The restaurant industry continues to evolve year after year, driven by technological advancement and consumer trends. Even without the pandemic on your hands, you know that the only way to stay afloat and thrive in a competitive environment is to adapt quickly. In 2020, meal delivery has skyrocketed around the world, as the pandemic has forced people to stay home and resort to online ordering.
Needless to say, this has created a highly competitive online market where restaurants are constantly struggling to acquire and retain customers. Having a delivery service, however, is not enough to inspire people to keep ordering from your restaurant – you have to market your delivery online and implement the right tech and tactics to reduce customer effort.
Today, we’re putting all of this into perspective and giving you five smart tips you can use right now to market your restaurant delivery online. Here’s what you can do to ensure stability, growth, and customer retention.
Build an omni-channel experience
Integration, connectivity, POS systems, cloud-based resource planning – these and many other technologies make omni-channel marketing, sales, and management a reality. Manually managing an omni-channel structure can seem like an impossible task nowadays, but nevertheless the modern customer demands that your restaurant has an omni-channel presence.
Simply put, you need to be present at every customer touchpoint to capitalize on all sales and marketing channels. This includes a restaurant, and a digital presence on third-party delivery services like Glovo, Donesi, or Wolt, as well as having a direct-to-consumer delivery system.
The problem still remains, though, as you need a centralized system that allows you to manage omni-channel efficiently and effectively. This is a problem that Bitebell solves for your restaurant.
Bitebell automatically forwards incoming orders directly to your POS system, eliminating the risk of error and boosting efficiency. Our innovative platform allows you to optimize delivery times by routing orders to your in-house delivery or your delivery partners.
In fact, Bitebell provides your restaurant with a robust infrastructure where you can easily and automatically team up with any partner and all delivery services. These include the popular ones like Glovo, but it extends to any partners in the market, allowing you to create an efficient long-term approach.
With Bitebell, you’re also able to seamlessly sync your menus across numerous delivery platforms to keep your offers up to date, and gain meaningful insights through built-in analytics features. Our unified ticketing system also allows you to centralize and manage all feedback from every platform so that you can manage your online reputation with ease.
Last, but not least, we should not all forget that people are cooking more at home, therefore we see a lot of new companies offering subscription models and ingredients in order to help people cook from home.
Keep your menu and offers fresh
Speaking of updating your menus, keep in mind that the modern customer loves consistency but craves innovation. In other words, it’s important to keep your menus and offers fresh, but to give your customers more of what they already know and love. And you need to do it by launching special deals and promotions regularly to spark interest, increase visibility, and motivate people to come back.
To that end, keep your most popular dishes on the menu, but add a dash of innovation to the mix. Use your analytics tools, feedback, and customer reviews to identify opportunities and weaknesses in your menu.
Perhaps you have a great main course list, but you could add more dessert options to reel in more customers. Maybe people love your staple dishes but are underwhelmed by your selection of drinks – adding products to your menus will incentivize them to place an order.
Focus on marketing consistency
To make better marketing decisions and make an impact on your customers, you have to be consistent across all channels. After all, how are you supposed to know which Instagram posts work best if there is no consistency in scheduling and posting? Merely tracking likes and comments won’t do, since one of your posts might be performing better because you posted it at a time when more of your followers were online.
This is why you need to ensure marketing consistency and continuity across the online realm. Here are a couple of key steps you should follow:
- Create a consistent marketing budget for monthly posting and advertising.
- Create a weekly posting schedule based on industry and consumer data and insights.
- Identify the marketing channels that are most relevant for your restaurant.
- Strive to be consistent with every post in order to see how it’s performing and the kind of impact it has on your audience.
- Optimize your posts according to your target demographic and customer preferences.
One of your top goals with marketing consistency is to generate actionable insights so that you can make better decisions month after month. You can only make better marketing decisions if you’re consistent and if you know which posts have the highest reach, engagement, and impact.
Create and disseminate engaging content
How many times a year do you post new, original content online? One of the key mistakes restaurant owners make is that they typically organize one photoshoot and keep reusing old content throughout the year. This not only makes your content stale, but it also lowers your customers’ engagement online.
People want to see that your restaurant is keeping things fresh and innovative, they want to see new content posted frequently. To improve your influence online and keep users engaged, you should organize a photoshoot every three to four months, even if you don’t have any new products on offer.
This keeps your menu fresh and shows your users that your brand is always doing something interesting.
While you’re at it, be sure to capitalize on video content. Along with new images, you want to produce short 20-30-second videos and simple video sequences that showcase your dishes, how you prep the food, and how you package and deliver it to the customers.
Leverage influencers and user reviews
On a final note, keep in mind that people trust other users and influencers more than they trust your brand. To build social proof and earn the customers’ trust, you need to leverage user-generated content and brand advocates across the web.
To that end, make sure to:
- Find influencers that share your brand values and love your food.
- Tell your story about the product through three to four posts on their FB and IG Stories showcasing your food, their experience, and promoting your brand.
- Provide a promo code or special deals for influencers to give to their followers.
- Analyze all your user reviews and extract relevant insights.
- Look for patterns that point to problems and opportunities.
Most importantly, use your reviews to give the customers what they want. Listen to the users and act on the data, and you will have no problem making an impact in this competitive market.
Wrapping up
Your restaurant has the potential to grow and expand in 2021, but only if you implement the right tools and know how to market your online delivery. You have the quality, you have the brand, now be sure to integrate these tips into your strategy to take your restaurant to new heights of success.