mobile marketing for restaurants
by Andreea Dobrila

Marketing with every passing day is seeking more space in the online world. Nowadays, whenever people are in search of good food, they tend to use their smartphone to google the nearby restaurants. And if you are not implementing correct mobile marketing techniques, then chances are there that you are losing a lot of food clients. So why not take advantage of mobile marketing for restaurants?

Your mobile marketing game needs to be smart enough to grab the maximum attention from foodies. People get to know about your brand when you use the right ways to tell them. There are different tips on winning big money online by implementing the right mobile marketing techniques to grow your business. You can use smart payment methods like Google Pay, and more to deliver online orders. But there are some more tricks you need to implement to start gaining online attention. Therefore, read the article carefully to know some of the best mobile marketing strategies. Stay hooked until the end.

What is Mobile Marketing for Restaurants?

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel marketing approach focused on reaching customers via mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. For restaurants, this can entail creating a responsive website and branded app, doing SMS marketing, and more.

Mobile Marketing for Restaurants That You Should Use

1. Responsive and User-friendly Web Design for Mobile

Creating a website exclusively for your restaurant services is important for growth. Your customers will easily locate your services on the website & decide whether the foods and the ambiance delivered by your restaurant suit them. Therefore, an organized and user-friendly mobile website is highly recommended.

Your website should be responsive, which means that it must not show unnecessary data to the customers. Because in this case, less is more. Ideally, you should make sure that they see your menu, your address, your special deals, as well as your social media profiles. And if you have a space you can add a few delicious, craving pictures of your menu, then that’s great.

The website should also be mobile-friendly to fit on the screen perfectly. Moreover, our suggestion is to create a website that is both responsive and mobile-friendly, like the one that we provide. This will help you deliver valuable information to potential customers that will translate into great revenues for you.

mobile marketing strategies for restaurants

2. Create a Social Media Presence

Social media is undoubtedly the best place to market your business. Especially these days, food-related posts are much in trend on different social media platforms. Through these platforms, you can not only interact with your potential customers and let them know about your business, but also run ads to gain more attention.

If you are new in the world of digital marketing, then you should consider hiring a professional digital marketer who can help you generate leads and gain food clients. If you have a bit of experience, then make sure to post frequently pictures of your mouth-watering dishes, or post more info about your specials. You can also ask customers to use your restaurant’s name as your hashtag (i.e., Restaurant Pronto) in any social media post in exchange for a free shot / free drink / free dessert.

Also, engage your target customers in fun quizzes, polls, or surveys. This way, you’ll get to know a lot about their preference. Once you know what foods and services your customers demand, you can improve your restaurant accordingly. For example, you can prepare fun quizzes on different cuisines or menu items, with emojis to make it more fun. Whichever quiz/menu item gets more players, you’ll know that your food clients love that cuisine/menu item the most.

3. Target Location and Language-Based Customers

You can use social media marketing tools for implementing ‘geo-targeting’. The step-by-step guide for implementing successful geo-targeting is:

  • Use Facebook Ads to target your potential customers.
  • Target popular restaurant or food-based Facebook pages.
  • In the campaign, target your preferred location. It is highly suggested that you target only your own city so that you can deliver the food easily.
  • Write good copies for different regional languages and target audiences from each language.

4. SMS Marketing

SMS marketing is one of the most popular mobile marketing strategies. You must have received an SMS from other brands talking about their service. You will have to do the same in order to gain more food clients. It is basically a technique that uses permission to promote a brand via SMS. You can receive their contact number either from the sign-in procedure of your website or from the feedback form of your restaurant. You can use their numbers to market your business by sending the following types of SMS:

  • “Table ready” reminder
  • Reservation reminder
  • New food menu list
  • Special discounts for regular customers
  • Special events’ celebration
  • Home delivery services
  • Booking services for birthday parties, anniversaries, and so on

These text messages are helpful in reminding your customers about your services. You can send out bulk SMS at a really affordable price.

Let your customers place orders from their mobile devices. Get our fully responsive website for as little as $9/mo

5. Create Your Restaurant’s Custom Branded App

Most people these days do not have much time to visit restaurants and prefer home deliveries, therefore, having a mobile app will greatly help you increase your sales.
Getting your own app is much better than being included on Grubhub’s list of restaurants because you eliminate the competition.

On Grubhub or any other third-party food portal, your food clients can easily leave your restaurant’s profile page and simply go check out other restaurants. However, by using your own targeted mobile app, more customers will actually order from you.

Related: The disadvantages of listing your restaurant on various food portals

So, if you don’t have one already, you can create such a custom app for your restaurant. And if you don’t have time to do so, then you can also get your branded restaurant app from us.

Once your app hits the Google and App stores, the next step is promoting your own app with the help of your social media accounts. This will help you gain enormous fame among tech-savvy food lovers. If you’d like to know more about how to promote your app, then feel free to read the article below.

Related: How to promote your restaurant mobile app for free [& get users to download your app]

6. Use Content Marketing

Another great marketing method includes content marketing. You can create content on various food-related topics to reach your desired customer base. Attach your restaurant’s website link or app link within the content. Eventually, while reading the blog, they will come across the link and might become your next customer. Also, try to attach some good deals and bonuses in the content.

Related: 15 unique restaurant promotion ideas

We would suggest you concentrate on eye-catching visuals. A smart combination of content and visuals will help you enhance your mobile marketing schemes.

7. Embrace Google

Google is the best digital friend for the present and the upcoming generation. Therefore, it is high time that you squeeze out the benefits of Google to gain food clients. You can easily do that by taking your first step towards creating a business page on Google My Business. This way, your restaurant can show up in Google searches. Make sure that all the information provided on the page is authentic and matches your website information. You can also use Google Ads for in-game mobile marketing or show up on other platforms via ads.

8. Sign a Deal with Food Bloggers and Vloggers

Food blogging and vlogging are much in trend these days. So you can sponsor a few well-known social media influencers – from your area – to advertise your restaurant.

You can also create your own blogging or vlogging platform. Upload various creative food content related to your restaurant on those platforms. Video contents attract more visitors than text format. So, YouTube can be of great help in gaining attention. Use a good camera to make high-quality pictures or record high-quality videos.

Conclusion

We hope that this article was able to help you know how mobile marketing helps in getting potential food clients. Make sure that along with following the tips, you deliver good quality food. You might gain a huge amount of customers initially, but in the end, they will stick to your restaurant only when you deliver as promised. So start using mobile marketing for restaurants to kickstart the growth of your restaurant.

This article is a guest post.

Bio

Thomas Glare started in the world of online marketing when he was hired as a copywriter for a small agency in Leeds. He rapidly wanted to learn more about marketing strategies, so he started to experiment on his blog until he figured out he has a natural knack for this. Since then, he collaborates with various publications, sharing tips on how to improve digital marketing strategies.

photo of GloriaFood blog writer Andreea Dobrila
Andreea Dobrila

Andreea Dobrila is a proven web copywriter & marketing strategist. She pushes online restaurants on the fast-track to quickly growing their online sales. Win more business by using her bulletproof tips & secrets.

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