How to promote a restaurant online
Which tools should you use to promote a restaurant online? What is the winning marketing strategy to broaden your audience and improve your business thanks to the Internet?
From the website to social media, by way of the restaurant listing on Google My Business, a business has many options to digitalize its operations. So many opportunities, however, also mean the chance of creating confusion, achieving the opposite effect. It is therefore necessary to bring clarity and use the various tools the web offers in a coordinated and strategic way.
Table of Contents
A website to promote your restaurant online
The first step to bringing your restaurant online is creating a website. The website should be seen as a digital business card, what a potential customer sees before deciding. This is why it must be appealing, fast, mobile responsive, and SEO optimized.
SEO optimization should be done with a local focus, in order to verticalize keywords and make them more precise. This way you will intercept the best queries, with a greater chance of finding interested potential customers.
What can never be missing from a restaurant’s website is the online menu. There is nothing more frustrating than visiting the website and not finding the food offering. Someone who lands on a restaurant’s website probably needs to choose where and what to eat, perhaps in a place they don’t know. The presence of the menu is essential to convince the visitor to try that particular venue.
A blog for your restaurant online
To engage the visitor, providing different content that is also very important from an SEO standpoint, you can open a blog within the website. Here you can explain the dishes on offer, suggest menu pairings and tell the story of the business. Increasingly, dining is becoming an experience of taste, not just a place to eat. This is where the blog can entertain the user and convince them to savor this experience.
To create an SEO-oriented blog you need to structure a strategic editorial plan. First of all, you will need to find the right topics: current trends as well as Google searches can provide excellent ideas. Next, you will need to think about a calendar, so as to give a consistent cadence to your blog and turn articles into a regular appointment for your audience. For restaurants and tourist facilities it is always wise to remember to include in the editorial plan all recurring holidays: Valentine’s Day, International Women’s Day, Easter, Christmas, etc.
Finally, blog content also makes excellent material for social networks. Re-sharing articles on your social profiles will let you create a further point of contact with the community, asking users for their opinion and establishing a dialogue with them. Of course, on social media you can do much more than this. We’ll talk about it later.
Online contacts and bookings
As mentioned, creating the website serves to bring the restaurant online. The purpose of this move is to give the business greater visibility, intercepting users’ searches to obtain bookings and expand your business.
The presence of contact details on the website must therefore be immediately apparent. Not only on the dedicated page, but also on the homepage and the other pages the contact details must always be present. The phone number to call, the WhatsApp contact to book via message, the email to request information: you need to give the customer every possible option.
Then there is the actual online booking. In the contacts section you could create a form with date, time and number of guests, which the customer can conveniently fill in to book their table with just a few clicks. Perhaps, to encourage this practice, you can offer deals and discounts, so that once the customer reaches the contact stage they actually complete the booking.
With Google My Business, restaurants go online
The website, however, is not the only tool available to intercept customers’ online searches. For businesses, Google has created Google My Business. This is the business’s profile on the search engine, which will appear for all queries relating to that particular field. It is a free tool with incredible potential, because it facilitates the encounter with customers and offers a space for interaction with clientele.
First of all you need to register the business profile, entering the name, address, contact details and business category, in this case “restaurant”. At this point the venue will appear in the search engine as a business, in the specific section created by Google called “local pack” , and on Google Maps, immediately showing its location.
The other fundamental aspect of Google My Business is the possibility for customers to leave a review. As always, reviews are a double-edged sword, since they can be positive and negative, in both cases often exaggerated. At the same time, giving clientele the chance to express an opinion is an important incentive to interaction, and reviews constitute a fundamental criterion for choice and evaluation.
Therefore, for a restaurant, pairing an optimized and well-structured website with a complete Google My Business profile will make it possible to increase and improve its online visibility.
Google advertising for restaurants
The Google network is an important resource also in terms of advertising to promote a restaurant online. To understand this, one example is enough: when you find yourself in a new place or on holiday abroad, one of the first things you do is the classic Google search “best restaurants in …”, or “where to eat in …”. This is where a Google search campaign with the right keywords can make your restaurant’s ads appear at the top of the SERP.
But Google advertising is also very useful with a local focus, especially with Google display campaigns. By preparing striking and inviting visual banners, you can do branding to increase awareness of your restaurant. An image or video of a well-prepared dish will immediately make your mouth water!
You can’t forget YouTube to promote a restaurant online
The video topic itself brings to light a fundamental element for promoting a restaurant online: the YouTube channel. Recipe videos have conquered the online world, just as the behind-the-scenes of a business are always interesting to users.
In managing a restaurant’s YouTube channel, therefore, different types of video should be conceived: the restaurant’s daily life, the preparation of dishes, the hilarious moments in the dining room or “backstage”, and so on. All videos that will engage the audience and, above all, inspire trust and the desire to try the dishes.
YouTube, moreover, is part of Google’s advertising network. This means that through your Google Ads account you can also highlight your YouTube channel videos. An excellent way to give visibility to the channel, and therefore to the restaurant, with original and appealing content.
Restaurant communication runs through social media
Increasingly, digital communication runs through social profiles. Restaurants too must therefore be present on these platforms. Not only in the classic way, showing their dishes and shots of the venue, but also finding a way to entertain users.
The habit, after all, is now well established: you go out to eat and photograph the dish you ordered, or a piece of decor that caught your eye, or simply take a selfie with friends. A restaurant’s social profile can turn this modern trend into an opportunity for loyalty and profit. For example, it could launch a contest among the best shots taken inside the restaurant. The winner will be rewarded with a dinner, of course documented on social media.
Managing a restaurant’s Instagram account
The Instagram account is the ideal place to promote a restaurant. With Instagram stories, for example, you can entertain and show live what happens in the venue, always staying genuine and in contact with the audience.
Moreover, food is one of the topics that is always trending on social media. This means that in managing the Instagram account choosing the right hashtags in the caption, combined with appealing copy and high-quality images, will allow posts to enter the platform’s trends. Not forgetting reels, short appealing videos that keep users glued to the screen.
The Facebook Page for a restaurant
While on the one hand Instagram is very important for visual content, we must not forget the importance that Facebook can have in a business’s online communication. A restaurant’s Facebook Page, besides being a place to put valuable information such as opening hours and location, is also the meeting point with users.
On Facebook you can hold a dialogue with people, inviting them to comment and have their say, provided you then take part in the discussion in an active and proactive way. Compared to Instagram, in fact, Facebook retains a stronger character of reading and exchange: two strengths to make the most of in order to promote your restaurant on social media.
Choosing your favorite social network
There are now many social networks. The audience that frequents one channel more than another often differs by age, as well as by mode of consumption and interaction. But a channel like Tik Tok, for example, which started out as a young channel, quickly became cross-generational, just as happened with Twitch. They are all useful channels for a marketing plan aimed at reaching a wide audience. It should also not be forgotten that Google too has its social “side”: with Google web Stories you can have the benefits of the immediacy of a social story and of improved SEO ranking. Obviously, not all social networks are advisable for a restaurant business, but keeping an eye on different opportunities brings considerable advantages.
The digital marketing of an online restaurant is on social media
But social media are also the perfect online place for advertising. Since people spend more and more time on Facebook, Instagram or Tik Tok, having ads appear on these platforms is a smart choice to win new customers. Another dynamic of social advertising for restaurants is that of influencers and bloggers through Digital PR activity. Inviting a web opinion leader, well known in the food field, to your venue will increase its fame and encourage followers to try it.
Facebook advertising for restaurants
The Facebook business suite is a particularly useful tool for restaurants’ online advertising. This is because Instagram is also part of the Meta network, and therefore with Facebook advertising you actually cover the greater part of social advertising.
Facebook advertising for a restaurant is ideal for improving the awareness and consideration of your venue, as well as for increasing engagement with your followers. Highlighting posted content and creating ad hoc posts for promotional purposes is an excellent way to increase the restaurant’s visibility.
The online restaurant is a matter of image: the importance of visual marketing
An image that leaps off the screen, an appealing video that keeps users glued: these are the ingredients for visual marketing that can best promote a restaurant online. Digital content moves very fast, so it is important to capture the audience’s attention in a fraction of a second. Visual content does exactly this job.
A carefully designed visual marketing strategy tailored to each channel is essential. The photographs on the website must be of the very highest quality. They will go on social media and must make your mouth water! We have already talked about the importance of video: it is the digital content most appreciated by users! On photos and videos, however, a tailor-made marketing plan must be created. Having beautiful shots and some footage without a communication strategy that brings out the uniqueness of your venue is really of little use.
Photo marketing for a restaurant
There’s no denying it: with food, the eye wants its share too. You don’t eat only with your mouth and stomach but also, and above all, with your eyes. A dish presented in an inviting and appealing way will always taste better and leave the customer with great memories.
How can you convey these sensations to the audience? How can you invite users to try the new items or the chef’s signature dishes? With stunning photo marketing! The photographs must be high definition, sharp and clean. Post-production work is also important to adapt them to the various formats needed, on the website, on social media and in advertising.
But a restaurant is not only the food it offers. A venue is also, and above all, the location, the staff who bring it to life and make it vibrant, the kitchen with its frantic moments and its cheerful ones. This is where the photos must become a narrative of the unique features of the restaurant: only in this way can they convey that feeling of trust and closeness able to win the audience’s attention.
Video marketing for a restaurant
Instagram reels, hypnotic TikToks that keep you glued to the screen, stories to update constantly, YouTube shorts and the Watch tab on Facebook: users want more videos!
This is where video marketing becomes an indispensable tool for promoting a restaurant online. And the great thing is that the only limit to this strategy is imagination! You can make recipe videos, emotional or fun videos, content telling a typical day at the restaurant and so on. The only rule to respect is quality: the right editing, with the choice of soundtrack. The only path to follow, that of strategic communication.
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