The pandemic has wrought devastation on the restaurant industry, which heightens competition for those who still offer delivery and takeout. To draw attention to your restaurant over others, develop your content marketing strategy.
Base your ideas around brand identity and anything that you offer that nobody else can. This will help tailor your promotions for your core audience. Better content marketing directly affects how much people buy when they visit your store.
5 Tips for Better Content Marketing
1. Upgrade Your Website
Now that people spend a lot of their time at home and online, it’s important to digitize your menu and make sure your website can handle the extra attention. Keep up-to-date with current food and graphic design trends, adapt landing pages specifically to give information about COVID-19, and use relevant keywords across the site to rank higher on search engines. All of this will expand your visibility.
Whenever you make changes to your location, contact information or anything they need to reach out to your business, update your website and profiles. Guests should always have the most up-to-date way to get in touch. Make announcements about these changes on social media, too, so the news reaches as much of your base as possible.
2. Open Online Ordering
While people are spending time at home and online during the pandemic, they’re ordering takeout and delivery more frequently. To convince customers to stick with you instead of your competitors, offer up these channels they’re craving. Not only will this help you keep your loyal customers but you’ll reach a brand-new audience when you put your restaurant on places like Google My Business.
3. Build Relationships
Getting to know your customers on a deeper level tells you directly what they want out of a guest experience, but also encourages them to engage more with your restaurant. Investing time in social media is a great way to strengthen your customer relationships. Go live to talk to them directly and keep your brand in their minds during this transition back to lifted capacity restrictions. Offer them little bonuses that they would miss out on if they didn’t follow you. Even simple posts, like behind-the-scenes footage of your cooks at work or recipes using things they can find in their pantries, increase brand loyalty.
Go further with your outreach in order to really make an impact. Email newsletters send targeted promotions right to their inbox and end with a strong call-to-action directing them to the reservation landing page or online ordering platform. This boosts sales. Customers also appreciate a chance to go directly to sales reps with complaints or questions; it’s a lot easier to get a straight answer than posting on forums. Do Q&As and open direct lines of communication, as well as reposting user-generated content to show your appreciation and grow your visibility online.
4. Special Deals
While you’re focusing your attention on off-premise channels, offer promotions and discounts on takeout and delivery that they couldn’t get without signing up for your content marketing listserv. Once you’ve created a delivery-only menu, you can run promotions to boost sales for fan favorites or dishes that have good ROI. Slip thank-you notes into your off-premise orders to go that extra mile. When you reward loyalty and regular patronage, profits grow. Investing in your customer relationship management strategy makes your content marketing more effective.
5. Digital Content Marketing
The right advertising channels expand your visibility to reach a wider audience. Everyone is online somewhere, so in addition to social media, run Facebook and Instagram Ads, Google Ads and campaigns via other services that connect you to targeted demographics based on their distance, interests and habits.
Content Marketing and Your Restaurant
Quality campaigns should fall back on your brand concept to widen the pool of interested customers. Done right, you’ll then retain them as loyal guests after their first visit. Although vaccinations are rolling out and the world is slowly going back to normal, people are still primarily spending time at home, online, ordering from their favorite restaurants. Make sure you’re on the platforms they’re already looking at, and your content marketing will be more successful than ever before.
The best restaurants rely on smart Point of Sale systems to manage their customer data, deals and everything in between.
