Are you looking forward to investing in Facebook marketing to promote your restaurant? In this article, we will suggest a few essentials and share seven practical ways to make you stand out, enhance your brand image and exponentially grow your social media presence.
Is Facebook marketing to promote your restaurant proving to be quite a challenge? Well, it need not be if you know how to go about it.
Facebook is among the most accommodating social media platforms to connect and share information with your prospective customers due to its easy to use interface and multiple interactive features.
To help you maximize on your marketing strategy, we will look at some effective and proven Facebook marketing ideas for restaurants.
If appropriately applied, these approaches will help you leverage this social media giant to get the word out and fill your restaurant with loyal and paying customers.
Here are 7 ways to use Facebook to promote restaurants
1. Create cravings through compelling videos and images
The quickest and simplest way of attracting customers to your restaurant is by creating awareness about the products and services you offer using quality pictures and live videos.
Are you wondering how to create mouth-watering food pics to lure your customers? It’s easy. Facebook comes with an image editor that allows you to crop photos and add text and stickers. This feature enables you to design personalized restaurant memes to keep your customers engaged and motivated.
You can also leverage the Facebook Live feature to stream and share live videos with your followers. Consider sharing live stream videos showcasing your restaurant layout and amazing furniture. You can also include cooking demonstrations and live streams of chefs preparing some signature dishes.
Bottom line: Ensure that the video and image formats are compatible with cell phones since most customers are likely to visit your website using handheld devices. Again the food pictures need to be appealing enough. Remember not everything that looks good on plate turns out appetizing.
2. Learn to retain your customers
There are two effective ways of keeping your customers: guaranteeing them excellent customer services and incorporating loyalty programs.
Nowadays customers are more likely to research your business and products before deciding whether or not make a purchase. For this reason, it would benefit you more to offer both pre-sale and post-sale customer services on your restaurant’s Facebook page.
You will be able to offer guidelines and resolve any complaints to change unhappy customers into loyal and repeat customers.
Loyalty programs such as contests and giveaways are also useful in increasing your customers’ purchase frequency.
For instance, host a “caption challenge” whereby you present a photo of one of your dishes or a funny event at your restaurant and ask people to provide their most creative captions.
Now reward the one with the best caption with a voucher to eat at your restaurant. That way you will benefit from the increased online presence and repeat clients.
Bottom line: It’s essential to ensure that your loyalty programs are a profitable exchange for you, either through increased engagement or more conversions.
3. Increase conversion rates with Facebook’s “Start order” feature
You might have done a great job creating awareness about your restaurant and the services that it offers but you will need to motivate your target audience to take the real steps toward becoming customers. Adding the Facebook Start Order call-to-action button is the best way to go about it.
It allows you to eliminate any barriers your customers might encounter when ordering food from your restaurant. What’s more, your customers do not necessarily have to leave Facebook to place food orders.
Bottom line: For you to be eligible for this feature, you will be required to use slice or Delivery.com for delivery. Reach out to Facebook and fill out this form to register.
4. Add your restaurant menu
Now that you have included the Start Order button on your Facebook page, you need to provide your customers with your restaurant menu on your Facebook page. Such menus make it easy for your customers to go through your menu items and prices over the phone to simplify their food ordering process.
Typically, when using the Facebook plugin to add a menu, the menu falls at the bottom of your Facebook page. But the best part is, you can use the “pin to top” feature to maintain your restaurant menu at the top of your Facebook page for enhanced visibility.
Bottom line: Tell your customers where to find your restaurant menu using a status update. You can also create landing pages to promote your restaurant’s menu.
5. Post shareable content to increase engagement
Posting shareable content on your restaurant’s Facebook page is another effective way to grow your online presence and promote your restaurant significantly. Avoid lengthy articles and seek to optimize your visual content to accommodate cellphone users.
Ensure that the content you share adds value to your audience to increase the chances of it being shared. Such content includes exciting facts relating to various dishes at your restaurant and step-by-step guides on how to prepare certain meals among others.
Remember that proper timing when posting your content is crucial in increasing the likelihood of it being shared.
Bottom line: Maximize on posting during the most productive hours based on the nature of your restaurant. For instance, if you are selling coffee, then morning hours are the most appropriate to remind your following to get a morning fix.
6. Leverage Facebook ads
Facebook ads offer a quick way to generate more traffic to your restaurant’s official Facebook page. These ads need to be captivating enough to encourage your customers to click on them and be redirected to your website. If your services are limited to a particular location, then geo-tagging ads could prove quite useful.
Do you know what’s more effective than Facebook geo-tagging ads? Being able to target a specific audience to generate relevant traffic to your restaurant’s website. Luckily, Facebook provides all these customization features.
Bottom line: There are various kinds of Facebook ads designed to suit various marketing or advertising requirements. Choose one that suits you best and consider establishing a reasonable ad budget.
7. Building better customer relation
Even though you can promote your brand or restaurant through advertising, perhaps the factor most essential for continued growth and success of your restaurant is building a strong relationship with your customers. You should aim at turning your customers into ambassadors to help you promote your restaurant through word of mouth.
Are you having challenges connecting with your customers on Facebook? Here is the deal; respond to your customers’ comments on your Facebook page and address their complaints promptly. Also, do not ignore your current customers and always keep the communication lines open.
Bottom line: You are more likely to connect with your customers more deeply if they feel appreciated. Therefore learn to value their opinions and let them know you recognize and appreciate their loyalty.
7 Tips to Improve Restaurant Facebook Ads
If you are new to marketing through Facebook are just looking to bring more traffic to your restaurant via targeted campaigns, these later listed 7 tips should help. These strategies can show you the way to improve the advertisements you make in Facebook Ads to attract the most potential customers.
1. Target Geographical Location
You should not even worry about the creativity of your ad or the advanced features of marketing strategies until you have developed a targeting plan.
You need to prioritize your ad reaching the right people.
To do this, you can configure targets by location and the process is remarkably simple. On Facebook Ad’s Manager platform, you can reduce marketing areas by kilometer and city areas.
It is important to note when the area might have an influx of tourist activity versus the average number of local guests your campaigns might potentially reach.
2. Target Based on Tastes and Interests
You should not overlook the filters related to targeting here: demographics, interests, and behaviors. Each of these has sub-categories to get even more specific. This is a critical phase, and as such, requires you to invest time, care, and attention into inputting the right data.
Identify tastes based on target education. This might be from a professional standpoint but might also include groups they tend to get involved with and content that they share and utilize.
You are going to have to try different combinations until you find the one that works. Success with Facebook Ads is all about your appropriate testing and tweaking of settings to reach the ideal result.
3. Not Only the Dishes
From a study conducted by the Coyle Hospitality Group Agency, atmosphere is one of the most important factors of potential patrons choosing where to dine.
Diners always appreciate an atmosphere as much as, if not more than, the expertly crafted dishes that you prepare. If the environment gives off a negative vibe, many patrons will not recommend the restaurant to anyone else – even if the food was incredible and the service was memorable.
So, this research should encourage you to not only improve the atmosphere of your eatery, but also to include elements of this designed atmosphere in your advertisements for social media. The right development can attract new customers.
You might want to take some time to create a fascinating and original setting for your restaurant.
4. Online and Offline Communicating
Printed ads are not some dead marketing option, especially when you consider the allure of placement in magazines, guides, and other targeted publications your guests might read. These are effective places to input ads to attract new business.
If you do happen to get recognition in a prestigious publication, it might be worth re-launching this same advertisement with digital enhancement for Facebook presentation.
Advertisements are not free, as you know, so make sure that this campaign path leads to a call to action that has customers booking tables.
5. Promote and Propose Events
Event marketing combined with Facebook Ads is a winning combination. In many situations, the two can become the best potential mix leading to restaurant revenues.
The creation of a special event, often themed around holidays and special occasions, can get easily promoted and shared on social media. It is an ideal way to generate some buzz about the business and encourage those who have not tried your food to give your restaurant a shot.
You need to remember that ads are intended to boost content, and if you have no content, there is nothing that these ads can do for your business.
6. Staff/Testimonials
Good service is always a draw for people in choosing a place to eat, and you can accomplish this with a professional, respectful staff.
You should always take the necessary time to teach you staff that love and kindness can take the restaurant to new heights, not to mention help intrigue new customers with Facebook content.
Ads with videos or pictures with the smiling staff you circulate through Facebook Ads can help to give new customers a warmth of your business before they ever arrive.
7. Planning the Advertising Campaign
Ad schedulers you can find on Facebook really make the delivery of your posts in advance a snap.
You can get organized by always keeping ads scheduled for circulation ahead of time, even dropping on some of the busiest times for your business to never lose the collective support you have online.
Planning is truly the secret to any ad success for restaurants. Make sure every choice you make is deliberate and well thought out. Take a bird’s eye view of your activities to see how these ads are landing when circulating Facebook.
From the above Facebook marketing ideas for restaurants, you will notice that using Facebook to promote your restaurant is not as hard as it seemed. All you need to do is to invest adequate time and leverage the right tools and features to reach your target audience.
