Digital marketing and social media can increase awareness about your restaurant. When you add digital marketing to your mix, you will gain more customers and engage with them more on a regular basis, bringing more customers in the door each day.

In this blog post we want to talk about 5 ways you can promote your restaurant online…

1. Create a Facebook page and run PPC ads.

If you don’t have one already, you need to create a Facebook page for your restaurant. Here you can post photos of entrees, promote deals and interact with customers. Facebook is consistently a popular social media platform and creating a business page is free, so why would you not have one?

When posting on Facebook, we recommend including videos or photos with your text to grab attention. We can help you write, create and schedule posts so you’re always in touch with your customers.

Lastly, you will want to explore Facebook paid advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. We help clients set up a budget, schedule, automate and review campaigns weekly, monthly and quarterly. PPC campaigns can be powerful even with small budgets because you can target them directly to people who are searching for places to eat. 

2. Encourage customers to check-in.

The more people coming to your restaurant, the more referrals or word-of-mouth advertising you will get. It’s simple. Encourage customers to use their mobile apps to check-in to your restaurant on Facebook or Foursquare. Offer a deal to people who do this. This is a marketing move that costs you nothing!

3. Publicize on Pinterest.

Ever thought of using Pinterest to promote your restaurant? Pinterest has 125 million usersas of 2018, and 87% of pinners have purchased a product because they’ve seen it on Pinterest. This could mean an item of clothing, shoes, accessories or food and drink. A lot of pinners also use it to search and find recipes online or ideas for dinner parties. Show off your specialties. And who knows, maybe someone will opt to cater with you!

4. Engage in SEO.

You have a website. Great. That’s the first step. But are you working to consistently show up and rank high in search results? Is your restaurant popping up when customers search for lunch, dinner or other food options? It’s important to do keyword research and embed fresh keywords often throughout your content. You’ll want to “think local” about what people are searching for to target customers. Search engine optimization (SEO) is tricky when you don’t know where to start or how to research keywords, but we can help you with this! We have free tools we set our clients up with so they can manage SEO themselves if they would like, or we can simply manage it for you. Negative keywords can keep you from showing up in search results, so we will make sure to help identify those for you as well as the keywords you need to integrate in order to stay above your competition in Google search results.

5. Email and text promotions. 

The easiest way to reach customers quickly is through email and text messages. This is a great way to push coupons, happy hours or other promotions you are running. An effective way to gather email addresses is from comment cards, promotional cards and your website. We can help you make sure your website is set up to always bring in leads for you. Make sure to connect with businesses as well and encourage people to leave their business cards. Keep track of each contact and market to these people! We have the tools to help you set up email campaigns as often as you would like. Emails are a great way to showcase videos, photos, recipes, promotions and other events your restaurant is a part of. 

Are you ready to put together a digital marketing plan for your restaurant this summer?

Contact us today.