Content Marketing for Restaurants

Content marketing is a great way for restaurants and the hospitality industry at large to engage with their audience. In our culture, food is a social experience, and this goes double, for dinning out. Here are our top tips on content marketing for restaurants.

Guidelines to follow when producing content marketing for restaurants

As with all your marketing activities, your content needs to be customer focused. Sorry to break it to you, but what you find interesting, may NOT be what your customers would call riveting. They’re probably not fussed that your kitchen hand, Tommy, turned up to work 15 minutes late today.

Knowing what content does get them excited, is easier when you have a clear idea of your target market. Don’t know enough about your most profitable customers? Check out this blog and get to know your customers like the back of your own hand.

Mix it up

Please don’t use the same post over and over again. You need a great variety of content to keep people engaged. You also want to grow your following by enticing new people to your page. When people are deciding whether to follow you, they will be looking at your whole timeline, including the last few posts you’ve done. Trust me, using the same image to post about Friday night’s quiz gets boring very quickly.

Here are some content ideas to inspire you:

Use social media to post the occasional competition. Remember to encourage your audience to tag their friends in the comments. You can make the prize a cheaper meal or an upgrade of their meal. Free meals are fine now and again. But we recommend you don’t fall into a pattern of this. There are people out there who hunt down free products and services as a hobby and they have a high penchant for complaining about their free products on social media. You have been warned.

Not confident of your own photography skills? Get your customers to take them for you. Run a food photo competition where customers post photos of their meal to social media and tag you in the caption. Ensure your rules state, that people who enter, are also giving you permission to use the photos, and BOOM! There you have it – photos for the next 6 months.

Phycology shows that people love photos of people. Dr. Owen Churches, from the school of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, has studied the neuroscience of face perception.

“Most of us pay more attention to faces than we do to anything else,” says Churches. “We know experimentally that people respond differently to faces than they do to other object categories.”

Take photos of your staff and take photos of your customers (ask for permission first). If you have a live band playing, get some crowd shots, or take a photo your competition winners.

Post recipes on your blog and accompany these with great photos of your meals. This is less in your face sales and provides your customers with valuable content that they will revisit. For your customers who are less inclined to cook, you’ve whetted their appetite and they may very well jump on the phone to book a table asap.

Post a video to Facebook. Facebook awards a higher ranking to videos that are directly uploaded to its website higher than any other content. they prefer video to be uploaded directly as they don’t want you sending their users off to one of their largest competitors, YouTube. Take a look at the Facebook page for The Farriers Bar & Eatery for some inspiration. They have a fantastic video as their cover image.

I hope this has inspired you to create your own content marketing for restaurants. The main thing to consider when employing a content marketing strategy, is consistently. There’s nothing worse than posting on Instagram three times in one day, and then nothing for the next two months. If you are stuck for ideas or don’t know where to start, contact our marketing coordinator. We’ll do your marketing communications for you and let you get back to managing your restaurant.