If you are only using social media to post pictures of your restaurant, it’s time to up the ante.
As a restaurant owner, you already know that Instagram and Facebook are powerful tools to increase your client base. The ‘click it before you eat it’ phenomenon can help you accomplish this in multiple ways.
To help you maximize your benefits from these platforms, our experts dug deep to list 5 can-do (must-do) goals along with easy ways to achieve them. After reading this blog post, you will know how to achieve the following through social media marketing for your restaurant.
- Increase Your Client Base
- Sell More And Sell Better
- Augment Your Restaurant Branding
- Humanize
- Address Feedback
1. Increase Your Client Base
Invest in paid social media campaigns to promote yourself to newer audiences and increase your restaurant’s sales. 60% of Instagram users use the platform to discover new brands. By making a strong visual identity, you can generate interest amongst a new audience set on the platform itself.
Devote time to do hashtag research. List down the hashtags by popularity and relevance and use them to be discoverable. A study by TrackMaven suggests that posts using 9 hashtags get the most likes. We suggest, start big and let analytics on your business account dashboard guide you towards which hashtags work best for you.
Replicate the broad persona of your existing customers who visit your restaurant or your competition to create audience sets on Facebook. Promote your ads and posts amongst these groups to reach out to a larger audience that shares similar interests.
Through geo-targeting and hyper-local ads, target only those people who can order with you. Reaching people who can like but not order is good to grow popularity but bad for return on ad spend.
So don’t just be liked; be discovered and experienced by a whole new set of customers through Instagram and Facebook.
2. Sell More And Sell Better
At the time of writing this article, there were 366 Million #food pictures on Instagram. While Instagram has started shoppable ads in some regions, it is largely underutilized by the FnB industry.
Use Lyve to convert your customers on social media platforms itself. Lyve boosts your posts hyper-locally and enables your customers to order with you on Instagram and Facebook. You also save the amount you pay by way of commissions to aggregators when you generate orders from your own social media accounts.
Alternatively, you can also include a link to your own order management system or your phone number in your bio or contact button. Your audience can order with you directly if they like your feed.
3. Augment Your Restaurant Branding
Make your brand easily identifiable by maintaining a similar look and feel of your brand, both online and offline.
Define your restaurant’s tone of voice and personality characteristics, this flows into every communication between your restaurant and your customer including your menu, online posts, customer interaction, etc.
Display your uniqueness in full visual splendor on social media platforms. Let your customers know how your food and people are different from others in the same industry. This goes a long way in building brand recall.
4. Humanize
Give a consistent voice to your restaurant. Let your customers interact with a personality and not a place. This boosts brand loyalty and increases customer retention and repeat orders.
The most followed restaurants on social media platforms don’t just talk about their food but also about the people and experiences, their food brings to the table. Sweet Green Restaurant (@sweetgreen) is one of the most followed restaurant accounts on Instagram, it focusses its Instagram activity on building communities through healthy food.
So, define the difference your food is making in the lives of the people who work there as well as those that dine there. Periodically sharing stories of your customers and employees goes a long way in giving a human touch to your restaurant.
5. Address Feedback
Social media platforms are a great place to understand what your audience expects from you. These platforms provide a positive and personal way to address negative feedback about your restaurant. Direct messages and responsive comments show your receptive attitude towards your customers.
Of all social media channels, Instagram gets the highest engagement. Hence, it plays a vital role in connecting you to your existing and potential customers. Proper utilization of the channel ensures your customer generation and retention efforts pay off magnificently. Schedule a demo with Lyve to understand how you can do all of the above in the simplest and most cost-effective manner.
Use tools like Social Bakers and Social Searcher to monitor brand mentions. You can draw precious insights about your strengths and improvement areas with these tools. Also, use the medium to collect positive mentions about your brand and share it with your audience.
Go ahead and multiply your followers and orders by simply optimizing your social media pages.
