The cuisine you prepare for the guests at the restaurant is highly delicious. But if the efforts you put into cooking the food go unnoticed by potential customers. That indicates you do not drive enough customers to your restaurant. You can harness social media’s potential to drive up restaurant bookings.
You have missed a gold mine of opportunities if you have not tapped into social media. Potential customers these days are on various social media platforms. Maintaining a social media presence allows you to reach out to the audience instantly. The social media platforms will also help your restaurant to enhance your restaurant’s brand visibility.
Social media platforms are user-friendly and cost-effective ways to promote your restaurant. Therefore, it has to be part of the marketing strategy. Merely 63 percent of restaurants leverage social media to promote their brand to their audience and to advertise. However, not all social media platforms are ideal for promoting your restaurant.
Before incorporating social media into the marketing strategy, you have to determine the social media platforms you can leverage most to promote your restaurant. After identifying the platforms, you may update your audience regularly about the menu on multiple social media platforms. But it is better to go the extra mile to promote your restaurant to boost booking.
Earlier, restaurants relied on paid- promotions, billboard advertisements, flyers, and word-of-mouth to improve restaurant bookings. As a restaurant owner, you can still leverage these marketing tactics, but social media platforms help you to target the audience precisely based on demography.
We discuss a few tips that you can use to harness the potential of social media to boost the booking at the restaurant.
1. Let your audience know more about your restaurant
Usually, potential customers know about the restaurant from online reviews from satisfied customers or the website. On the other hand, social media allows your customers to know about the restaurant instantly. For instance, if you close the restaurant a little early, you can immediately notify your clientele by posting on social media. Furthermore, if you have closed the restaurant for renovation, you can regularly update the clientele by posting images.
That will let your clientele know how everything is coming along. Your clientele will be less likely to check the website for updates but will indeed check social media. That does mean that you should not update the website. Information on the website should be up-to-date. To ease and boost booking at the restaurant, you can utilize restaurant bookings software like Picktime.
The booking page and widget are customizable and quickly integrated into the website and social media. That will allow the customers to schedule a booking directly from the website or social media page like Facebook 24/7. They need not contact you by phone or email to schedule a booking. That takes away one of the significant hassles of running a restaurant.
As a restaurant owner, you will have to handle multiple customer reservations. That is often a challenge, and the calendar feature of the software eases it by giving a complete outline of daily customer reservations. So you can organize your day to accommodate various customer bookings.
To avoid no-shows or the cancellation of bookings, you have to follow up with the customers. The software sends automated reminders by email and SMS. That enhances communication with the customers. If the customers want to reschedule the booking if needed, they can complete the process in a few clicks.
The software also permits the creation of a secure customer information database. That enables you to save the customer information and ensure their privacy.
2. Utilize social media to stand out from the competitors
With the help of social media, you can enhance your brand’s visibility. You can also create a visual appeal around your brand. You can leverage visual-savvy platforms like Instagram and Ticktock. The posts on these platforms can incorporate the color theme of the restaurant. For example, a modern coffee café may share a minimalist photo of coffee or otherwise classic style images that will appeal to the audience.
Before leveraging social media to drive up restaurant bookings, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself. For instance, what makes the audience interested in your brand, and what makes your brand unique? Answering these questions yourself will enable you to leverage social media better to drive up bookings.
3. Enhances communication with your clientele
If you can allocate someone from your team to be in charge of social media and be active, that will help you stay in touch with your customer constantly. That is because potential customers are used to sending texts rather than calling to make a reservation. Social media allows such audiences a platform to ask questions or comment about their experience. The customers would appreciate the instant responses from your brand. Furthermore, a recent study discovered that customers are likely to visit and order from restaurants with a solid online presence.
4. Brand building
Potential customers check online to know what the chatter is about your restaurant. For instance, they would begin with Google reviews and the testimonial on the website. But social media gives them a detailed overview of your restaurant that they would not otherwise find online. That is where the posts on social media help you stand out from the competitors-for example, the eye-catching images of beautifully plated dishes, satisfied customers sharing their experience with the services, and much more. Frequently posting on social media will help you build a brand for your restaurant and gather more followers. That will eventually result in driving up the restaurant bookings.
5. Encourage your customer to share their experience on social media
When dining out at a restaurant, customers want to share their experiences on social media with their followers. This trend is prevalent among young Instagram users and other platforms like Tik Tok. They can tag the social media handle of your restaurant on social media. That will help potential customers to find your social media handle quickly. Encouraging your customer to share their experiences on social media is much like work-of-mouth marketing. That is highly effective in spreading awareness about your brand and boosting the restaurant bookings.
Hopefully, the tips we have shared in the article will help you to drive up restaurant bookings by leveraging social media.
