For any business today, online marketing is essential. With over two thirds of the world’s population online, the web now provides the ideal place for businesses to display their wares — including restaurants.
Restaurant digital marketing rethinks the relationship between new, potential customers and the restaurant teams ready to greet them indoors. Here’s what to know.
Key to a restaurant’s online presence is food digital marketing. Find out more below — or sign up for information on the best restaurant apps available today.
What is Restaurant Digital Marketing?
It’s super simple to understand. In today’s hyper-connected world (that is, the information age) businesses like social media companies help create a platform for individual businesses, restaurants, food companies, to advertise their services online.
In a sense, restaurant digital marketing is a business model that fits neatly into today’s online economy. A restaurant with a built-in digital marketing strategy is going to gain greater recognition from customers; after all, over 4.26 billion are using social media across the globe — and counting.
It goes without saying that restaurant digital marketing is important for new customers both young and old, hoping to research, learn, and discover everything they want to know about your food business. This helps to keep tables full, with the handy help of a wait app for restaurants.
3 Advantages of Restaurant Digital Marketing
Spreading the good word online is very important for businesses and has many positive implications, playing a foundational role in educating new customers who know nothing about their services. The top 3 advantages of restaurant digital marketing include:
Reach a global audience
There is no limit to a public profile online. Once live, digital restaurant profiles can reach anyone in the world. If a well-known news-site mentions a restaurant, for instance, this can go anywhere. Also, with the use of online translation tools like Google Translate, a food business can reach new customers that speak different languages — free!
The rest is usually free
Before the internet, businesses would typically invest a lot of money in their advertising procedures. Specialist knowledge in things such as market orientation and strategies were professional requirements. However, now restaurant owners can use many online resources — for free! Social media companies belonging to Meta, Instagram, Twitter are readily available.
Online marketing complements overall business
Traditional methods of restaurant and business marketing (i.e. industry awards, word-of-mouth, newspaper reviews) work hand in hand with online efforts. The revolution in information technology has not destroyed these methods — it has made them better.
Overall, restaurant digital marketing helps to establish a network economy for your food business. This means that customer knowledge, education, and awareness all improve with the proliferation of your restaurant’s methods via multiple means.
How To Use Restaurant Digital Marketing
- Start a business account on all social media sites. Be as comprehensive as possible, and identify your online business account with keywords (restaurant, type of cuisine) and fill in all the necessary details customers will need to find you — address, phone number, email — to put them in direct contact with your services.
- Make videos. It is a simple but effective method to digitally invite your customers indoors. Write a script that is at once informative and fun — and pay attention to share rates on the social media sites you post them on. The more shares, the more customers you reach.
- Provide links to your restaurant’s digital services. This could be a digital menu that includes appropriate links to make pre-orders and payments. Once customers have pre-paid for their items, your restaurant makes a profit — even in the unfortunate event of a restaurant no show.
Did you know restaurants can give customers the option to pre-order drinks and beverages for free? Learn more about how restaurants are delivering a faster, more efficient service with the top five pre order benefits.
What About Food Digital Marketing?
To focus specifically on certain dishes and meals available at your restaurant, food digital marketing aims to promote the sales of specific items.
Perhaps a restaurant has a dish that is failing to sell well; food digital marketing can give a menu item a new lease of life.
Similar to an overall restaurant digital marketing strategy, our guide on how to attract restaurant customers deals with this more specifically. First, restaurants need to think about visual tastes. “Have a peek at what other popular restaurants are doing,” we have advised. “You want your restaurant and its dishes to be Instagrammable — essentially a heightened form of word-of-mouth in the digital age.”
So what is the best way to implement these forms of online marketing? With a first-rate, top-class digital service of course.
Boost Restaurant Service With Carbonara App
What better way to complement a restaurant’s digital marketing programme? If your venue has a strong presence online, then it needs to have a strong presence indoors too.
The good news is that restaurants can now do so almost instantly.
It is also the first ever truly-free restaurant app available today with all the features a busy venue will ever need, including:
- table management features
- free SMS messaging, with WhatsApp functionality
- online booking features, with support for Google My Business
- and much, much more
If you would like to enhance your knowledge of restaurant digital marketing technologies and strategies, try reading our instructions on online booking systems: “The Ultimate Guide to Online Restaurant Reservations in 2022”.
And if you want to read about how some restaurants are using Carbonara App right now: “Opting for Online Reservations in Southern France”.
