Digital Marketing: 5 Strategies

Digital marketing. Creating an effective digital marketing campaign for online restaurant management is almost never a simple task. Especially for restaurateurs who use most of their time and energy to control what happens in the kitchen.

In recent years, a number of online marketing platforms have stepped in to make it easier for independent restaurateurs to develop websites. And also manage social media, and cultivate better relationships with their customers online. Here are five tips from industry experts on what you could do to improve and expand your online presence.

1) Create mobile websites.

Digital marketing

Restaurateurs who spend a lot of money on sites with moving buttons and Flash content are doing themselves a disservice if these sites don't work on mobile devices. Thesixty-ninepercent of mobile phone users access the web every day from their smartphones.  This is why you should focus on creating a simple website that runs quickly on as wide a variety of mobile devices as possible. This site should be easy to update, and should possibly integrate with restaurant web platforms without impediments. In this way it will be very simple to reach the online restaurant service. This possibility should not be underestimated at all.

2) Stimulate interaction with digital marketing 

Digital marketing

Hundreds of online visitors may click on your restaurant website every day. What transforms online visitors into real customers is the stimulus to interact with the restaurateur. The best stimuli are certainly limited time offers and discounts.  These are usually posted on the  restaurant's website, Facebook page, or Twitter – a way to encourage people to get up and walk through the doors of your restaurant.

3) Online restaurant management: Publish menus online.

The thing that consumers look for more than anything else when looking online for information about a restaurant is an updated menu – even more than the phone number, address, or photo of the establishment. Menus don't need to be posted just on the restaurant's website, anyway. A good online marketing strategy for your restaurant could be to post your menus on online restaurant advertising platforms. Or in the advertisements of local newspaper websites to extend their dissemination even further.

4) Solicit anonymous feedback from your customers.

Often, restaurant owners do not fully understand the quality of service that their staff provides. Was the customer experience satisfying or frustrating? Was the food top notch or so-so? Restaurant platforms that provide restaurants with anonymous ways to gather honest customer feedback – whether through text messages or online – can help you understand what they're doing well and where your restaurant has room for improvement.

5) Digital marketing: Take advantage of social media.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter should be an important part of your online marketing campaign. Restaurant owners looking to make the most of Facebook should post photos of their dishes and ask customers what types of specials they would like to see. On Twitter, restaurants can tweet links to photos they post on Facebook and occasionally post culinary tips as a way to demonstrate their expertise and keep their followers updated.

As you will have seen, all these online marketing strategies can be integrated with each other, in order to exploit all the possibilities offered by the internet.