As a restaurant owner, there are many facets of your business to manage. To ensure success, you train your staff and opt to work with well-trained chefs. To appeal to customers, you may work with an interior designer to attain just the right atmosphere or a graphic designer to really make your menus pop.
Once these things are in place, it’s time to start looking at your marketing strategy. While many entrepreneurs hope that “if you build it, they will come,” a solid marketing plan is essential to gaining a fanbase and drawing in customers. Your customers are on the internet; therefore you need an online content marketing strategy in place to meet them there.
While we have a few goals you may want to consider, here are 3 types of culinary content your restaurant business should be cooking up:
Blog
Putting content on the internet is a key way to connect with your online audience. Not only will it help draw traffic to your website, but blogs will also give you a place to establish your brand, showcase your expertise and build your reputation. Blogs can be used for public relations and as a space to share news items, tips and food knowledge. In this age of marketing, people want brands to get personal, and a blog is the perfect opportunity to do so. Give your audience a chance to go (virtually) behind-the-scenes, tell about your history or create and develop recipes to share.
Once you create the content, we have a few ideas how to use it.
Photography
Food photography is an art, and a type of content with which you want to put your best foot forward. With visually based networks such as Instagram growing in popularity, a strong image base is crucial. Your customers expect you to be sharing quality images on your social media sites. Professional photography is an asset that can be used across all your online platforms: website, blog, social media, etc. An aesthetically pleasing image will jump out of a newsfeed and draw people to your brand. And if you are posting to a blog, images will help your posts thrive: content that is paired with quality images is more likely to be read.
Video
There is a trend in the marketing realm that cannot be ignored: video is the future for content marketing. For many video is daunting, but it is an increasingly imperative content medium to embrace. Video outperforms other types of content and is preferred by the online audience.
Because it is a kinetic form of content, video is a great way to get personal and tell your story. Paired with quality blog content and a base for sharing (such as a strong social media presence), video can bring your marketing efforts to the next level.
To learn more about how Dish Works can enhance your restaurant’s content marketing, get in touch with us!
Photo credits: top, Life of Pix; bottom, Looking Glass