6 Reasons Why Digital Marketing is Essential for Restaurants

In today’s digital world, restaurateurs have all the more reasons to use digital marketing to grow their businesses. For the most part, your customers are on the internet 24/7, clicking and scrolling through webpages and pictures on social media platforms. To get their attention and beat your competitors, it’s important for restaurants to have a solid digital marketing plan. Here are six reasons why you need to invest in digital marketing immediately if you haven’t already done so.

1. Expand your reach

Many of us rely on search engines to discover new restaurants nowadays. That is why it is so important for restaurants to have a website and driving traffic to it by buying the right keywords. Imagine your website as your shopfront on the internet. By putting your restaurant out there, you are expanding the reach of your restaurant and reaching new potential customers.

2. Benefit from its added value

Your restaurant’s online presence is more than just a website. While it performs the usual — featuring a menu and informing operating hours — you can do so much more with it. For starter, you can build a booking system within your website or social media platform to help secure reservations. Moreover, the display of images will help your potential customers make the critical decision of trying your restaurant or not. Build in a virtual tour on your website, take Instagram stories within your restaurant, give your customers a taste of what your restaurant is like.

3. Build customer loyalty

Whether it’s through social media platforms, website or email campaigns, your restaurant gets to tell stories, create a dialogue with potential or existing customers and engage with them on a deeper level. In other words, digital marketing makes customer interaction more personal. This then allows you to enhance customer loyalty and gain honest feedback that’ll help your restaurant further improve operations.

4. Track it, adjust it, refine it

Unlike the nature of traditional marketing, digital marketing allows you to track and evaluate its effectiveness. Through easily generated monitoring reports, you gain insight as to how your restaurant is doing and how to hone your digital marketing strategies. You can count on digital marketing to give you the statistics you need to learn what makes customers click and convert.

5. Ace brand awareness and credibility

When making a new hire, a human resources manager would look up the candidate on LinkedIn. Likewise, potential customers would look up a restaurant on the internet before they decide to dine there. That is why having an official restaurant website enhances your restaurant’s credibility. Moreover, potential customers will want to scroll through a sea of food photos on a social media platform such as Instagram to see if the food is appealing to them. Make sure your customers have no reservations about your restaurant. Let them see the menu, entice them with mouth-watering images and give them the opportunity to book online immediately.

6.  Keep your budget low and flexible

First of all, digital marketing is much more affordable than traditional marketing. Secondly, you have full control over how much you spend on digital campaigns. In other words, you can keep the costs low if you would like to. The best part about digital marketing is that you can make easy tweaks and figure out what yields the most attraction for your restaurant. With insight and experience, you can pinpoint what works best for your targeted audience and maximise results. For example, you might learn that your targeted audience is younger and spend more time on Instagram as opposed to Facebook. In that case, you might consider spending more money advertising on Instagram.

Fill your empty seats with eatigo

Looking to fill your restaurant’s empty seats? Join us at Eatigo, the restaurant reservation platform, to offer time-based discounts of up to 50% to more than five million hungry customers. There’s no better way to keep your restaurant busy!
You can join Eatigo today by submitting your interest via one of the forms below:

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