Social Media Marketing for restaurants and bars- Where to start and how to grow
Do you own or promote marketing activities for a restaurant or a bar? Do you want to know how to use social media but you do not know where to start?
You face a common problem, nothing to worry! Restaurants aim to engage with their customers; they like to use social tools to get more customers walking through their doors – but they just don’t know how.
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There are several packages of support you can choose of, depending on your business goals.
- Social Media Strategy
- Social Media Contents (verbal & visual) Creation & Planning
- Social Media growth
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3 golden rules for a successful Social Media by using Facebook and Instagram to drive more customers to your restaurant
#1: Think Like Your Customer
One of the first step in successful marketing is to know who you’re communicating with. This is particularly true in social media. Think like your customer, why would they want to visit you? Create a tone for your social media based on this. This tone is reflected through visual and verbal communication.
If you want your place to be known as the easygoing hangout spot, create a tone that you will consistently use across all of your social media contents. Post in a friendly, personal tone. You could, for example use messages from your long-term employee or your barman for your message.
If you want to be known for your high level premium dining place – create your social media postings around your premium products and qualified Chefs accompanied with high quality food images and ambience of your place.
#2: Facebook Marketing
Facebook provides an incredible opportunity for restaurants and bars to connect with their customers. You’d be hard pressed to find a food place who is not on Facebook. Most of the Facebook users check their updates a few times a day.
How to use Facebook?
- Be consistent in quality of text and content.
- Create a media plan with a red line of your story.
- Include delicious photos of your food, or people having a good time enjoying a meal with friends, share emotions.
- Learn how to manage properly Facebook’s effective promotion tools
- Use lots of photos of your food – most shared posts on Facebook are images. We are in the business of food, food is extremely visual. Include lots of images of your food in your regular Facebook updates. Why not creating a lookbook of your current menu items and presenting them daily or weekly?
- Create and promote exclusive offers for your community, do contests!
Post exclusive offers on your Facebook Page. Give deals to customers if they “like” your Page or comment.
Offer social coupon promotions to motivate your Fans to share your deal with their friends – and get those friends to become Fans of your Page too.
Do contests once in a while and offer a special prize and offer for example a “behind the scene” dinner. - Create geo targeted ads – Facebook ads let you do all kinds of very specific, niche targeting. For restaurants and diners, this is ideal. You can target your ads to be seen only by people in your particular geographic location. You can also target your ads to be seen by those with specific likes, and by those who like certain pages.
- Embed videos – Videos have a larger reach than photos and look very cool when embedded directly into a post. If you have videos about how your food is made, or you have an interview with your chef/ food suppliers/ happy customers – include them in a post and make it very personal.
#3: Instagram Marketing
Instagram is an extremely large and popular photo sharing platform. Its integration with Facebook. It’s used about 95% of the time when your customers are posting images to their Facebook friends). Instagram can be used in conjunction with the Facebook tactics, or on its own.
How to use Instagram?
- Create a media plan with a red line of your story.
- Use planning and posting apps to facilitate your work on Instagram. I love to work with buffer. It offers a free account, too.Use excellent Food photography: Instagram is a site of photos. Use this opportunity to post delicious photos of your menu items and show beautiful content. Create high quality photography and a storyline to transmit an attractive feed. I found this article very helpful to bring your Instagram account to a next level. It’s about Photo editing and design (edit, collage, and resize your images) and Video editing and design (design, edit, and resize your videos).
- Use hashtags and tools to create hashtags: Hashtags are huge on Instagram. They’re very relevant.
You can use tools to create them and track their performance. Some of the one I like to use are Hashtagify, talkwalker or preview app. Instagram uses a max. allowed number of hashtags, which is 30, try to use between 20 and 30 hashtags per post. - Use niche hashtags – Get found more easily by your niche market by using specific hashtags. For example, if you’re a bakery in zurich, and are located in Kreis4, use geographic specific tags, like #kreis4eats
- Use campaign specific hashtags – If you are running a special marketing campaign (such as a contest, create a hashtag just for that specific promotion. This allows your followers and anyone else to engage with your campaign by using the same hashtag in their posts.
- Be personal show employee appreciation – Take a photo of your staff working with your products. It could be a chef, a waitress, or even a delivery person. Post stories from your company on Instagram keeping a red line. Add a short description.
- Run contests where the community can post their pictures. Show appreciation for loyal customers and repost their posts, like and comment back.