Restaurant Marketing Unlocked: How to connect with your community and boost local bookings

In the final installment of our Restaurant Marketing Unlocked series, we take a look at the importance of ensuring all customer journey touchpoints are saying the same thing.

We’ll look at the importance of having an up to date Google My Business profile, creating searchable content and the importance of reaching out to your community.

Become well-known in your neighbourhood

Let local and passing customers know you are open and trading safely through optimising your restaurant’s Google My Business profile.

A Google My Business listing brings together essential information on your restaurant and presents it to a customer searching online or using Google Maps.

If you’re open for business with new opening hours or you’re offering a slightly altered service, you need to ensure all of your customer journey touchpoints are saying the same things. Google My Business is often customers’ first point of contact with a brand, so this is a good place to start.

Optimising your customer’s experience online

Usually your profile will feature a business name, contact details and links to a website. However as a restaurant, there’s a few more advantages to setting up and optimising your Google My Business listing.

As well as your address, you can include your opening hours, links to menus and social media profiles. Google also allows you to post special offers or news on your business profile and there’s the ability to upload photos of dishes as well.

Images are a powerful tool for marketing your business, so be sure to take advantage of this feature on your profile.

Research shows businesses that add photos to their Google My Business profile receive 42% more requests for directions from customers than those that don’t.

You’ll also be able to add answers to frequently asked questions in the Q&A section of the profile to help save your staff time. You can even opt-in to allow customers to make a booking or message you directly through your profile.

Create searchable content to help increase traffic

Your restaurant’s website should be regularly updated with fresh content to help with search engine optimisation (SEO) and boost your chances of Google listing your business higher than competitors.

This can be easily done through creating a blog on your website, or by regularly refreshing your page content. When creating content, consider what search terms customers are looking for online.

Creating content that is relevant to customers’ search queries and your service offering will help get your restaurant’s website found by new users online.

In our latest whitepaper ‘How to get your restaurant open for business within the current government guidelines’, we delve deeper into how to create searchable content to connect with local customers and boost bookings.

Why this will benefit your restaurant

Taking the time to ensure all your digital customer journey touchpoints are in sync and up to date, will raise awareness that you are open and help them to find your restaurant through local search.

By optimising your Google My Business profile and creating searchable content you will:

• Offer another revenue stream through online ordering, click & collect and delivery
• Ensure diners feel comfortable browsing and ordering from your menu via your website or app
• Be able to promote your brand story and what makes you unique
• Collect customer data to be used in future marketing campaigns

Sound good?

Download our free whitepaper today to get the inspiration and insight you need to optimise your website to boost table bookings or click & collect and delivery.