Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have revolutionised how companies in all industries engage with consumers. Consequently, where social media marketing was initially seen as novel and then “nice to have”, it’s now essential, with an estimated 77% of businesses using social media to market their products and services.
For restaurants, in particular, social media marketing presents a potent and cost-effective way to retain customers and attract new ones. The first bite, as they say, is with the eye, and with food and beverages being so visually arresting, social media provides the perfect platform for restaurants and other hospitality venues to establish their brand with their existing customers while increasing awareness within their target market.
In this post, we explore the power of social media marketing for restaurants and how it increases the loyalty of existing customers and helps consistently bring new people into your food venue.
Social media marketing helps develop a personal connection with customers
The first advantage that social media marketing offers restaurants is the ability to create and, subsequently, develop a personal connection with their customers. Regularly posting on social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube helps build brand awareness for your food venue, allowing you to reach new customers who might be intrigued enough by your content to order from your online menu. At the same time, you can strengthen your restaurant’s connection with existing customers by creating content that invites engagement.
However, something that’s essential to understand – which many restaurant owners and management overlook – is exactly what your brand is. Contrary to popular belief, your restaurant branding isn’t your name, logo, décor, menu design, or even food – it’s the personal connection between your restaurant and your customers.
Your brand is how they feel when they think about or, better yet, order something from your restaurant. The stronger those feelings are and the more positive the association with your venue, the higher the chance they’ll be compelled to act on them. In this case, that translates to them walking into your restaurant or reaching for their phone to order takeaway.
By offering a variety of ways to regularly engage with consumers, social media marketing allows companies to place their brand at the forefront of the mind of their target customers. Better still, because of its heavy use of images and video, social media marketing lends itself extremely well to the hospitality industry, whether a hotel, bar, or restaurant.
5 ways to create a personal connection with social media marketing
In the same way that the ultimate goal of your restaurant branding is for people to feel positive emotions when they think of your food offerings, you want your audience to feel good when they engage with your social media content. There are five ways to achieve this:
- Engage them: interacting with your audience in an authentic way; treating them as individuals. This includes asking questions and encouraging replies in the comments, and running giveaways.
- Empower them: Providing a means with which they can contact and communicate with you, whether offering praise or criticism. Valuing customer feedback and responding appropriately way.
- Hear them: Demonstrating that you’re aware of how customers feel about your brand and responding appropriately. This includes replying to comments that people leave on your posts. Another example is responding to requests to add a particular item to your menu – or bring an item back (a great reason to offer menu items for a limited period – absence can make the stomach grow fonder, too!).
- Delight them: Offering moments beyond customer expectations, which are more likely to be remembered and shared. Although this sounds like a tall order, it can be as simple as posting something funny that brings an unexpected smile to their face.
- Know them: Remembering your customers, their personalities, and their preferences. This most applies when you have a thriving social media community –typically the result of having a designated community leader or social media manager. This will allow you to, for example, post personalised comments – possibly referencing when they last saw them in person – further reinforcing their affinity with your restaurant.
Social Media Marketing Offers Cost-Effective Promotion for Restaurants
Another considerable advantage that social media marketing brings to your restaurant is that it’s far more cost-effective when compared to traditional advertising methods.
To illustrate this, let’s use the example of a tried and tested form of marketing employed by restaurants – the trusty leaflet drop. The typical cost of printing and distributing 1000 leaflets starts at £50 (without accounting for graphic design costs), depending on the paper quality, style of printing, distribution method, etc.
For the same cost, you could hire a virtual social media manager for a few hours a week – or, similarly, allow an enthusiastic employee to run your channels from home for extra pay.
The same applies to other forms of traditional marketing, like placing an ad in the local paper or on a local radio station. Allocating the same budget to social media marketing would not only stretch your marketing spend but also extend your reach, allowing you to reach more people at a lower cost.
Advantages of Cost-Effective Social Media Marketing for Restaurants
Being far more cost-effective, however, isn’t the only benefit that social media marketing offers over traditional marketing methods. Here are some of the other advantages of using social media to market your restaurant:
- Increased reach: you can reach hundreds, or thousands, of people at once with a single social media post. More importantly, social media posts are permanent, staying on your feed where people can see them repeatedly.
- Targeting: social media marketing makes it easier to target the exact type of customer you’re looking for. Facebook ads, for instance, allow you to specify who you want to see your ads – down to details like relationship status and interests.
- Easier to measure: through likes, comments, and customers ordering in response to social media-based promotions (e.g., a #hashtag providing a discount), you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. In contrast, although you can crudely measure the effectiveness of leaflet drops by the number of calls you receive, the insights you receive are limited. Unless you ask every customer, it’s hard to know if they called in response to this flyer drop, the one before, and so on.
- More creativity: with video and images at your disposal, especially with a growing variety of AI tools, your social media posts are only limited by your imagination.
- Increased shareability: customers are highly unlikely to tell other people about a leaflet they go through their letterbox. And even if you make a memorable radio ad that’s worth talking about, the someone will be able to do is describe it. Social media, in comparison, posts can be shared easily and instantly.
- Instant CTAs: because you can include a link to your online ordering page, potential customers can immediately act on their hunger if your content whets their appetite.
Ideas for Marketing Your Restaurant on Social Media
Here are a few ideas for how to best harness the power of social media to strengthen your connection with your existing customers, as well as capture the attention of new customers.
Make Instagrammable food
Carefully prepare each of your menu items and take photos of them. If you or your staff can’t take professional-looking pictures, hire a photographer to take the most appetising photos possible. Investing a day or two to capture your entire menu will result in enough photos to post on social media for months.
Post recipes
Use YouTube to publish short videos which take your customer’s favourite menu items, i.e., fakeaway meals. Now, some restaurant owners may be reluctant to create recipe videos for fear of it deterring customers from ordering from them. However, it provides another way to boost loyalty with customers, because they’ll be thinking of your food even when not ordering from you!
Besides – their version won’t taste quite like the genuine article – which will only make them appreciate their favourite menu items all the more.
Promotions
Social media lends itself to flash promotions, e.g., 20% off on all orders for the next four hours. A common way of achieving this is to use a hashtag, which people have to enter or quote when ordering to receive a discount. Additionally, social media is an ideal way to promote your happy hour specials, and every time you add an item to your menu is a reason to engage with your social media followers.
Contests
Running competitions on social media is an excellent way to boost engagement because everyone loves free stuff –especially food and drink! Better yet, contests are cheap, easy to run, and can be run as often as they prove effective. Ideas for social media contests include:
- Caption this: post a funny picture and ask people to caption it in the comments
- Create a dish or drink
- Name this dish or drink
- Suggest a theme for an event
Post photos and videos from events
On the subject of events, whenever you host a special night at your restaurant or even during a themed happy hour, hire a professional photographer and some of the photos on Instagram. This not shows potential customers that your restaurant is popular and has a lot going on, but it also allows those who attended to comment on the photos they’re in.
Ask your staff for ideas
Some of your employees are sure to spend far more on social media than you. This means they could be better at putting together creative content to publish, in addition to consistently coming across lots of creative ideas as they scroll their feeds and homepages on Instagram, Twitter, etc.
To recap:
- Social media marketing offers restaurants the ability to create and, subsequently, develop a personal connection with their customers
- 5 ways to create a personal connection through social media marketing
- Engage them
- Empower them
- Hear them
- Delight them
- Know them
- Social media marketing is far more cost-effective when compared to traditional advertising methods like leaflet drops, paper adverts, and radio spots
- Other advantages of Social Media Marketing for Restaurants include:
- Increased reach
- Better targeting
- Enhanced measurability
- Allows for more creativity
- Increased shareability
- Instant CTAs
- Ideas for marketing your restaurant on social media
- Make Instagrammable food:
- Post recipes
- Promotions
- Contests
- Post content from events
- Ask your staff for ideas
Maximise the impact of your social media marketing campaigns with Grafterr. With Grafterr’s free online ordering platform, you can post a direct link to your online menu with every social media post – boosting the conversion rates of your marketing campaigns. Plus, we’ll help you boost your marketing knowledge with our marketing sessions and through the support of our dedicated team of Customer Success Specialists.
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