If you’ve landed here looking for ideas on how to advertise a restaurant in the real world, I won’t sugarcoat it. That’s not really my area of expertise, so in this post, I’ll try to help you with something else, namely advertising on the Internet.
However, before I dive into what I’m good at, let me tell you, as a customer, what a well-advertising restaurant looks like in my eyes. First, it’s famous for its good food; second, people speak well of it; and third, people talk about it at all. So, as far as I’m concerned, you can shove all sorts of flyers or newspaper notes into your pocket. The best advertising you can do is to prepare great food yourself. Your Customers can also help you by happily recommending your place to their friends.
I hope that you will soon find out how to use the Internet to advertise your restaurant. There are at least six ways to do it. And I will describe just as many to not overwhelm you with an excess of knowledge that could come back to haunt you.
Online Presence
First and foremost, you need to establish your presence online. To do this, you must have a domain purchased, a website for your restaurant, and an online food ordering system on it. You can take care of the website yourself, or you can outsource it to someone, like me; I’m happy to help. The most important thing about being online, though, is to remember that just being there doesn’t do anything. Nowadays, not only restaurants but also fast foods and even food trucks have websites. To stand out among all of them, you need to have an attractive, nice, and tempting website. And you also need to start acting intensively. And here the real fun begins. Pleasant, effective, generally fantastic.
Positioning the Restaurant’s Website – SEO
I like positioning the most because it’s the most demanding, the most tedious, the hardest, and the most effective. You probably know that positioning a restaurant’s website means making it achieve the best results on Google when hungry people start searching for food, restaurants, pizzerias, or homemade meals. Depending on the size of the city, searches like “pizzeria Your City” can range from a few hundred to several thousand a month. All these people land on your competitors’ websites, who make good money on them. I’m surprised you haven’t taken care of this yet. I would have, especially since I’m quite good at it.
In short, if you want to advertise your pizzeria or other restaurant well on Google, you primarily need to optimize it with both the user and search engine robots in mind. You need to design it properly, build it, fill it with content, and it would be good to also run a blog. Later, you can start thinking about implementing additional actions to position the site, but I won’t talk about them. It’s expensive knowledge.
Google Ads Campaign for Restaurants
You can actually run an AdWords campaign even before starting to position the site. With AdWords, you can launch a campaign that will allow you to gain specific traffic to your restaurant’s website almost instantly. You choose keywords wisely, launch the campaign in the search engine, and observe how people who were looking for food behave on your site.
Remember, creating an effective AdWords campaign is not easy. It requires careful selection of keywords, creating ad groups, creating ads, setting bids per click, measuring conversions, and choosing the right landing page. Companies that carry out such orders for a fee don’t do it for no reason; such a campaign needs to be not only created but also continuously expanded and optimized to perform better and better, becoming a great advertisement for a pizzeria or other venue.
In my opinion, an AdWords campaign, as long as it results in effective restaurant advertising (people call you, order food, reserve tables), should be continued all the time, even when your site is already positioned. This is because, in the case of a well-positioned site that runs an AdWords campaign continuously, you can count on it attracting different people. Different hungry people.
You should welcome them all with open arms!
Presence on Facebook
Moving on to Social Media. You’ve probably heard of a portal called Facebook? It’s a place where teenagers spend a lot of their time, as well as somewhat older people. They watch what their friends are doing there to be able to envy them while pretending everything is okay by giving likes. Well, a lot of people use this portal to keep in touch with friends and reality. People on Facebook look for everything and expect everything from it. Including food. That’s why you should have your profile there, which should be regularly and interestingly managed. Moreover, on Facebook, you can create your shop, you can also create a special chatbot that will automate communication with the Customer, and even allow them to order food through Messenger, the communicator used on Facebook.
You can run contests here, publish photos of your dishes or your restaurant. There are a ton of ideas for actions on Facebook. Some are free, others are paid. It’s worth using all of them because the potential is huge. Just ask restaurateurs who have several thousand fans; believe me, they order from them, and by liking posts of such restaurants, they help them reach new customers.
Mailing and SMS Campaigns
If you conduct online food sales, you certainly have some database of your Customers. You need to ensure they have the option to leave you marketing consent for sending offers. Then you will be able to communicate with them frequently through any chosen channel: whether by email or SMS. Both options have their pros and cons, and the truth is, if used skillfully, they can be considered a good idea for restaurant advertising. Here, however, it’s important to remember that we’re “attacking” the Customer by writing private messages to them. So, it would be nice not only to want them to spend money with us but also to give them something, like a promotional coupon or a voucher for a free cola. Anything to make a good impression.
Collaboration with Portals
Finally, I leave food-selling portals, which many restaurateurs consider enemies. And I completely don’t understand this. It’s precisely portals like pyszne.pl or pizzaportal.pl that can be a fantastic place for you to advertise your restaurant. Just think about it. Is there any other industry where you just have to sign up to receive hundreds of orders from Customers? I don’t know such a place, and portals are almost a guarantee of such a turnaround.
You start cooperation, make good food, portals make it easier for Customers to find your restaurant. Customers order, are satisfied, and want to order again.
Your task, after the first order, must be to convince the Customer to order the next portion of food not through the portal but directly on your website.
So, don’t give the new Customer a pyszne.pl flyer, don’t leave them a discount coupon for pizzaportal.pl, and don’t drive a car wrapped in pyszne logos. Make sure to promote your brand, your mark. Advertise your restaurant and draw Customers away from the portals. Sometimes it’s worth giving them 5 PLN for it; it’ll pay off quickly. Just look at the portals, which sometimes give new Customers a discount of even 20 PLN. They’re not stupid; they know that this way they get contact with a Customer, to whom they can later send an SMS, email, or something else encouraging them to place more orders.
Internet advertising for restaurants can be nice and pleasant. I know this from experience because I’ve already helped several restaurants. I’d be happy to help you too, if you’re interested, of course. Let me know, I can advise you not only in terms of advertising but also on the website.
