5 Tips to Easily Promote Your Restaurant Online

To promote your restaurant online, create promotional content that represents your restaurant’s food, service and ambiance in the best way possible.

Read any basic book on brands such as 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and you’ll get the hang of it.

1) Create Content
The content should be delivered through every sort of medium you can think of! Following are a few ideas.

• Get a photo shoot of your entire restaurant done.
• Develop brochures, flyers, posters, and other creative print materials that can be used for different platforms.
• Make video recordings of customers’ positive feedback at the end of their meal.
• Encourage visitors to spread the word

2) Facebook It!
You can ignore a platform which has 7 billion active users around the globe. Here are a few FB tips to follow.

• Create a page for your restaurant. It can be a read-only fan page or an interactive one. Remember, the more interactive the better.
• Engage the visitors of this Facebook page as much as possible. You can choose to engage the visitors on the Facebook page itself or divert them to your website. The better branded content you’ll develop, the more effective you’ll be at increasing your restaurant’s brand recall.
• Once you have established a Facebook page, make a schedule of your postings. Make your posts relevant to current happenings such as health discoveries, festivals, etc.
• You can also opt for advertising your Facebook page or website on Facebook itself. This will increase the chances of relevant people visiting your page.
• Keep up with the technical developments on Facebook and the options that it offers. It is constantly growing platform and you should make the most of it!

3) Twitter Netiquettes
For many, Twitter is the e-hangout place. Although Twitter supports text only, it is highly powerful.
One positive tweet is more powerful than a neon board carrying your restaurant’s advertisement. So create an official account by your restaurant’s name and Tweet moderately. Here are a few pointers when it comes to the Twitter as a medium.

• Always remember to keep it clean by simply talking about the latest developments and offers of your restaurant. Never mention a competitor.
• Although this may seem obvious, never ever mention any customer(s) in a bad light. You may end up offending a big group.
• However, speaking good of certain customers can do wonders and will help retain happy customers and attract new ones.
• If angry/dissatisfied customers tweet at you, don’t ignore them. Instead, face their query/complaint in a diplomatic way. If it possible try re-directing the conversation to a private platform.

4) Into Youtube

• Encourage visitors to shoot videos of your restaurant. Let them even come into the kitchen and meet chef(s). Such videos are usually put on Youtube or other video websites and can get you lots of attention.
• Create a Youtube channel for your restaurant and gather all your fans from Twitter and Facebook there too. Keep posting different sorts of videos time by time.
• The videos may contain the following:
  • Interview with the chef
  • Interviews with happy customers
  • Short recipe videos in which the chef how certain specialties of your restaurant are prepared in the kitchen (without revealing the exact proportion of the ingredients of course)
• Positive feedback from food experts if possible

5) Catch ‘Em Back!
All this online marketing will help you collect a huge list of fans from different platforms, i.e Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Wherever possible, collect the details of fans such as residential location, age, gender, education, contact number, email address, and enter this information into your customer database. This database will help you do a number of things that can benefit your business. Try doing the following:

• Analyze the details of those who are interested in your online marketing. Are they the same as your targeted customers? Or are they engaging with you simply because of the effectiveness of your online marketing?
• Use the contact numbers and email addresses to send them customized invites and notifications. Use this option very carefully or you’ll be thrown into the spam bin.
• Ask these people for feedback, complaints and suggestions for your restaurant.