Get started promoting your restaurant
You’ve signed up to the Marketing Studio which is great, now it’s time to get promoting your restaurant to win new customers, sell more food and make more people aware of you. Whether you’re a takeaway, pub, restaurant or café, the following guide will help you get on your way to getting seen.
Take some photos of the dishes you want to promote. That could be meal deals, special offers, or new additions to your menu. Lighting is important, natural light works best. For extra tips, check out this blog from Aviko’s photography studio.
The examples we’ve provided are pictures we took for our consumer social profiles. We’ve set the food out nicely with a few background items to add depth to the image, we’ve then taken the photo from a diner’s perspective next to a window to get the natural light. All done on our mobile. If the picture isn’t bright enough, you can change all of that on your phone settings.
Promote special offers & meals deals
Typically, midweek is a bit quieter for restaurants, takeaways, cafes and pubs. However, the mid-week treat is an opportunity to tempt customers with special offers and meal deals you might be offering. This video gives you an overview of how easy it is to create an eye-catching social media post promoting your special offers.
Want to target your neighbours with a leaflet drop?
If you find leaflet drops work for you, you can use the Marketing Studio to create leaflets, just choose the Menu/Flyer design and get creating. This example shows how to create a printable leaflet for a drop to the local neighbourhood to attract local regular customers.
Let your customers know about your restaurant
It’s good to let people know about the different services you offer to remind them you’re there and ready to feed customers delicious food. This example shows how to create a social media post to let people know that you serve breakfast and brunch, you could create anything from showcasing your most popular dishes to your availability on other platforms like Just Eat.
Show off your menu & specials menu
Got a new menu, or a new specials menu? Create a menu that you can use on social media and your website to let customers and potential diners know about your delicious food. You can create the design with pictures of the food, your logo and lots of other elements to tempt them. You can download the file as a PDF to print and as an image to use on social media and your website. Choose from pre-built templates, or create a menu from scratch.
Let people know about the specifics
Want to let customers know you’re available on Just Eat, or that they can order at your own website? Changed your opening hours, offering new mealtime services? Let your customers know with visual social media posts. The example below shows a number of the pre-built templates you can choose. You can also create your own design from scratch and upload your own food photography, logos, generate QR codes, change colour schemes, you name it, the only limit is your own creativity.
Downloading images is really simple, just check out like you would in an online shop (it’s all free here though) and when you complete the order, click download. You can even go to ‘My Account’ and view your old orders and redownload them, or edit them.
1. Finalise your design
When you’re happy with your design and want to download it, click PROCESS in the top right corner.
2. Check your order
You will navigate to an order summary page. When happy choose PROCEED TO CHECKOUT.
You can also go back and edit the design or create new ones to be added to your shopping basket.
3. Place order
You will navigate to a final confirmation page. When happy choose PLACE ORDER.
Note: You will see references to cost and billing address, this is due to the platform being build using an ecommerce platform. You will not be charged for any of the services used.
3. Download your design
You will navigate to an order confirmation page, here you can download your finished design by clicking DOWNLOAD. You can also choose the file type to download by clicking on PNG where you can choose either PNG (an image) or PDF (document for printing).
5. Test some advertising
Social media advertising can be cost-effective and provide you with a good return on Investment. If you’re new to it, don’t worry, just test it out using £5 to see what sort of response you get. Check out this article: a beginner’s guide to Facebook advertising (Facebook advertising covers Instagram too!).
With social advertising you can choose different options, so you might want to get people to visit your website to order, so you can focus your ad on Traffic (getting people to click on a link to go to your website). You might want to make people aware of you, so you’d choose Brand Awareness or Reach. You can target people with specific interests, i.e. your cuisine type and postcode location so you’re hitting the right people.
Here’s an example of the types of numbers you could expect, we’ve benchmarked the results from Aviko’s consumer social media advertising to demonstrate what you could achieve:
Based on an average conversion rate of 3.98% for the Food and Drink Industry, that equates to…
Based on an average bill of £15 per order, that’s £150 revenue for £28.67 spend. So unless your margin is less than 19%, you’re making a profit. Plus, factor in the 2nd and 3rd order from those customers and you have a profitable marketing campaign at a very low cost.
Note – If you’re uncomfortable navigating Facebook Ad Manager, look at a freelancer to help you run marketing campaigns. It shouldn’t cost much to run a campaign once in a while. There’ll be plenty of freelancers local to you too (we’re a common breed us marketing people).
6. Track orders from Social Media
If you’re planning on using social media for the long term then it’s wise to track your sales that come from social media. This way you can get the most bang for your buck with advertising and learn which channels work best for you in terms of sales. With Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager you can track where your orders/reservations are coming from, this includes the social media channels.
Setting this up requires a little bit of technical knowledge, but it’s not a big task and only needs setting up once. You can then get a report emailed to you on a regular basis. Use a freelancer or your web agency to set it up and get the report delivered to you so you know how social media is working for your restaurant.
- Instagram Sales
- Facebook Sales