Restaurant Marketing Blog

Constant connectivity and smarter phones have made the mobile an important part in the everyday life of the consumer. For businesses and services, the mobile phone is the primary way to communicate, interact and communicate with the consumers.

Globally 4.6 billion people are connected to each other through mobile devices today and 2.5 billion people use a smartphone across the world. By 2020 nine out of 10 people will have access to mobile phones. With the increased accessibility and connectivity mobile phones offer, consumer’s demand for a mobile-friendly experience has been growing for the last 5 years.

However, a mobile-friendly experience does not limit to a responsive or a mobile website. An organization looking to integrate the mobile experience into every element of the customer journey would have to integrate mobile payments and mobile commerce to the overall customer experience.

Restaurants especially face a rising challenge in adapting to the changing consumer behaviours by catering them to at every level of their diner decision making process mostly carried out on a smartphone. Millennials, who happens to be the movers and shakers of the restaurant industry, has substantially different habits in comparison to the Generation Xers and Baby Boomers are 65% more likely to search online on the go for places to order food for takeaway or use in-house or third-party food delivery apps constantly.

In fact, Millennials are multitaskers when they have a mobile phone in hand. When deciding on a place to eat immediately people who are born between the years of 1980 and 1995 would search for places to eat nearby, check their background based on online reviews made by friends, peers and other diners online on social media and independent review sites and would visit the website of relevant restaurant to check the online menu; on a mobile phone, all within a time space of 30 minutes to 1 hour.

With a growing population intent on eating out and discovering new dining experiences all on their mobile phones, restaurants face the challenge of integrating multiple consumer actions within a single app.

Today, a mobile-optimized website with a hyper-curated conversion path is only the beginning for a restaurant’s route to its guests’ mobile phone. Having an easily accessible menu online offering all the information on each food or beverage including pricing, and nutritional details can have a heavy advantage in a world where 81% of the Millenials look at a restaurant online menu before deciding on a new restaurant.

Enabling the guests to check real-time reviews, order food and pair them with drinks and desserts all within the restaurant website or mobile app is the most proven way to make sure visitors to your website converts immediately to diners.

Even when planning a more formal dining in or a celebratory event at a restaurant, Millennials turn to their mobile phones to do the planning and reservation. From researching on menu and ambience to communicating with the restaurant staff and making a reservation Millennials carried out most of the transactions on mobile and on real-time, turning to live chat and emails to carry out the transactions instead of making voice calls.

Beyond diner acquisitions, mobile also makes it easier for restaurants to retain customer loyalty by creating a mobile-centric loyalty program. In a world where loyalty is hard to come by and only 40% of the first time restaurant guests are likely to return for a second visit, digital loyalty programs directly integrated with consumer mobile phones allows restaurant to provide a better a customer experience to the returning guests by allowing guests to make reservations or order food online, make payments, collect diner loyalty points and review their diner experience and provide feedback all in one place.

By reserving a permanent place in your guests’ mobile phone, restaurants can continue to engage the consumers through notifications on exclusive offers, personalized discounts for special moments in life like birthdays and anniversaries.

While owning a mobile-optimized website and a mobile app would have sufficed a restaurant to win the mobile game a few years back, the restaurants of the future need more actions on their mobile playbook to compete with nontraditional players and consumer patterns.

Since 91% of the restaurant goers made a decision to try a new restaurant based on a recommendation by a friend or a family member and 68% based on a positive online review, it is essential for restaurants to engage guests continuously online.

Engaging diners through social media and review sites and rewarding them for feedbacks and engagements to spread positive word of mouth online, optimizing your restaurant’s geolocation through Google My Business and tweaking your mobile optimized website for local searches and voice searches are essential objectives for restaurants to win the mobile marketing game in 2019.

The Global Restaurant market is growing at an annual pace of 5.6% and almost 60% of the USD 3 Trillion worth global foodservice market is generated by restaurants of various sizes and shapes around the world. While restaurants as an industry continue to prosper around the world, consumer preferences and buying behaviours will continue to evolve in the...

While social media remains a foremost choice for restaurant marketing, consumer preferences are gravitating, markedly, away from traditionally successful sites like Facebook and towards more visually striking sites like Instagram. Both new entrants and those that saw profit growth in 2017 are flocking to Instagram more than restaurants whose profits...

People around the world including your potential diners continue to watch and take action on hours and hours of videos on social media and YouTube so much so that by 2019 videos would amount to 80% of all consumer internet traffic.

On an average over 18,000 people search for recipe videos online per day while videos on social media registered 1200% more shares than text and images. In fact, Facebook has openly declared their love for videos and provides them a 135% greater organic reach than other posts, which comes as no surprise since Facebook alone generates 8 Billion video view on an average per day.

The same wave of interest continues on YouTube with video consumptions rising by 100% compared to the year 2017 and videos are the main source of education and awareness for retail consumers today, and nearly 40% of these videos led to an immediate purchase.

With so much compelling data backing the success of video marketing; restaurants today cannot avoid generating an exciting range of videos to grab the attention of your customers and keep them engaged online.

When it comes to video production and marketing, one of the advantages of being at a restaurant or a bar is that you are never short of ideas, actions, and excitement to keep shooting.

Videos with great visuals and a brand message are gifts that keeps on giving. Host them on your website, share them on your social media and post them on your YouTube channel but make sure you have the right format and time frame.

From telling your brand’s story in a video to registering the live action in your restaurant kitchen, you will keep falling on ideas at every step once you start looking. In the meantime, we have listed some ideas below to get you started;

Brand Stories

People think, relate and communicate in a form of stories and videos are the best way to share your brand story with the world. Whether you are telling the story of a local community that connects with your restaurant, your serving and kitchen staff that makes the food magic happen or the local farm or winery that provides the right ingredient for your restaurant, videos can help you bond with your customers.

Talk to the Chef

Nothing fascinates restaurant consumers like fancy knife work, grill skills or bartending techniques and videos are the best way to flaunt them to your consumers. Help your consumers meet the key players of your restaurant by creating videos of your culinary team in action. Have your Chef De Cuisine create the signature dishes and post them on social media. Create long and short versions of the same recipe so it can be posted on different platforms to gain the maximum effect.

On an average 400 people searched for 30-second recipe videos and another 210 for short recipe videos on Google. In fact, different social media platforms call for different durations from just 30 seconds on Instagram to 2 minutes on YouTube.

Client Stories

Praise coming from your regular clients is the best praise indeed. If you have a loyal client base that treats your restaurant as their second home, have them saying nice things about your place on video. Whether it is an unforgettable experience, like celebratory graduation dinner or a proposal or their favorite meal at your place, let them talk about what makes your establishment special for them. Consumers always relate to positive user experience and new consumers tend to put their trust in the online word of mouth.

Recipe Videos

Recipe videos that are easy to watch and follow are the online rave at the moment. Nearly 50,000 people search for cooking videos online every month. Whether they are on simple recipes, cooking instructions or creating a new recipe from the scratch, people turn to videos to learn new recipes and cooking skills and providing them the instruction they need ensures visibility, traffic, and sales.

Take Tasty videos for an example. Tasty, which calls themselves the largest food network online has built a loyal brand following online 90,500 people search for ‘Tasty recipes’ online each month. While building such a fan base is a mighty task, a restaurant can take a page out of their book when trying to reach food lovers.

Live Action

Do your restaurant host much live cooking and entertaining events? Then live streaming is made for you. Take advantage of the live cooking, theater kitchen and unique bartender skills by live streaming the action through Facebook and Instagram. While Instagram and Facebook allow one to four hours of live streaming the ideal time period for a live video is 10 minutes, which is just the right time to attract and engage your audience.

Vlogs

Vlogging or video blogging has been there for a while and food vlogging is a great way to communicate with a growing community of foodies online. Food vlogging on YouTube has long replaced cookbooks and live cooking shows on TV and are the go-to resource for cooking instructions.

According to the August 2018 statistics issued by YouTube, 3 in 4 adults watch YouTube videos at home mainly for entertainment and instructions. Comedy, music, entertainment and ‘How –To’ videos top the viewing charts during the past year. Moreover, 68% of YouTubers watched a video to help their day to day purchase decisions.

Moreover, Instagram too plunged into the vlogging game recently by introducing IGTV, a mobile first, vertical and full screen video experience, which allows users to create channels and record and upload videos upto 1 hr long.

In the light of these overwhelming development, vlogging for restaurants has become a must than an option. Vlog posts can be used to engage consumers on various aspects of your restaurant from food, beverages, preparation, serving to the sourcing of ingredients.

Nothing impresses consumers like being a part of a larger cause than a mere business endeavor. If your restaurant is heavy on local sourcing, promotes equal opportunity in employment or specializes in specialized food item like vegan, organic or heritage recipes, videos are the best way to spread the word.

Numerous as they seem don’t let these great video ideas overwhelm you or trick you into thinking that producing videos on your restaurant or bar is going to cost you a fortune. With a sophisticated mobile phone camera, you would be able to produce many hours of videos to share on social media while an average budget DSLR camera and a tripod can help you produce winning videos with a little training, which is now available at YouTube Creator Academy.

No matter what your choice of videos are, always remember to keep them engaging, entertaining and within the ideal time frame to attract and engage more viewers.

Sometimes, people decide to dine out on impulse and sometimes after careful thinking and searching particularly where it’s a special occasion. Whether they act on impulse or after a long exhaustive search, the finest food and beverage in the loveliest settings with the highest level of service for the fairest price with the least inconvenience...