The Ultimate Guide To Marketing Restaurants and Cafés | Tips on Tracking Sales and Making the Most of Social Media
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In a fast-growing sector like restaurants and cafés, a lot of its players face tough competition to prove themselves, showcase their dishes, and gain customer trust. Therefore, advertising and marketing in this sector are super important for success. You might offer the best recipes in your restaurant, but you need a unique and well-thought-out plan to attract and reach your customers.
A lot of business owners in this sector are looking for the best ways to market their businesses to hit their goals. With the digital scene evolving, just using roadside billboards isn’t enough anymore, and social media has become one of the top trends for promoting this sector and growing its audience.
Like other industries, advertising for restaurants and cafés mainly relies on "data" and reports generated by restaurant management systems. Data and social media platforms are two of the most important aspects of successful marketing.
Whether you have a mobile coffee cart or a restaurant with a unique menu, promoting your business and knowing how to attract new customers while connecting with regulars is super important for successful management, according to Statista. The age group between 18-29 is the most popular demographic in retail, so building special relationships with this group will benefit your brand and help you grab a share of the target market.
Whether you have a coffee cart or a restaurant with a unique menu, promoting your business and knowing how to attract new customers while connecting with regulars is super important for successful management. According to Statista. The age group between 18-29 is the most popular demographic in retail. Thus, building special relationships with this group will benefit your brand.
Our Yalla Plus team presents you with the basic tips you may need to market your restaurant or café to ensure smart and successful management...
Table of Contents:
# Key tips for advertising Restaurants and Cafés.
- Identify your target audience.
- Use online advertising.
- Use collaborations and partnerships.
- Use traditional advertising methods.
- Track advertising metrics.
Key tips for advertising Restaurants and Cafés:
Identify your target audience:
Of course, before building a relationship with your customers through advertising, you need to figure out who your customers are first and who's your target audience. Even though this isn't always an easy thing to do, with the right kind of research methods, you'll be able to identify your target audience and understand their needs.
You should realize that selling any product is all about meeting customer needs. When customers are looking for a café to chill at on a super-hot day, they’re usually looking for the best cold drink. But a lot of them want new and exciting flavors, and a cool place to hang out with friends, and many are looking for transparency about ingredient ratios and sources.
Thus, make sure to dive deep into understanding the demographics of your target audience - including age, gender, and interests that helps you get a better grasp of their needs. Before spending money on advertising, you need to analyze your customers' preferences and habits and understand what inspires them to come back to you.
- There are a bunch of tools that may help you figure out your target audience. You can use survey sites (like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms) to ask open-ended questions to potential customers about your café and their preferences to get some useful insights.
- Use social media analytics to understand how your café is doing on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.
- Use tools like HubSpot and Sprout Social to see how many people are engaging with your social media content and how many sales your posts are generating. This will be super helpful for understanding your target audience and their preferences.
Read more: Restaurant guests' preferences in 2024.
Use online advertising:
To be honest, most internet users are driven to block or mute any ad that pops up in front of them, but having a strong online presence is one of those things that makes a difference and inspires the audience to click on your ad. A strong online presence includes:
- The website or the digital menu: The Digital menu from Yalla Plus acts like a website for your restaurant. It presents you with a barcode that you can use for promoting your restaurant. You can share menu info, add offers/discounts, and enable direct ordering through it, which will boost your customers' experience and market your restaurant.
- A strong presence on social media: To build your online presence, you need to pay attention to your restaurant's profiles on the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram. They're one of the most important marketing tools for restaurants and cafes, and you can use them effectively to reach your audience and boost your sales.
- Ordering System: The smooth order system ensures you get the most out of your online ad. You need to choose the best-integrated system that helps you receive orders through social media platforms. The order and pay system from Yalla Plus presents your customers with a simple and secure ordering and payment experience, allowing them to order through social networks or in the restaurant using the Digital menu from Yalla Plus.
Online advertising is categorized into two categories: organic and paid. Mixing both categories will ensure you the maximum promotion for your restaurant or café.
- Online organic advertising: it includes everything free that you can use for promotion:
- Organic social media: it includes any free content shared on social media, like videos, posts, blogs, stories, and more. It's a chance to share the food experience and showcase the unique vibe of your restaurant or café, plus show off your brand's identity to the world.
- SEO: When Googling "best restaurant near me", a customer is likely to get thousands of results. Optimizing your restaurant's website for SEO will help it show up at the top of the results, which means more clicks and customers coming in. The Digital menu from Yalla Plus is designed to boost search engine performance.
- Business directory and review sites: You can use "Google My Business" to help customers find your restaurant faster by showing up on Google. You can also use review sites that let customers share their opinions and ratings about your restaurant, which can encourage other customers to check it out.
- Online paid advertising: it's a more precise way to promote your restaurants or café and target customers, plus it's better optimized to reach the target audience:
- PPC advertising: It's a way to pay advertising platforms (like Google or social media) when someone clicks on your ad. Since paid search ads show up at the top of Google's page or through social media feeds (the ads that say "Sponsored"), they usually have a benefit on your restaurant. Plus, it's easy to target specific markets, track the number of clicks, and scale your ads up or down based on your results.
- Social media ads: Social media platforms enable you to create targeted ads based on demographics and interests. For example, you can promote your restaurant's plant-based menu items to the communities that are into clean eating or target dog owners to show off your restaurant's spacious dog-friendly patio. Unlike traditional print or TV ads, social media lets you tweak your ad and your target audience based on who’s engaging with it.
- Banner ads: They usually show up as a strip at the top of the page. They can be pretty effective if you place them on relevant websites and blogs that your target audience may visit. But banner ads usually have lower click-through rates, but they definitely help create brand awareness just by being seen. Now, banner ads come in all shapes and sizes, including videos, pop-ups, and interactive features.
Check out what the Point of Sale system from Yalla Plus offers for boosting your restaurant's operations and keeping your customers satisfied.
Use collaborations and partnerships:
You can promote your restaurant through relevant collaborations and partnerships to raise awareness and attract new customers.
When collaborating with potential partners, try to figure out what’s in it for them and come up with an idea. For example, if you have a partnership with a bookstore, you could host a talk night with an author the store wants to promote. In return, the store could include a printed ad for your restaurant with every book purchase. That would be great for marketing for both sides.
Also, identify influencers in your zone who have a lot of followers and post regularly, and make a deal with them. Let them have a behind-the-scenes look at your restaurant that most customers don’t get to watch, like checking out the kitchen’s cleanliness or interviewing a waiter or chef about the ingredients.
Use traditional advertising methods:
Printed ads: We can't forget that printed ads tend to be EXCITING and more memorable than digital ones. Always look for creativity in using colors, fonts, sizes, and eye-catching designs. Think about advertising your restaurant or café in local newspapers and magazines to reach a non-digital audience.
Flyers: Hand out promotional flyers about your restaurant in busy areas where your target audience hangs out, like universities and shopping malls.
The digital menu from Yalla Plus presents you with a barcode that you can use as a marketing tool, when a customer scans the barcode with their smartphones, they get taken straight to the menu page, which is a huge opportunity to market your restaurant's services. Make sure to put the barcode on your promotional flyers and share it on social media.
Local events and sponsorships: One of the main perks of getting involved in local events and sponsorships is that it builds trust in your brand with your target audience. Having your restaurant's name printed as one of the sponsors on a local festival banner could be the push people need to trust your brand.
Local events and sponsorships: One of the main perks of getting involved in local events and sponsorships is that it builds trust between your business and the target audience. Having your restaurant's name printed as one of the sponsors on a local festival banner could be the push people need to trust your brand.
Check out what the Digital menu from Yalla Plus offers to help you ensure a great experience for your customers in your restaurant.
Track advertising metrics:
It's highly important to track the effectiveness of previous efforts in advertising restaurants or cafésto make reasonable data-driven decisions based on real results. Here are some key metrics you should be aware of:
Impressions: When using digital ads, you need to keep an eye on the number of times the ad is shown.
Clicks: You need to check the number of times your ad has been clicked.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): It's the percentage of people who clicked on your ad to the number of people that the ad showed up for them.
Conversion rate: It's the percentage of clicks that led to an actual sale, and it's a super valuable way to figure out how well your digital ad is doing.
Cost per click (CPC): the average amount you pay to ad platforms for every person who clicks on your ad.
Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS): The revenue earned for every dollar spent on advertising.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of acquiring a new customer through advertising. To calculate CAC, pick a period (like a month, quarter, etc.), add up all your marketing and sales expenses, and divide that by the number of customers.
Conclusion
With so many strategies to promote restaurants and cafes, coming up with a suitable promotional strategy might seem exciting but also a bit overwhelming for some. So, we hope that with our tips and guidance on the best ways to market and advertise your restaurant, along with our restaurant and cafe management software solutions from Yalla Plus, you can smoothly market and manage your business, turning potential customers into regulars.
Read more: Yalla Plus Raises $2.7 Million Seed Funding to Transform Hospitality Tech.
Read more: Food allergies in restaurants: Overlooked risks that call for caution.
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