Consumers want restaurant food this holiday season. A recent HungerRush survey of 1,000 adult consumers in the U.S. found that 64 percent of respondents said they planned to order at least one food item from a restaurant to include in their holiday meals, while 37 percent said they would order their entire holiday meals from a restaurant. Does your data hold clues as to how you can best support your own guests’ holiday wishes for festive food? Maybe they’re looking to treat themselves after cutting back on meals out of the house this year, to minimize their own prep work at home, or to simply enjoy the festive season with foods they wouldn’t normally make themselves. Fill out your calendar with outreach that taps into those wishes. This could include contacting last year’s guests (and other segmented groups on your email list) to share your holiday menus, take-out meal bundles or limited-time offers. Or, help people get into the holiday spirit by creating videos of your decorated restaurant or your chef preparing a special menu item that you share on social media. Encourage new social media followers (and sharers) by launching a social media contest and offering a free meal or a gift card as a prize. If you have community partners – like charities or complementary businesses – coordinate your social media efforts with them to encourage new people to support you this season. With each promotion, ask yourself what need you’re aiming to fulfill so you can ensure you’re sending out content that connects with your ideal guests. Thinking of tapping into social media influencers to help with your marketing efforts? It helps to be patient and flexible. The return on investment can be difficult to trace directly, and because influencer marketing is fairly new, you may be unclear about how to set mutually beneficial agreements with influencers. That said, if you cater to a niche audience and you follow social media influencers who have developed large and/or loyal followings in your space, your efforts to partner with them may help give your social media marketing exponential power. A report from CIO Coverage indicated that when the restaurant brand All Bar One partnered with 10 micro-influencers with a combined following of 200,000, they were able to increase their brunch sales by 28 percent across their 50 restaurants and bars. If you’re thinking about giving influencer marketing a try, it’s important to approach the right partners – ideally, people who consistently post content that is relevant to your brand, generate positive attention in the form of likes and comments, and engage professionally and responsively with their audience when that happens. In a recent interview with Expedite, Jennifer Bell, the CMO of the Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, said their company has been working with influencers to extend their brand in new ways. She says: “I love the idea of us not telling you why you should come to the restaurants, but an influencer showing you why. That is a much more powerful message and a more powerful way to connect with customers.” Where do your guests interact with you online? If you have a strong social media following and a consistent presence on select platforms — or even if you have plans to launch social media-based marketing campaigns in the future — you could probably benefit from social media ordering. The recent announcement that Deliverect was acquiring ChatFood, a company specializing in social media ordering, is likely to make the capability far more common. Restaurant Business reports that Deliverect works with about 41,000 restaurants around the world and roughly one-third of them are located in the U.S. The deal will give restaurants that use Deliverect a new stream of orders: People can order food from these restaurants directly from their Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts without having to leave the app and place their order from your website or a separate app. Restaurant food is often an impulse purchase and the social media ordering functionality removes some of the barriers that currently exist between your food and potential guests. Imagine sending someone in your loyalty program a WhatsApp message with a targeted offer. Instead of leaving WhatsApp to visit your app or website to order, all they have to do is reply. They can even use the same app to coordinate the order with their partner. For a large number of consumers, summer is prime time for eating out. Statista research found that 48 percent of consumers say they dine out more in the summer than in any other season. So before the season wraps up, make the most of the opportunities it can provide to elevate your restaurant online for the public in the months ahead. There’s no promotion better than an authentic testimonial from a guest, so consider where you can accumulate user-generated content – to include photos, video and audio created by guests based on their experiences with your restaurant. Are your guests already posting about your restaurant on social media? Modern Restaurant Management advises restaurants put a mechanism in place to gather what guests post in one place so it can build some momentum around your brand. Develop a contest or other promotion and create a branded hashtag that you ask your guests to use when sharing content about your restaurant. Launch a food photography contest or name-the-new-cocktail contest and give the winner a free appetizer or drink, along with promotion on your social media channels and other marketing outlets. Your loyal guests are your restaurant’s best ambassadors. How can you channel their enthusiasm for your restaurant into promotions that can bring other guests back after the season has ended? Can your guests place an order with you via social media? It’s a practice that is likely to expand in light of Deliverect’s recent announcement that it would be acquiring ChatFood, a firm that specializes in ordering via social media, as well as tableside order and payment functionality and loyalty solutions. Restaurant Business explained that ChatFood integrates with Meta apps such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and allows customers to order directly from a restaurant’s profile via these platforms. The move was made in an effort to help remove barriers between consumers and the restaurant food they’re craving. It’s a good time to review the process your guests go through to order from you. Where is there an opportunity to reduce the friction? Social media planning and posting can feel like a one-and-done exercise: Conceive of eye-catching content, post it, hope for the best and move on. But if you’re strategic about your posts – and simply aware of how people respond to your brand – you can generate a response that’s far larger than any individual post. Take Chipotle’s recent experience on TikTok with a menu hack shared by two content creators on the platform. Late last year, the pair’s review of a Chipotle steak quesadilla with fajita veggies touted a do-it-yourself dressing made from the brand’s chipotle-honey vinaigrette and sour cream. So many people tried to order the off-menu item that Chipotle decided to promote it as a limited-time offer on its app and website this spring. When you consider potential contests, invitations to share menu preferences, or other outreach to customers via social media, think a few steps ahead. How might you use guest feedback to not only reward people for their loyalty but also demonstrate your own engagement with the people who enjoy your food most? Restaurant reviews – both positive and negative – pack a punch. TripAdvisor found that 94 percent of U.S. restaurant diners base their dining decisions off of online reviews. The sweet spot for ratings is four stars and higher: According to Review Trackers, consumers don’t trust businesses or restaurant operators with reviews of less than four stars, and 33 percent of diners won’t eat at restaurants where the ratings on Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google are lower than four stars. A Harvard Business School study found that restaurants can boost their revenue by 5-9 percent for every star added to a Yelp review. Playing reviews to your advantage requires a deft response, particularly to your negative reviews (though potential brand ambassadors may be hiding out in both your positive and negative reviews). A thoughtful, calm, well-written response can turn a bad review on its head and make a reader – if not the reviewer themselves – want to give you a try. In a recent report from Modern Restaurant Management, Izzy Kharasch of the restaurant consulting company Hospitality Works advises operators go back through two years of online reviews for their restaurant and respond to each one personally. Thank the person for bringing a problem to your attention, apologize for not meeting their expectations, and invite them to contact you personally. Ask them back to your restaurant and check on them personally – you may or may not want to offer a free appetizer or round of drinks. Your treatment may motivate them to post a positive updated review and to recommend you to friends. There is just something about online videos that make a person engage. A study from Animoto found that Facebook videos generate 10 times more comments than other kinds of posts. A separate study found that Instagram videos receive 38 percent more engagement than image posts. (This likely explains why Instagram, which originated as a place to share photos, has somewhat controversially been trying to reinvent itself as a video platform in recent years.) And every platform wants to be TikTok right now for its ability to motivate people to not only watch entertaining content but also share it with friends. Video should be a key part of your marketing strategy because it can help you build stronger connections between the people who prepare your food and those who enjoy eating it. And they can be very brief – Animoto suggests small businesses post a good number of videos that are 15 seconds in length – with a hook within the first few seconds. Consider the talents on your team and how you can showcase them in ways that connect with people. Have a creative chef? Have him share his favorite cooking hacks, or interesting takes on how to work with a food item in different ways (the #TortillaTrend on TikTok is one example). Do you have a dish that can be customized in dozens of ways? Share some diverse examples – or better yet, ask your viewers to vote for their favorite or share their own concoction. Do you plate your dishes in visually striking ways? Create a contest in which you challenge your viewers to share their own outrageous platings. Who knows? You might just become a viral sensation and give your restaurant a valuable boost in traffic. Your guests – and sudden boosts in sales – can come from unexpected places. That’s especially true at a time when a restaurant can be observed from afar in a range of online channels, unbeknownst to an operator. Take the recent example of the struggling Las Vegas restaurant Frankensons suddenly becoming a viral sensation after it emailed out a plea for visitors. It caught the attention of a social media influencer who visited the restaurant, loved the food and posted a glowing TikTok review. Now, the owner of Frankensons has a better problem – trying to meet the steep rise in demand for his food. An MGH survey published in late 2022 found that 53 percent of millennial TikTok users had visited a restaurant after seeing it on the social media platform. Research from TouchBistro about the state of the restaurant industry this year indicated that while Facebook is the most popular platform for social media promotion for restaurants (62 percent of operators report using it for marketing) and Twitter isn’t far behind at 59 percent, only 40 percent of restaurant operators report using TikTok for promotion. When you consider your marketing efforts for the year, think about the stories you can tell, what makes your brand special, and how you can translate it using videos, photos and words through a mix of channels – including but not limited to social media. Your most loyal new guests might find you where you least expect it. It’s easy to get canceled these days. For a restaurant, a critical online review going viral, a negative story about a key supplier appearing in the news, or a food safety crisis can do it. Even the public’s perception of a restaurant’s connection to the war happening on the other side of the world (whether that connection actually exists or not) can have consequences that temporarily derail a restaurant business. While you can’t control how people react to your business, you can take steps to manage a crisis in a way that turns down the heat instead of making the problem worse. Make it a priority to monitor and manage your online profile. When you receive a positive written review, thank the reviewer for the post. When the inevitable negative review happens, respond promptly and stay professional about finding a solution. If you feel you can do something to make the situation right, encourage the person to call you directly or invite them back – showing everyone how you handle an upset guest constructively may even win you some fans. If a larger crisis comes about, use your Google Business Profile and prominent space on your website to pose and answer commonly asked questions in an open, transparent way. While no restaurant is looking for crises, they can generate some opportunities to elevate your reputation with the public if managed thoughtfully and promptly. |
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