Quality restaurant copy encourages curious customers to dine with you for the first time, convinces regulars to try out new menu items, and overall increases profit by driving business to your door. Suppose you can’t afford a full-time writer to handle your promotions, blog posts, and menu descriptions. In that case, the task may fall to someone less experienced with compelling, informative, and professional copy.
If that person is you, don’t panic. You can still create compelling menu descriptions (necessary for any successful online ordering platform) and make compelling marketing copy without hiring expensive outside parties to garner sufficient ROI. With just determination and intimate knowledge of your business, anyone can create a website that reflects your brand quality and voice, is optimized for mobile use, and has a layout and photos that supplement compelling content. Here’s everything you need to know about creating that copy.
Better Copy
When it comes to blog posts and website descriptions, everything you write should be with the underlying goal of introducing your brand to a broader audience. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a top priority: Use relevant keywords and phrases that push you to the top of search results, so you don’t get buried beneath your competition. Use Google My Restaurant to improve the likelihood of getting noticed online by relevant potential customers in your area.
It’s not all about drawing their eye: You have to stand out and hold customers’ attention once they click your page. The copy doesn’t have to be poetic to be effective. Identify your core strengths so you can continue to shine a spotlight on your brand’s aspects that make you truly unique. Why should a family choose you over the twenty other Italian restaurants just like you in the same neighborhood? Take every opportunity to:
Inform your audience about changes to the restaurant’s hours, menus, aesthetic, and other big news. Announce across your socials when you create new specials, deals or form partnerships so guests can celebrate these milestones with you.
Speak with your loyal customers, employees, and management to identify what makes your brand special. What are unique attributes that only you bring to the table? Suppose you can create a compelling story about your restaurant. In that case, you and your marketing team can begin to brainstorm what direction and brand voice the restaurant should adopt in their advertising efforts and content creation in the future. This provides a reference point to follow in the future.
Make changes based on ideas sprung from your copy. It’s your business and your rules; you can experiment with the concept in any way you’d like.
Amidst all this, don’t forget to focus on your story.
How to Write Quality Restaurant Copy
Effective Storytelling
People are most loyal to brands that they can relate to, connecting with them on an individual level. Designate a landing page to tell the story of how your dream came to be. You don’t need to be a prize-winning writer for this. Just be honest and explain why guests should come to support your brand. Identify what you’re known for and work it organically into the copy: Do customers love your farm-fresh ingredients? Mention how you partner with local farmers to support the economy and demonstrate how you’re part of the larger community fabric.
Social media is a great place to connect directly with your best customers and learn what trends they favor, from passing food fads that will fade by the end of the month to green, economic business expectations that have been sweeping the country over the past several years. When you stay informed about your customers’ value, you can focus on writing about topics that will genuinely catch their interest. Connect blog posts to your social media and your social media to your menu, so all of it links back to turning readership into sales, which is one of the ultimate goals of restaurant copy.
Fancy wording isn’t everything. Where copy fails, your delicious food, tempting prices, events, and partnerships are all still a draw for curious consumers. Copy and blog articles are meant to work together with the outstanding services that you already offer. Everyone has different strengths; what’s important is to identify yours and leverage these skills to your advantage. Experiment to find the style, format, audience, and content that works for your brand. When it clicks, the resulting flood of traffic and increased sales will make all that time and effort worth the ROI.
As you’re optimizing your website, online ordering platforms, and restaurant brand, consider making your operations more efficient with the eatOS Point of Sale system. Taking on the extra workload, you’ll quickly realize the upsides of equipping your business with automated sales reports and analytics, workforce management features, customer relationship management capabilities, and more. We help grow your profits and increase your core audience’s loyalty by streamlining operations for a better guest experience every day. Book a demo with eatOS to learn more and together, we’ll enter the future of restaurant management.
