Digital Marketing for Restaurants – Guide 2022
All great conversations begin at a gastronomic encounter or over a gin and tonic. I recall a question that arose on one such occasion shortly before the pandemic. We started talking about soccer and ended up talking about how to digitize a restaurant . Voila
Restaurant marketing plan: Example
This was the first list we made on an authentic bar napkin, the ones we used to make…
1. Operation
- Restaurant business plan ( restaurantbusiness plan)
- Direct costs, weights in relation to revenues. Cost of food and cost of beverages
- Definition of KPI
- Strategic Canvas, recommended
- Business budget, an excel sheet
- Know the operation and orient it to your client(design thinking). Describe in detail the components of your business and the
- Value proposition of your product.
2. Communication and graphic image
- Preparing the necessary communication to reach your clients(Copywriting)
- Choose the communication channels, not all of them are valid, and you don’t need all of them. Social networks
- Online reputation, nps
- Graphic design, define your corporate image and set a direction in which to move. Canvas
3. Digital Strategy
- Web only or do I want to sell on the Internet?
- Online store to sell take away
- Food delivery, are you willing to sacrifice 30% commission?
4. Web
- Structure of the web, don’t get confused, let it be understood.
- How to buy your restaurant’s domain name
- Where to host your website, hosting
- Are you going to do it yourself? Do you have time? What is your learning threshold? My advice, put yourself in the hands of professionals.
- Reservation tools.
5. Digital marketing
- Copywriting, how do you sell to your customers?
- SEO, how your customers find you
- SEM, if you advertise, budget and measure
- Email Marketing or content marketing
6. Social Networking
- If you have time to attend all of them, fine, go ahead.
- Which is the social network where you have more convening power. Don’t mess up.
7. Online reputation
- Tripadvisor.
- Google My Business
8. Local channel sales
- Tripadvisor.
- YELP
- Google My Business
Digital marketing in restaurants. What does it mean?
La conversación se fue animando en tono distendido. María y Luís estaban muy interesados en hablar de ello porque tenían en mente quedarse con un restaurante (lo harían meses después y pondrían en marcha todos y cada uno de los procesos de los que hablamos).
As a restaurant and hotel expert, I made an introduction to the topic of digitizing a restaurant in an easy way . More than having a restaurant and launching it on the internet, digitizing a restaurant is intimately linked to being able to sell through a new channel. That’s a small part, I told them, and they were left waiting for more information. I talked to them about automating the value chain and the processes parallel to the operation of any restaurant. That’s advanced level, but they wanted to know more.
Digitizing a restaurant the easy way – How to do it?
The theme gradually took shape and became more animated. The big question that every owner asks is how to start digitizing a restaurant in an easy way and without having to do a master’s degree in digital marketing. In our discussion, the first categorical statements emerged.
“To start with, we need to make a website so we can sell food for home delivery or just a place on the Internet where you can buy food and pick it up at the store.” My answer was ambiguous in order to create controversy. “I could more or less agree,” but the beginning of your strategy is to think about the customer experience, basically and in the case of a restaurant, what kind of food we offer and how we offer it. It all comes down to knowing and knowing the customer who is going to buy from you.
Customer experience in a restaurant
Yes, to start mapping out a digital strategy for your restaurant, you need to know your customer. If we focus on the digitization of restaurants, logically we have to know what experience the customer who decides to search for information about your restaurant expects to have.
Better with an example: imagine that your client is a 70 year old lady who wants to go with her grandson to have a drink in a terrace in Valencia. You will have to think about how you are going to reach that blessed lady and show that you are one of the best options to go to your restaurant. I see you coming and I anticipate the question…. But, the 70-year-old lady would not necessarily search the Internet. Totally agree, this is likely to be the case, but your grandson will.
How a customer arrives at your restaurant
My proposal was to find the restaurant they were planning to stay at and show them how difficult it was to find it on the internet. Before and far from having a website, they didn’t even have the option to The conversation turned to talking about the customer’s journey from the moment they think they want to eat, to the moment they arrive at your restaurant. That is a miracle in which you can participate.
Design thinking of a restaurant
The English words came out and the first criticisms appeared. A little bit of wanted and gratuitous controversy wasn’t so bad. Let’s say that “design thinking” is the literal translation of design thinking. Applied to restaurants, it would be designing the customer experience based on thinking about how the customer feels when they use your service, what is the path from the moment they think about going to a restaurant until they get to your place and live the experience.
I gave them an example of a malpractice we were experiencing. Our table was placed on the way to the bathrooms, so that everyone who wanted to use them had to border our table. If the table had been placed one meter further to one side, the toilet user would not have to go around the table. Considering that one user came with her eyes on her cell phone, having a table in the middle was foreboding of a catastrophe. And it happened to us, the girl tripped and almost fell into the arms of Maria who was in her way. The design of how to set up the restaurant room would be extraordinary if someone had considered where to place the tables to facilitate all the services to the users. Simple.
