they have a Facebook page.  The truth is that unless you are an ‘it’ restaurant where everyone wants to go (and realistically, less than .1% of all restaurants fall into this category), you need a website.  People want to see the menu, see what the food and restaurant looks like and get an idea about why your restaurant is different.  People are searching on a mobile for somewhere to eat.  This is perfect for a website.  A website is much better to pick up traffic from search engines.  Without a website, that traffic is either going to review sites, which may or may not have incorrect information, or it is going to your competitors.  Many restaurant owners do not realise how many customer enquiries they are missing out on, but a great website can generate hundreds of bookings every month.
2. Get great images:  The text on your website does the marketing, but the photos sell it to your customers.  Great images make customers want to come to your restaurant.  You want photos of people having a great time, photos of great menu items, like sticky date pudding with the sweet liquid oozing down the side, or a hearty winter warmer with your fireplace in the background.  Show customers the great work you do, show them people having a great time and show them the ambience of your restaurant.  Here are some ideas that don’t cost a fortune to get great photos for your restaurant.
   
3. Get the Balance right between text and graphics:  If you don’t have enough text, then Google will have no idea about what your website is about and won’t refer people to it.  We refer to this as the “Best Website that no one has ever seen” syndrome.  We have talked to restaurants with awesome looking websites with no text.  One restaurant was a favourite of ours for business lunches.  They had a fantastic looking website that had been designed by their graphic designer son.  There was no text whatsoever on the website and the traffic coming to the website was minimal.  This was because Google can’t see images, and didn’t know anything about the website.  This restaurant went out of business, mainly because their weren’t enough customers!  Don’t make the same mistake.
4. Take bookings online:  Two really important things your website must do is Sell and build your database.  If you can take bookings online, you lock the customer in, you get their customer details and you can make the sale, 24/7 without having to bother with the phone.  It saves time and also cuts down on human error.  Best of all you are collecting the email address of every customer who makes a booking, helping you to grow your database. 
   
5. Link it with your other marketing:  If you have a Facebook page, you should have the Facebook icon on your websites home page, you should show how many people like your Facebook page and you should show them any of your friends who do.  It is also a quick and simple way to grow your Facebook following.  Facebook marketing can also be a great way to do very targeted  marketing campaigns.
6. Make sure it is optimised for Mobile:  Over 50% of visitors to restaurant websites are on a mobile phone or a tablet.  If your website isn’t set up for mobile phones, you are missing out.  All of our websites are optimised for mobile out of the box, so you don’t need to worry about it.  More importantly, it is the same website as your normal website, which means that you don’t have two websites that you need to make changes to. 
   
7. Get the SEO right:  Many websites don’t have the technical part of the Search Engine Optimisation for their restaurant website right.  It is difficult to explain, but it is one of the big killers that decreases the marketing performance of a restaurant website. We sent an engineer to San Francisco to talk to Google engineers to ensure that we have our search strategy right for all of our restaurant customers.
8. Target the right keywords:  Not enough Restaurants have a business plan or a marketing plan.  Without either it is hard to work out which markets you are targeting.  The better defined your target markets are, the better you will be able to market to them.  You need to ensure that your advertising, your website, your social media, your menu and your front of house staff are all aligned for the markets that you are targeting.   When you have done all of this, you will know which key words to target.  We have helped customers with strategies that generate over 1,000 visitors per month with just a few keywords.  This isn’t the normal response, but with a great plan, great results can be achieved.
9. Measure the effectiveness:  If you aren’t keeping track of the number of visitors to your site and the amount of revenue each month, you aren’t being serious about your marketing.  We send our customers a monthly report detailing the number of website visitors, the number of bookings they receive and also the number of Facebook likes.  Not only this, but we also compare them with other restaurants, so you know how well your restaurant advertising and marketing is going.  No other company is able to provide restaurants with this kind of information.

The Average Restaurant website in the Marketing4Restaurants network gets 996 visits per month.

Some restaurants are getting over 5,000 visits per month.  If you aren’t getting these kinds of numbers then chances are that people looking for your restaurant and your kind of restaurant are finding your competitors.  This is why we view SEO as the little secret behind so many successful restaurants.

Our customers receive their traffic from a combination of Search Engines referring traffic to their restaurants and from email campaigns, coupon campaigns and referrals from other sites.

Our team are experts in building the text that you need to drive more customers to your restaurant and to help you turn them into repeat customers.

 

You don’t want to be running the best restaurant that no one has ever heard off.

In today’s market, great food, great value and a great experience for your customers isn’t often enough to allow you to run a profitable restaurant.  You need a system to help you generate new customers and turn them into repeat customers.  That’s exactly what www.Marketing4Restaurants.com is designed to do.  Our system provides our customers with a website that looks great on mobiles, has great SEO (we sent an engineer to San Francisco to talk to Google engineers about it!) and takes bookings online helping you to build your database.  We even make it simple to send out emails to all of your customers.

Please contact us today if you would like to increase the number of customers you have at your restaurant.

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