Online marketing strategies for restaurants

If you run a restaurant, you have almost certainly been using the internet for a while to keep customers coming back and to attract new ones. But having a website and a Facebook page, which is what most restaurants have, is not enough on its own without a proper online marketing strategy behind it.

Strategies that work for restaurants

Marketing automation

An automation platform handles any repetitive marketing process for you: email, SMS, push notifications, promotional banners. Customers who land on your website are tracked in real time. When a diner visits to book a table, the system captures their name, email and phone number, and that information feeds future automated campaigns via SMS, email, push notifications or remarketing banners on the web and on Facebook.

Conversion rates rise sharply with this approach, because contact is triggered by actual behaviour: a scoring system based on purchases, and automated reminders when someone visits the site. Bounce rates fall too, since content updates itself for each visitor. In practice it means winning back inactive customers and holding on to current ones.

Search engine optimisation

SEO work puts your restaurant in the top positions for the searches that matter locally: your town, your type of cuisine, the dishes you are known for. It is slower than paid advertising, but the traffic it brings costs nothing per visit and it compounds over time.

Paid campaigns

Search and social advertising fill the gap while SEO builds up, and they work particularly well for restaurants because you can target by location and by time of day. A campaign that runs at midday within a two-kilometre radius of your door behaves very differently from one that runs all day, everywhere.

Reputation and reviews

For restaurants, reviews are the strategy. A steady flow of recent, genuine reviews on Google and the major booking platforms moves more covers than almost anything else you can do online. That means asking for them systematically, and answering every one of them, good or bad.