Restaurant Content Marketing: A Step By Step Guide
If you are a restaurant owner, you are in the business of transforming food into magic. However, what if you could channel a different type of magic. One that encourages even more diners to enjoy your fabulous dishes? We are talking about the power of restaurant content marketing.
This is what more restaurant owners should be focusing on in order to increase sales and boost loyalty. In this article, we will explain what content marketing is and how to formulate your own restaurant content marketing strategy.
Restaurant Content Marketing: What Is Content Marketing?
In the most basic explanation possible, content marketing is essentially the creation and sharing of material. Some examples of the materials created and shared include: images, video, text, etc.
Generally, content marketing is not promotional. However, it is a way to draw people in and encourage them to check out your products or a service. The point of content marketing is to provide people with useful information and answers to questions they may ask.
By establishing yourself as an authority that provides practical ideas, information or even entertaining content, customers will naturally be drawn to you.
On the other side of things, by pestering them with overly promotional content, you may get the opposite effect and actually irritate them. The bottom line here is that you need to promote your restaurant without actually promoting it.
For Restaurant Content Marketing Start By Defining Your Goals
Prior to starting out creating content, you need to figure out what exactly you wish to achieve. For example, you may be looking for more social media engagement. Alternatively, you may want more people to order food from you online ordering system. Defining your goals will inform your future content strategy.
For Restaurant Content Marketing Create Your Own Content Calendar
Based on what you wish to achieve, it is now time to create an organised content calendar that you and your team can easily follow. It should contain how often you will post, on what channels you will post, what your target audience is, what type of content you would like to focus on, a list of content ideas that target special events, holidays and different seasons. Finally, it should include what tools you will need for editing, publishing and promoting the content.
Make The Content Your Own
Authenticity is essential if you want your content to actually stand out. You need to find your brand’s voice and stick to it on all your media platforms. In addition, the quality of the content is really important. You should really consider hiring a talented restaurant content creator who has an understanding of your vision and can share that with the world. For your content to be exciting, you cannot just rely on text. You need to use images and videos also.
Optimise That Content
If you post on a blog and address topical issues in the restaurant industry, you need to be optimising that content for SEO. That is if you wish to rank high on the search engines. You can use a free keyword research tool to discover what keywords people are searching for and are related to the industry.
Then, target those keywords in the article. Remember, optimisation goes far beyond text. Therefore, you also need to optimise your images by including alt text. They make them readable when the image fails to display.
Promote Your Content
You will want to share your content on all of your social media platforms and possibly get in touch with industry leaders through email to share some of your work that may be of interest to them. In addition, with quality content, you can repurpose it by simply sprucing it up a little. You can add some fresh images to the old article and send it in an email newsletter.
Pay Attention To Your Progress
Rather than coming up with new content all the time and never looking back, you should be monitoring how your content is performing. Therefore, you should be asking, has it helped you get closer to the goal you set at the beginning?
No restaurant content marketing strategy should skip this step. Objectively analysing its performance will help you to figure out what is working, what your customers love, what you need to change and so much more. In addition, you may have already gotten feedback from your customers and fans which will inform your future content marketing plan.
Conclusion
As a result, restaurant content marketing does not have to be a pain. In other words, if carried out correctly, even the simplest of tactics can greatly help your restaurant business in terms of brand awareness, increased sales and boosted loyalty. Although, remember that content marketing for restaurants generally relies mainly on social media entries featuring varied media content such as images and videos and blog posts.
