By Grace Carter
Making a restaurant these days is hard work due to dwindling numbers of people eating out, faster takeaway and delivery options, and the vast amount of competition. However, is your restaurant harming your own success while marketing your business?
First impressions count in the restaurant industry, so if you’re marketing yourself incorrectly or unprofessionally, you could be causing yourself some problems. Today, we’re going to explore some of the most common marketing mistakes restaurants make, so you can avoid them at all costs.
#1 – Not Marketing Enough
Perhaps the most common problem that most restaurants find themselves in is not spending enough on their marketing budget. As you’ll see in the later mistakes, marketing costs money and if you do it right, it can pay off indefinitely.
Set aside a monthly or yearly budget and ensure you’re promoting yourself in multiple channels, not just sticking an ad online or in your local paper. There are so many marketing channels out there, and you need to use them to your advantage.
#2 – Having a Poor and Outdated Website
Your website is the place your potential customers are going to go to check your business out, and if they don’t like what they see, they’re not going to walk through the door. You need to make sure your website is up-to-date with all the right information.
You’ll also want to make the website look attractive. Have pictures of your food and of the restaurant, and really make the online space as nice as the physical building itself. Make people want to come to your website.
“In this day and age, it’s crucial that you ensure your website is responsive and optimized for mobile users. If your website is a struggle for mobile users, you’ll be losing so much custom from people not bothering to figure your site out,” shares Tamsin Harper, a content manager at Assignment Help.
#3 – Not Using Accurate Content
Another first impression that your potential customers will pick up on is whether your content is accurate. This applies to your advertisements, your website content, and your social media posts. If you doubt your writing skills, here are some tools that can help:
- Via Writing & Studydemic. These are two online grammar resources you can use to help you use perfect grammar throughout your marketing content.
- OXEssays & UKWritings. These are two online proofreading tools to ensure none of your content has any errors in it, as suggested in UKWritings review.
- State of Writing & My Writing Way. Use these two writing blogs for advice and tips on how to improve your general writing style.
- Essayroo & Boomessays. These are two editing tools to help you structure and edit your content, so it reads perfectly. Highly recommended by Write My Australia.
- Writing Populist & Let’s Go and Learn. These are two websites full of writing guides you can follow and use to ensure your writing is professional throughout.
#4 – Not Using Google Business
When you search for a business on Google (the most popular search engine in the world), the chances are you’ve seen the Business section on the right-hand side. This usually includes the opening hours, the contact information and links to the website and social media pages.
One of the biggest mistakes is not claiming ownership of this section and ensuring it’s up to date. If people are searching for your restaurant, this is going to be one of the first things they see. The process of claiming this section is easy using the online instructions Google provides.
#5 – Not Interacting with Reviews
When you buy something on Amazon, you probably look at the reviews to decide whether you’re going to purchase something or not. If it has bad reviews, you’ll probably take your business elsewhere. This just goes to show the importance of social proof.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re receiving good or bad reviews, when you’re marketing your business, you’re going to want to reply to them all. For good reviews, a nice reply helps to extend further the positive experience the customer is having, and they’ll remember you to come back.
On the other hand, a negative review left undealt with is going to look bad in the eyes of potential guests. By addressing the bad reviews and helping the customer feel like the problem is resolved, not only are you increasing the chances of the writer coming back, but other people reading the review can see you’ve dealt with it, and will be much more likely to visit themselves.
About the AuthorGrace Carter is a content manager at Academized and Assignment Writing Service, where she curates email marketing, works with proofreaders and editors and manages submissions. Also, Grace is a tutor at Bigassignments.com, educational portal.
