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How to promote your restaurant on instagram


How To Master Restaurant Marketing On Instagram

Here’s 10 restaurant marketing strategies to elevate your eatery on Instagram 🍴

In a world where 69% of us photograph our food before we eat it, Instagram is the place for restaurants, cafes and street food vendors to grow their brand and attract customers.

1. Create a Restaurant Hashtag #️⃣
2. Use Food & Drink Social Media Holidays 🗓
3. Stick to a Feed Colour Palette 🎨
4. Create Story Highlights 📱
5. Create a Memorable and Unique Brand Symbol 💡
6. Partner With Influencers & Food Bloggers 🤳
7. Run Competitions & Giveaways 🎁
8. Photography Tip: Master the Flat Lay Shot 📷
9. Photography Tip: Good Lighting 📷
10. Photography Tip: Composition 📷

Instagram has become more valuable to restaurant marketing than most websites, with people discovering new places to eat on the app, and deciding whether they want to go there based on the restaurant’s Instagram feed.  “Instagram goes hand-in-hand with word-of-mouth” says Maree Suteja, owner of Crate Cafe, Bali, which was designed with Instagram in mind.

Maree isn’t the only restaurateur cashing in on the millennial impulse to order beautiful plates of food to photograph and share on Instagram…

“There is a new wave of ‘Insta-friendly’ restaurants launching around the globe. Each element of these restaurants has been carefully crafted; from the decor and lighting to the way food is presented, all with the sole intention of customers posting photos on Instagram.” — Adglow

And the demand is there! It doesn’t take much googling to find lists and lists of the ‘most Instagrammable restaurants’ in a city. The users who are looking for these places to post on Instagram naturally become brand ambassadors for the restaurants — it’s complete genius, and the magic of Instagram for restaurant marketing.

Building your restaurant to be ‘Instagrammable’ is one thing (and definitely something to bear in mind). But if redecorating isn’t on the agenda, there are plenty of restaurant marketing strategies you can use on Instagram to increase your reach and attract new customers…

⭐️ Restaurant Marketing On Instagram: Top Tips ⭐️

1. Create a Restaurant Hashtag #️⃣

Keep a hashtag in your bio which tells customers what to tag when they post Instagram photos at your restaurant! This will help you keep track of user-generated content.

What is user-generated content?

Photos of your restaurant taken by anyone but you! Re-posting customer photos is a key restaurant marketing strategy on Instagram, for a number of reasons:

  • It shows visitors to your profile a genuine dining experience
  • It helps build community
  • It increases engagement

Another reason for encouraging and posting UGC is that it saves you time that would’ve been spent creating content, which you can spend focusing on other areas of your restaurant marketing!

Including a hashtag in your restaurant Instagram bio like Baoziinn encourages users to tag you in their posts, and gives you a way to keep track of UGC.

For more information on Instagram hashtags and how to use them in your restaurant marketing, check out our all in one guide!

2. Use Food & Drink Social Media Holidays 🗓

A great restaurant marketing strategy is to plan campaigns around social media holidays! There are lots of commemorative food and drink days that garner a lot of attention on Instagram and Twitter alike, think #NationalProseccoDay and #WorldVeganDay. Creating content for these events increases your reach (because the hashtags will be trending) and is great if you’re running low on ideas (because you can plan in advance).

There is so much potential for creativity when creating campaigns around food social media holidays. Depending how far in advance you plan and schedule Instagram content, you can create content especially to post on the day, or even create a (particularly Instagrammable) dish especially. Similarly, on the day itself, you can use the hashtag to promote a special offer or menu item.

Genesis and Alchemy using #WorldVeganDay to promote their vegan menu items.

Restaurants don’t need to limit themselves to food and drink social media holidays! There are plenty of commemorative days and events that you can tie into your restaurant marketing campaigns, such as #NationalFriendshipDay.

Never miss a trend again! Keep track of all restaurant marketing social media holidays with our 2020 calendar:

3. Stick to a Feed Colour Palette 🎨

Maybe it’s the colour of your walls, or the surface of your tables, or a range of bright dishes — whatever you choose as your main content focus, try and stick to a consistent colour palette. Restaurant marketing on Instagram is entirely visual, and a cohesive feed could be the make or break of someone scrolling on or clicking the follow button.

Random and inconsistent looking content will make your restaurant’s Instagram page look messy and generally less aesthetically pleasing. The important thing with restaurant marketing on Instagram is to try to post with your whole feed in mind rather than individual posts, as it will help you create a stand-out profile.

Compare the two restaurant feeds below: the first posts a random collection of content without a clear colour palette or theme in mind, the second maintains a pale white and blue theme which creates a much more satisfying effect for profile visitors.

A restaurant Instagram feed without a consistent style of content, vs one with a colour palette.

Naturally, sticking to a colour palette on your restaurant Instagram feed requires more discipline and planning than posting as and when you feel like it. This is when you need to use an Instagram Grid Planner like we have at Hopper HQ. You can upload your content from your desktop, schedule it to Instagram in advance, and drag and drop the posts to create the perfect theme.

Using a grid planner like this for your restaurant marketing on Instagram saves loads of time, and prevents any posts clashing or looking too repetitive.

Sign up for a free trial of Hopper HQ today to test out the Instagram grid planner and skyrocket your restaurant marketing! 🚀

4.

Create Story Highlights 📱

Another must for restaurant marketing on Instagram is Story highlights! When somebody lands on your profile, you want to give them as much as possible to look at and learn about your restaurant before they go elsewhere. Story highlights essentially act as a menu on your Instagram profile, that users can navigate much like a website.

Whether it’s your menu broken into categories, weekly specials, meet the team profiles, or your favourite customer photos — think about what you want to convey about your restaurant at the top of your profile to make visitors want to follow you!

Examples of Story highlights from Cafe Organic and Caravan that tell visitors more about the restaurant.

As these restaurants have done, we’d also recommend making Story highlight covers as well. This will make your Instagram profile look clean and professional, and is generally more enticing to click! You can make these covers through Stories themselves, or on a third-party graphic design app such as Canva.

5. Create a Memorable, Unique and (obviously) Instagrammable Brand Symbol 💡

Instagram is all about virality. If you have something associated with your restaurant this is highly photographable and unique, it has the potential to become an Instagram craze. As far as restaurant marketing goes, this is a winning strategy. Not only do your customers become brand ambassadors when they share photos of this ‘cool Instagrammable thing’, people will come to your restaurant because they have seen it on Instagram.

Take this chain of cafes by Maison Kitsune — who serve fox biscuits with their beverages — as a great example:

These foxy biscuits have become an Instagram trend in Paris, Tokyo and Seoul associated with this Cafe Kitsune.

It’s a beautifully simple but hugely successful restaurant marketing idea. This can be applied to any restaurant or cafe, and has great potential for creativity depending how big (neon sign on the wall) or small (unique coffee art) you want to go!

6.

Partner With Influencers & Food Bloggers 🤳

Food is such a popular industry on Instagram (I mean we all need to eat right?) that there are thousands of influencers and bloggers in the space sharing restaurant recommendations, recipes, and amazing content. These users typically have very engaged audiences in the areas they are based, which is why partnering with them is a great way restaurant marketing tactic for reaching new potential customers!

There are so many ways to collaborate with influencers depending on your budget and objective. Many food bloggers with a large following will charge per post or Story, whereas some micro influencers may give your restaurant a shout out in return for their meal on the house.

Here are two examples of food influencers posting about restaurants: one is clearly labelled as an ad and the other is a partnership competition (more on Instagram competitions in a moment).

Partner with food bloggers on Instagram to increase your reach.

For more information on working with influencers, Do’s and Don’ts of influencer marketing, and tips for getting the most out of campaigns, check out our guide!

7. Run Competitions & Giveaways 🎁

A valuable restaurant marketing tactic for Instagram is to run competitions with your audience. This not only increases engagement — with your followers liking and commenting to enter — but also your reach — by making ‘tag a friend’ a requirement for entry. Your followers therefore help increase brand awareness for you by tagging people (who will likely also live in your area) in your competition post!

Competitions require a lot of organisation, as you’ll need to decide:

  • Prize
  • Method of entry
  • How you’ll select the winner
  • How they redeem the prize
  • Terms & Conditions

As well as liking a post and tagging friends to enter, you can also run a photo competition, where you ask your customers to share a photo of your food with a specific hashtag and choose the best entry to win! Here are examples of both restaurant marketing strategies:

Tag a friend or snap a photo — different ways of running an Instagram competition for your restaurant from Grind and Arlos.

For a more detailed guide on how to run an Instagram competition, check out our 5 step guide.

To finish up our restaurant marketing on Instagram guide, we have 3 key food photography tips…

8. Photography Tip: Master the Flat Lay Shot 📷

A restaurant marketing trend across Instagram is utilising flat lay photography! Both restaurants and food bloggers alike photograph their tables from a bird’s eye view to create the satisfying effect we’ve come so used to seeing on Instagram. Yes, it may be slightly embarrassing standing on a chair to nail the shot, but it’s what you’ve got to do if you want your Instagram profile to stand out (or hopefully your customers will do most of it for you — check back to point #1).

This is another reason to have statement furniture or ornaments to make your tables really pop on Instagram! Think photo-first: whether it’s flowers, napkins with eye-catching patterns or any pretty embellishments — anything that makes it irresistibly photogenic will make a difference.

Black Star Bakery is nailing flat lay table shots.

As good as iPhone cameras are, it’s worth investing in a high quality DSLR if you really want to take your restaurant marketing to the next level.

9. Photography Tip: Good Lighting 📷

Good lighting is important to restaurant marketing for both you and your food photography, and the shots that your customers will take and share on Instagram! Natural lighting lends itself well to Instagram, particularly for those accounts aiming for a pale theme or feed colour palette. However, even if your restaurant (and therefore Instagram feed) is dark, you should always try to photograph your food in well lit settings.

Both of these restaurants utilise good lighting in different ways, with the left clearly photographing their food near a window, and the right using artificial light in a successful way that suits their feed:

Examples of food photography in both natural (Pastaio) and artificial lighting (Hawksmoor).

If you’re promoting new dishes or seasonal specials on Instagram, take the photos on a table with the best natural lighting, or even outside. Avoid photographing food in completely direct sunlight though, as it can over expose the shot and also give cause harsh shadows. The most important thing is to stay consistent with your restaurant marketing, brand, and Instagram theme!

10. Photography Tip: Composition 📷

Finally, both the angle and lighting of your photography should emphasise the food at the forefront of the photo. This is supported by the composition of the shot itself. Particularly for flat lay shots, it’s great to have a variety of table props enhancing the photo, however, you have to be careful you don’t detract attention from the food and drink that you’re trying to promote.

Depending on your Instagram theme, you might create compositions that are particularly colourful, or contrastingly only use items of a similar colour that complement one another. Decorative items that make the content more eye-catching, without taking the limelight are ideal.

My favourite example of food photography composition on Instagram is Aldi’s UK account. I know it’s not a restaurant, but it’s absolutely fantastic:

Aldi UK‘s ‘never ending table’ Instagram account is a great example of food photography composition.

Put your photography head on and think about angles and leading lines that draw the eye to your dishes, whilst still looking beautiful!

Check out even more tips from some digital photography pros to master your restaurant marketing game.

That wraps up our restaurant marketing tips for Instagram! Have any other strategies that work wonders? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.

Hopper HQ is a visual planning and scheduling tool for Instagram, bringing the creativity back to social media management and freeing up time to focus on the areas of marketing you love most 💙 Try it free today with our 14 day trial.

7 Proven Hacks to Turn Any Restaurant into an Instagram Powerhouse

For those of us looking to bolster legitimate business, Instagram is now a monster of a social platform. The advent of business profiles, insights, advanced metrics, bulk schedulers—these, combined with the platform’s original, unique value proposition (highly visual, immediate and widescale brand exposure) make Instagram a powerful asset for small and local businesses.

There’s perhaps no industry for which Instagram is better geared than the restaurant industry. Research has shown that people 18-35 spend five whole days a year browsing food images on Instagram, and 30% would avoid a restaurant if their Instagram presence was weak.

Much of the below content is derived from a new social project I’ve taken on at Tapestry Restaurant in Boston. I’ll show you some of the strategies we use, and some of the results we’ve achieved thus far.

Restaurant owners: here’s how to hack the ever-loving burrata out of your Instagram profiles, get more followers, and drive hungry people through the door.

1. Court food bloggers (oh so many food bloggers)

We’ll start things off with an ostensibly obvious hack – if you can get a food blogger with a large following to post about your restaurant, you’ll get the benefit of a huge amount of brand exposure to an interested foodie audience.

But here’s the kicker: however often you’re currently wining, dining, and pork rind-ing food bloggers, you’re not doing it nearly enough. You should start confusing these people for wait staff. They’re easily reachable (most list emails in their bios, but DM is just as effective), anxious to gain more followers (you’ll do this together), and dirt cheap (especially next to the influence they wield).

A lot of bloggers/influencers will charge you quite a bit for their services, but don’t get it twisted—there are more than enough willing to smother their social media platforms with your city-best Neapolitan pizza for the price of…well, your city-best Neapolitan pizza.

How big of a following should you be looking for? A good rule of thumb here is 30k-50k followers—these people have mastered the art of #foodporn, have amassed a loyal following because of it, but aren’t so preposterous as to ask for copious amounts of money to make your tagliatelle look sexy (it already was). 50k+ is where things start getting expensive. Although, we shouldn’t generalize. Shoot for as many followers as possible.

2. Run contests (oh so many contests)

Here’s an Instagram hack that goes hand-in-hand with the above, but with one caveat: limit contests to one/two per partnership. Running an Instagram contest with an influencer will cost you at least the amount you put up for a prize—I’ve generated significantly more interest with a $50 gift card than a $25 gift card, and would recommend that as a minimum—so you want each contest to reach a different set of followers (inevitably there will be some overlap). You also want to keep in mind contest fatigue (a real and troublesome phenomenon).

That said, once you’ve isolated a followership, it’s as simple as this: “Like this picture, tag the friend you’ll share your winnings with, and follow [your restaurant handle here].” Ask the influencer if they’ll share four or five pictures over the course of the next week and a half, and watch the followers roll in. Tapestry gained about 75 followers over the course of the contest we ran with the above-pictured blogger—an increase of a little over 4%. Not at all negligible, when you’re dealing with thousands of followers.

Owners: whip up enough gnocchi to feed a food blogger and a contest winner, and you’ve basically grown your Instagram following for free.

3. “You #knead this pizza”: live and die by catchy, authoritative copy

Throw in a CTA and we’re cooking with…grease, here!

Save the long copy for that novel you are totally going to finish. If Instagrammers’ thumbs were cars, they’d be dilapidated ’86 Honda Civics, pushing 120 mph in the left lane, duct tape where the windows used to be. They’re impatient, peripherally impaired, and they’re not stopping for…it. Accordingly, treat your organic posts like billboards—and, by extension, like promoted posts. Mere descriptions…

and witty one-offs…

often perform better than half-baked attempts at humor…

Because there’s nothing funny about #foodporn.

So tell a story. But keep it close to the length of a tweet. Tell that thumb to stop, like, click the reservation link in your bio (more on links shortly), etc. Good Instagram copy (it’s 2017, that’s a thing) works in conjunction, or as a supplement to the main event: the photo. If the public photography of food stuffs, baked or otherwise, is a source of embarrassment for you (it is for some people), you’ll not want to waste the effort on distracting copy. Kill your darlings!

4. Use the right scheduling tool

There are some pretty thorough articles out there on this subject—here’s one, and here’s another—and I recommend reading all of them (avoiding, obviously, those that seem biased toward one tool or another). Post scheduling is something you don’t want to mess around with. Instagram has long prided itself on being an app of “spontaneous posting,” and therefore does not allow third-party apps to post for you.

You know that awesome bulk scheduling tool you get in Facebook Business Manager? Yeah, there’s nothing of the sort in the Instagram UI. And no third-party posting means that apps like Hootsuite and Sprout Social have their hands tied.

The best these apps can do is send a pin to your smartphone—i.e., here is the post you scheduled, from your desktop, to appear on this date and time, now copy/paste the text to Instagram and post with your smartphone. This isn’t the worst thing in the world. It just means you have to remember to be on your phone when you get the reminder. Obviously not the best thing in the world, either.

Your other option is to pay for a third-party app to outsource your scheduled posts to tech farms in Ukraine, India, and elsewhere. It’s a hands-off alternative. They’ll send your posts for you. But you risk having your account suspended.

The following list of third-party apps is far from comprehensive, but comes from a guy who has made a mistake or two (or three) in the social game and feels thus inclined to expound upon his own tomfoolery.

ScheduGram: Check the forums: ScheduGram is the undisputed king of third-party posting. You can post videos, manage filters, post the first comment (important feature, more on that shortly), and integrate Canva for edits. Instagram seems to more or less allow ScheduGram to do its thing—few, if any accounts using it get suspended. One thing: it costs $20 per month. For one account. See above gif.

Onlypult: Pretty cost-effective (about $8/month), but you lose some of the functionality of ScheduGram. I used Onlypult for about three days on an account, had trouble posting, resolved that, then promptly had a “shadow ban” imposed on my account. My posts stopped showing up in my hashtag lists. Likes plummeted. Impressions plummeted.

Gramblr: When you’re in the annals of a Reddit thread about Gramblr, and a user with a name like “gramblrlovr11” come out of the woodwork and protests, “I dont no why you say a bad thing about Gramblr, Gramblr is best app,” you can safely take it with a grain of salt. This app follows/unfollows users at a rampant pace, posts erroneous comments, and messes with your DMs. It will, in all likelihood, get your account suspended. And judging by its Reddit presence, its bots are learning and will soon render us all obsolete.

*General internet consensus: stick with apps like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social—even if you have to use the free versions of these, with limited functionality. The hope is that, in the near future, Instagram will take pity on social media contractors everywhere and either integrate bulk scheduling into its UI, or allow third-party posting.

5. Use the most effective linking method at your disposal

An Instagram story link. For unverified accounts, Moby Dick.

Here’s another way Instagram just squeezes your social management: you can’t link within posts, and you can only link once in your bio. This means that if you really want people to see your slick new homepage, but you also want to send low-funnel users right to your OpenTable page to make a reservation, you have to choose one or the other (unless you’re running Instagram ads, in which case your options open up quite a bit).

Just win a “Best of Boston” category, or get linked to in a “Best City Patios” article? If you don’t want to sacrifice website/reservation clicks, you’re going to have to tell people in a single organic post, list the URL, then hope they manually type the URL into their browser (you can’t copy/paste out of Instagram, either).

Some very exciting news on this topic: Instagram story links are in open beta. Users will be able to “scroll up” on a story to a webpage of the restaurant’s choosing (perhaps a beautifully formatted menu, or an even more beautifully formatted “reserve table now” button). The story link function is currently available to all verified Instagram accounts, and to a lucky few among us in the bourgeois. The belief among erudite forum-dwellers seems to be that, like Instagram stories before them, story links are being gradually “rolled out” to all users.

6. Don’t skimp on hashtag research

The most precious step of post preparation.

#SeriouslyTho. Using the right hashtags is the single biggest thing you can do to drive organic impressions and increase your reach.

Instagram posts with at least one hashtag average 12.6% more engagement than those without. Imagine what you can do with around 24 (the typically allowable amount)!

Hop into your search bar and look for hashtags that will return enough results to get your post serious visibility, but not so many that your post will be buried in the glut. This, for instance…

shows higher intent, and will yield more low-funnel eyeballs than this:

There’s no hard and fast number to go by here, but it’s always a good idea to specify by location: i.e., #bostonfoodporn rather than #foodporn. This way, you’re not wasting impressions on a person in NYC who has no intention of ever coming to your restaurant. Experiment with different tags and give it the eyeball test—if certain tags return more impressions than others, pull and plug.

*Pro tip: post all of your hashtags in the first comment, after five vertical periods. Your hashtags will be hidden, your post will look cleaner, and you can avoid the stigma attached to trying too hard get noticed (and to hashtags #ingeneral).

*A master class in hashtaggery: keep your tags in a note on your smartphone for easy copying and pasting, pulling and plugging.

7. Don’t sleep on crowdsourcing photos

However talented you may be at using your friend’s smartphone to muster up the perfect lighting over those #dollaroysters (bonus hack), you just can’t match the aggregate talent and bandwidth of all your loyal customers.

Head to the “tagged pictures” tab in your profile and check out all the beautiful content your customers have produced while eating at your restaurant. That can all be yours! Direct message each user a sentence or two about how you’re glad they enjoyed their meal, how you love their picture, and how you’ll tag them for photo credit if they give your permission to repost their photo to your page.

When I first inherited the Tapestry Instagram page, 44 of the 60 customers that had tagged us in pictures gave me permission to repost their content. At one post per day, that’s a month+ worth of content I was able to throw into my bulk scheduler. When you’ve exhausted your tagged shots, click the geolocation you’ve been including on all your restaurants photos and sift through that cache.

*A final word, regarding filters: don’t use them. The idea is to have content that doesn’t need coiffing, and Instagram users are surprisingly keen on making that association: filter (in any capacity) equals content that couldn’t stand on its own. If you do find a filter that seems to generate interest, and that fits your brand, use it in every post. Research shows that 60% of the top brands on Instagram use the same filter for every post. Uniformity is a key ingredient to brand recognition and loyalty.

For help with marketing your restaurant during COVID-19, check out these posts:

  • 5 Ways Restaurants Can Use Facebook Ads During COVID-19.
  • 5 Clever Strategies for Restaurant Marketing During COVID-19.

 

7 tips for social media promotion

Instagram is a social network with more than 1 billion registered users. This is a powerful platform for self-realization and self-expression, promotion of business and making money. If you own a restaurant or cafe, in the 21st century it would be a sin not to take advantage of the huge opportunities Insta has to conquer a new audience.

Potential customers of your restaurant or cafe scroll through the Instagram feed for about half an hour a day. Promote your page competently to reach a new level of development. You can run it yourself or hire a specialist who will be in the establishment throughout the day to catch interesting moments in the kitchen and in the guest room. His task is not only to make plans, take pictures, shoot videos, write texts and post, but also constantly keep his finger on the pulse. It is necessary to instantly respond to comments and questions, because contemporaries do not like to wait - they will immediately switch to other proposals if they do not receive an answer in time. nine0006

Note! On Instagram, you can install a program for restaurants - Restoplace, which allows the guest to see the availability of tables and immediately book them.

  1. Think strategy, idea and style . It is through them that your profile will be different from the rest. Don't be afraid to be creative and test out-of-the-ordinary ideas based on high-quality photos and organic texts. Awaken the emotions and desire of the representatives of the target audience to bookmark posts. You need to know your target audience "by sight" - gender, age, marital status, having children, tastes and hobbies. nine0014
  2. Look for your format . Experiment, be innovative, come up with original rubrics. Remember that restaurant advertising is the best promotion tool. Get your subscribers hooked on your content by becoming a regular gastronomic media for them. Avoid templates and clericalism, do not be "stuffy" and drawn out. Give mood, joke, evoke positive emotions, be remembered, do not leave people indifferent.
  3. Share your secrets . It is difficult for many to take this step, but there is nothing wrong with revealing the nuances of preparing some dishes from the menu. "Let" customers into the kitchen of a restaurant or cafe - let them watch how the dough is kneaded, steaks are beaten off, or a signature salad is decorated. Introduce them to the staff - let them know the positions, names and character traits (the most charming chef or waiter can be made a local star who will invite you to the next event in Stories). The next time a visitor who follows the page on Insta will come to you with a special feeling - like old acquaintances. nine0014
  4. Use hashtags . No more than 30 pieces for one publication. Write them as a separate comment under the post. Do not be lazy to come up with new tags every time, which should correspond to a specific picture and text. Remember that organic traffic is not possible with popular tags borrowed from everyone.
  5. Create legends . If the menu is so compact that you managed to cover most of the dishes and drinks on your social network page in a couple of weeks, stop for a second. You have a real chance to turn a couple of the remaining positions into real legends - with history, unusual ingredients and amazing presentation. Let the whole Instagram know about them, and every next client will want to try. nine0014
  6. Make friends with customers . They should know that they are always welcome - both when they are sitting at a table in the hall, and when they write comments on Insta. Reward subscribers for their activity, regularly hold sweepstakes and contests with prizes in the form of a romantic dinner or Sunday breakfast. Let them mark friends in the comments and make reposts, come up with names for new dishes or cocktails, etc.
  7. Follow the trends . Almost once a week, new trends appear on Instagram, which you should not only know, but also actively apply. Shoot vertical videos, use stylish masks, sliders, countdowns, links and stickers - earn likes. nine0014

By putting your soul into your Instagram, you will get a good response, increase loyalty, traffic and sales. It's not hard if you really love what you do.

The restaurant's menu is an effective sales tool

A well-designed menu increases the average check by 10-20%, so its role in the marketing policy should not be underestimated.

Innovative trends in the restaurant business

Restaurateurs who want to always be in trend should pay attention to the innovations that appear in the consumer market. nine0003

How to attract new guests to a restaurant

People go to a restaurant for more than just food. This is a place of relaxation, a set of energy and inspiration. The atmosphere should be invigorating, conducive to communication and at least a second visit to the institution.

Restaurant business optimization during the crisis

It is important at this time to use any opportunities for the survival of the enterprise.

10 tips on how to run a restaurant's Instagram

INTERVIEW+TIPS

Interview with Evgenia Nechitailenko

Today, in our section "interview + advice" , Evgenia Nechitailenko, the owner of the PRprosto pr-agency working in the field of gastronomy, the managing partner of the Muesli restaurant and the Ducks and Waffles gastro farm, answers questions. Evgenia's portfolio includes the promotion of more than 60 projects in Moscow and Sochi.

“

Evgenia, what social networks are the most effective for restaurant promotion?

It all depends on the audience of the restaurant. The premium class is basically Facebook. The average check of 1500 is already Facebook and Instagram equally, and sometimes Instagram comes to the fore. For budget, network projects, you can also hook VK. If we are talking about regional projects, then Odnoklassniki should also be taken into account. nine0003

“

How should a restaurateur think and what steps should he take if he decides to use these tools?

The restaurateur just has to think :) The most important step is to hire a professional and not interfere with his work. Discuss, share opinions, express wishes - yes. Dictate conditions - no. At least we do not work like that and do not advise anyone. The output will be “lifeless, tired, tortured”, and your reputation as the final performer suffers. nine0003

“

How can you evaluate the effectiveness of a social network and what should you pay attention to?

The most important indicator for social networks is user engagement. This is the case when the quality of content can be quantified. In our practice, we use the popsters.ru service for analysis, which clearly shows what type of content works best at what time, and helps to fine-tune posting.

“

Own specialist / outsourcing - pros, cons for each choice? nine0003

Our specialist is always there, he can catch important moments, interesting moments in the hall. All, perhaps. Outsourcing is neither a plus nor a minus, it is a format of work. Yes, the manager is not always in place, but he often appears on the site, spends time there, knows about all events, all activities, quickly responds to comments and questions from users and always keeps his finger on the very pulse. If a specialist does not do all this, then it's not about outsourcing, you understand :)

“

Prices: what to build on, what does it cost? If such an answer is possible: how much does one guest cost on average for a restaurant from social networks?

The budget for smm consists of the manager's fee and possible advertising costs. Our agency has a fixed cost for the work of an SMM manager and no circumstances affect it. Small or big, expensive or budget project - it doesn't matter. For us, in this case, the difference is only in the average check and the number of landings. The amount of work, the number of posts, preparation of texts, drawing up a plan, the amount of time spent on the project, efficiency, and ultimately emotional involvement - for us there is no gradation. nine0003

We offer owners mass and targeted advertising campaigns. We explain that this helps to collect a high-quality audience, give information to more people, and subsequently receive them as guests. They understand, they agree :)

“

What should you pay attention to when choosing a social media manager?

For examples of his work, of course. If the pages are filled with poor quality (there is no address of the restaurant / phone / opening hours / cover / avatar), then it’s already worth considering. A small number of subscribers is also a wake-up call. A lot of subscribers and few likes - this is generally just a cheat program and these subscribers have nothing to do with your audience. Well, you should be emotionally comfortable with this person. In other words, he should not piss you off :))))

“

Main mistakes of restaurateurs?

Hire a specialist and tie his hands. Require constant coordination of each action, reports, tables. The manager in this case does not deal with your page, he deals with the tables.

Another point - sometimes the owner also wants to post, reply, comment on behalf of the site. Hardly establish a rule - only you are the author of materials, comments. Only you read messages and reply to them. Otherwise, porridge will begin, which at some point will inevitably turn into a negative. For example, he will forget to re-login and post something indecent on the project page. They will see it, make a screen, put it on the network. Who has to make excuses? Who is in for a reputational loss? nine0099

10 tips from Evgenia Nechitailenko on managing restaurant social networks:

1. Not by bread alone!
SMM is not about posting your menu and events, it is about well-developed headings, searching for original formats, attracting experts and obligatory promotion of content.

2. Be different for the better!
Be experimenters, innovators, but never be provocateurs. Aggressive SMM – so last season. nine0003

3. Be regular!
Become a real daily gastronomic media for the client who has already become yours, and for those who will only become one.

4. Reveal secrets!
Don't be afraid to reveal the secret to beating your steaks, kneading pizza dough, and even cutting forbidden ham. Competitors still think they're smarter than you, and customers still won't cook their entire menu at home. nine0003

5. Do little, but do great!
If your menu is so small that you have already posted all four of your three burgers, then stop, look around, think carefully and make a real legend out of the last one so that the post about it will be seen all over Facebook.

6. Become a friend!
Communicate with the client from the bar to every comment on every post.

7. Use the experts!
Even if your establishment doesn't have a celebrity chef who can tell you about your endless love for food, find your own stars in the team. Believe me, a charming waiter who invites you to try a new dish on the video will make your page a hundred times more human. nine0003

8. Use all available formats!
Albums, slideshows, wow, what kind of photo carousel is this? And social networks have long had notes that are better than many media, the functionality for creating promotions and limited offers for customers, and many more functions hidden from the average user.

9. Shoot a video!
Small and big, on your iPhone and the whole film crew, looped and briskly edited, recorded and live. Why? There is always a good response to a decent video, this is the spirit of the times.

10. 9013 SMM - Specialists !
SMM is not an attachment to your marketing, but its exact reflection. Always think about how this or that promotional action will be reflected in social networks.

We thank Evgenia for interesting answers and useful advice!

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Restaurantweek 2023

Restaurant Management and Development Forum 2023

The latest technology in the management, development and promotion of restaurants from the owners of well-known establishments, the largest chains and trusted experts.

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Program of the event

7-9 February

President of the Tiger restaurant holding

Henrik Dieter

President of the Tiger restaurant holding (Bar BQ Cafe, Osteria Mario, Shvili, ZEST, Vanya da Manya). More than 30 restaurants in Moscow and the region. nine0099 More than 40 years in the field of public catering, 30 of them in Russia. As General Director of Rostik's - KFC, he managed more than 150 restaurants in Russia and the CIS countries.

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