A Simple, Useful Marketing Tool to Add to Your Restaurant Website

Sometimes the most useful marketing tools are ones that are simple and straightforward.

The big chains can do some amazing things with their restaurant websites because they’ve got a dozen people in their marketing departments. Maybe more.

You don’t.

People want to be able to do two things immediately when they visit your restaurant website, beyond view your menu:

1. Get your phone number.
2. Get your address.

Good restaurant website design suggests that those two should be prominent. But how about making it very easy for people to take the next step and get DIRECTIONS?

We’ve just stumbled across an easy-to-implement tool for this, for a mere $6/month. You setup an account and drop a snippet of code to your website in the spot you want this call to action to appear, and voila.

Here’s what the customer does:

1. They visit your website.
2. They enter their mobile number into the box on your website.
3. They get a text with your restaurant name, phone number, and address.
4. That phone number can be tapped to call you.
5. That address can be tapped to get instant directions.

Boom. Within a few seconds they’re either calling or they’ve got directions to your place.

We’ve just tested this ourselves on our development site (not here at our live NextRestaurants site) and it works exactly as it should. Instantly.

Here’s what it looks like, off to the right.

I don’t mind telling you that it would be nice to be able to change the color of the widget to match your site’s look and feel or to stand out more. You can’t. I haven’t seen that you can change the content of that widget at all, including the text on the button.

If you’re hyper-brand-conscious, you’ll also probably expect that text to the customer to come from a number you own, rather than the TextMe folks. Maybe that’s your bigger concern?

You may also be wondering if that customer is immediately added to your mobile marketing list. They’re not.

If you can set aside those three issues — and let me tell you — you should be able to on that first one in particular, because your emails are often stamped with the email service provider’s name, anyway — then you’re good to go, again for just $6 per month (up to 1,000 texts).

Cool tool from TextMe.io. Just discovered it this morning. Check it out.