Marketing Tips For Restaurants: Do You Struggle With Social Media?

Social media is both familiar and unexplored lands for restaurant operators. It’s been around some time, yet any online marketer will tell you there are still vast uncharted opportunities in social media waiting to be tapped. Problem is, you already signed up for Twitter, Facebook, and even YouTube, but for some reason customers just don’t seem to come in. You are losing money, you are losing hope on your restaurant business, and this whole social media thing.

Let me quote a simple fact about online marketing.

If content is king, then conversion is queen.

John Munsell, CEO of Bizzuka.

I’ll tell you one thing. Marketing your restaurant through social media –Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc–has more to do than just signing up an account and introducing today’s wine dinner or next week’s lunch specials. Conversation is key. You need to bridge the gap between your brand and your customers, and social media, if done right, can help you with just that.

Here are some marketing tips for restaurant operators looking to advertise through social media.

1. Devise a plan (or know what you want to do before you do it)
Advertising on social media requires more thought than it looks. To paraphrase the CEO of M Strategies Inc. Michelle Smith, it isn’t strategy just being there.

The first crucial marketing tip for restaurant owners is to know their audience. Are your customers or market niche on social networks? Which social network?

Then proceed by establishing a friendly relationship with them through dialogue. Tell them about your brand, the latest news and events happening in your restaurant. I’m sure everyone one of us is a customer, a consumer, and isn’t it wonderful when a certain brand takes the time to hear us out?

2. Listen to your brand feedback (or get ready to mingle)
People hate filling up customer feedback forms, but they seldom hold back saying what’s on their mind on the Internet, especially in social network forums. Any marketing tips for restaurants article or blog will tell you that.

As a restaurant operator, this is incredible customer data, and you don’t even have to offer free dessert. In social network forums, customers will say what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they’d have wanted to see but didn’t, etc. Since most social network forums have IM features, it’s easy to reach out to them.

3. Invest time to do the task (or don’t do it if you don’t have time to do it)
Kogi BBQ is a small, albeit very successful, food business that roams around Los Angeles on a van selling tacos. But here’s the real piece of news: Kogi BBQ has its own exclusive social media manager staff - Mike Prasad. His sole responsibility is to handle the brand’s presence online.

When advertising on social media first started out, it was okay to assign an intern on it. But times change, and competition only grows over time.

Nowadays it’s brand suicide, almost unethical, for a restaurant operator to put a kid on the job. These days it’s best, as a marketing tip for restaurant operators, to invest time and money to hire someone with the right skills and knowledge. And make sure this person can tie it all together. So your restaurant website, newsletters and microsites all track back to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and all other social networks with your presence.

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

Benjamin Franklin.

This is it for now. I’ll give you time to digest everything so you could get started on planning your social media efforts.

Check back later this week where I’ll discuss more social media marketing tips for restaurants.