Branding, Marketing & Advertising Your First Restaurant
These three factors can make or break your venture, so it’s essential to understand the role each one plays.
When you start your first restaurant, you need to know how you’re going to reach your potential customers.
I’ve decided to break this post into a three-part series.
This week’s post will cover the final one Advertising.
If you missed Branding or Marketing posts click here.
How To Properly Advertise Your Restaurant
How can you entice your restaurant customers when there are so many options for diners when looking to eat out?
And then once they have become your guest, how can you make sure they’ll keep coming back?
The answer to these questions and more, a strong advertising campaign, which leads me to this week’s post!
So your restaurant can have a great menu, creative cocktails, and an atractive interior.
But what good is all that if people don’t know your restaurant exists?
The good news is there are plenty of restaurant advertising options.
I will highlight a few advertising and promotion ideas, covering various price points, target audiences, platforms, and more.
How To Properly Advertise Your Restaurant
~Social Media
Social media provides restaurants with a wide, affordable reach that just can’t be found in other methods.
It allows you to showcase your restaurant, increase exposure, and get more customers through your doors.
The big players are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Having one or a few designated creative posts can potentially reach hundreds or thousands of potential customers.
Don’t be afraid to self-promote!
Most customers want to know about your restaurant’s latest news, specials, and events!
Data proves that 88% of people trust what people say on Facebook about businesses.
And, similar to Instagram, Facebook is a great platform to grab viewers’ attention.
You must use eye-catching images.
Post with imagery consistently!
Always post a high-quality (meaning: naturally lit and crisp) photo of entrees or signature desserts and cocktails. Posts like this are a great way to keep your restaurant top of mind and maybe even entice someone to come in on that very day.
~Online Marketplaces
For most, you create a venue profile, complete with photos, details, sample menus, and more.
Some marketplaces are free, and some charge an annual or monthly fee.
Others offer a combination of both, depending on what you signup for.
~Your Website is Your First Form of Advertising
Your website is often the first glimpse a potential guest sees to get a feel for your restaurant and offerings.
If your site has broken links, blurry photos, and outdated menu PDFs, that doesn’t exactly make a great first impression.
It’s easy for updating a website to fall to the bottom of the to-do list!
But it is a crucial aspect of your restaurant that shouldn’t be pushed aside for too long.
Your website is often the first glimpse a prospect or potential client sees to get a feel for your business and offerings.
Print Ads
Toast a POS software for restaurants recently released a restaurant advertising report claiming that the three most popular channels that successful restaurants (one that saw profit growth between 2017 and 2018) gravitate to are social media, charity or event sponsorship, and traditional ads in newspapers and magazines.
The appeal of traditional ads in places like newspapers, magazines, and weeklies, is that you can be strategic.
Most of them have annual restaurant-focused issues that break down the best eateries in your area.
It’s a great opportunity to place an ad in one of these issues or editions to gain more exposure.
There are also paid online ads that can potentially give you exposure at a reasonable price.
To have effective paid ads there must be good imagery, short-and-sweet ad copy, and a targeted audience.
Keep in mind that different ads have different objectives.
Some aim to drive traffic to your site and gather email addresses, while others target potential customers in your surrounding area.
Popular places for restaurants to advertise include YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Yelp.
Before I end this week’s post on advertising I would like to point out that you must know who your target audience is before entering any advertising campaign.
Who is your tareget audience?
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