Social Media Archives - Open for Business

4 Easy Tips for Restaurants to Be Found Where Diners Are Searching

The digital world asks a lot from restaurants. Posting fresh, compelling content to different channels every day and always trying to stay top of mind can get overwhelming. As digital marketing and social media platforms evolve, nailing down and executing an online strategy feels more daunting than ever. But you don’t need to push new content to be found – and be current – where diners are searching for your restaurant.

Last month, we introduced a new Open for Business series all about online marketing, tapping our own internal team for tips on best practices on each platform. And while yes, digital marketing requires planning, constant attention, and analysis, there are also plenty of easy things restaurants can do right now to optimize their presence. Below, we share four simple ways to build your brand presence. Start by updating these channels, then think of everything that comes next as bonus points.

1. Optimize your Google Business listing.

Every month, there are five billion searches for restaurants on Google. A free business profile lets you connect with all of those potential guests through Google Search and Maps. Like with Yelp, you can post photos and offers to your profile to inspire diners to come in for a meal.

To claim your restaurant’s Google Business listing, log into the Google account you want associated with the business. From there, you can search for your restaurant’s name – if you see your restaurant in the results, select it and follow the steps for verification.

Google may verify your business by calling you on your business phone number or sending you an email. But the most common method is to send a postcard to your restaurant’s physical address. This can take up to five days and look like a spam mailer, so keep an eye out for it.

If you search for your restaurant and don’t see it in results, select “Create a business with this name.” Since your restaurant has a brick-and-mortar location, select “Yes” when asked if you want to add a location to your listing. Enter your restaurant’s address, hit “Next,” and on the next prompt, select “Yes, I also serve them outside my location” if you offer delivery. You’ll also be prompted to enter your service area, which is an optional step. (If you don’t offer delivery, select “no.”)

Next add a business category, like “Italian restaurant.” You can always change it later. Finally, you can add your restaurant’s phone number and website, which is vital because it gives diners a way to reach you easily with questions or to book a reservation. Select “Finish” to begin the verification process.

2. Set up an Instagram (business) account.

If you use Instagram with a personal account, you know the drill: post your best photos, like and be liked, comment and reply, and don’t forget the hashtags. Your restaurant’s Instagram account will be similar to your personal one, but business accounts give access to tools that can help you optimize your feed, like analytics and paid advertising.

Operators can see their audience’s demographics (age range, location, and more), as well as which posts had the most impressions or engagement. That kind of insight gives you the power to optimize your social media strategy based on your best-performing assets. Businesses can also add buttons such as “Contact” and “Reserve” to their profiles so users can reach out or book a table. Finally, you can put money behind your posts to reach more people, if you choose to do so.

If you already have a regular Instagram account for your restaurant, you can convert it to a business account easily in “Settings” without losing any content. If you’re starting from scratch, create an account using a Facebook account, email or phone number. (It’s a good idea to use a general restaurant or company email to ensure you’ll always have access, even if the person who created it leaves.) During the setup process, you’ll see the words “Try Instagram Business Tools” – click there to make yours a business account. Select a category and sub-category (think “restaurant” and “dim sum restaurant”, and add your physical address – this is key, because a location makes you searchable on Instagram. Once you’re up and running, start posting! [Read more…]

Making the Grade: How do Your Restaurant’s Digital Marketing Efforts Stack Up?

In a world where new restaurants concepts are popping up on every block and competition is at an all-time high, restaurateurs need to do everything they can to gain loyal customers. While many restaurant marketing strategies have been around for years, leveraging digital marketing is one of the newer and more powerful ways to boost profits in your restaurant.

Considering that 90% of diners research a restaurant online (more than any other type of business) before deciding where to eat, getting found is important, but it’s only half the battle. What type of information are potential guests finding when they search for your restaurant? Are you showing up in all the right locations?

A marketing grader can help answer these questions, and Upserve has created a restaurant-specific marketing grader geared toward the unique needs of the restaurant industry. They found that restaurants who scored above 95 overall pull in 2x more annual revenue than the average restaurant, so they also provide actionable tips for improving your score.

First, let’s talk about what goes into your restaurant marketing grade.

Why Use a Restaurant Marketing Grader?

A marketing grader is a tool that helps you evaluate your marketing efforts, comparing your marketing against competitors and providing specific opportunities for improvement. Upserve’s proprietary algorithm analyzes everything from your website to social media accounts to online reviews.

Your restaurant’s marketing grade is based on a few key points – data consistency, reviews, social media, and visibility. Upserve scoured publicly available data from restaurants around the United States and analyzed every aspect of their restaurant marketing including reviews, social media “likes” and check-ins, and how consistent the information on their key social accounts are across the three platforms. (Check out the breakdown below for more details.)

As we said above, digital marketing is more important than ever, with over 90% of diners looking to their smartphones for recommendations. Once they open their browser window, your marketing efforts will determine how and if they find you and, most importantly, if they decide to choose your restaurant amongst the other options in front of them.

So why is the restaurant marketing grader geared specifically towards reviews, social media, and restaurant websites?

27% of diners say that a restaurant’s website is the most important place to look.
68% of millenials trust online reviews, compared to 34% who trust TV ads.
84% trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
33% would never eat in a restaurant with less than four stars.

How to Use the Restaurant Marketing Grader

To find out your restaurant’s marketing score, all you have to do is type the name of your business into the grader. Once you hit submit, you’ll see your overall marketing score, plus the individual scores for each of the four main areas of data.

[Read more…]

Unpacking Social Media: What Restaurants Need to Know in 2019

Social media is practically an obligatory topic for industry events and how-to articles, and for good reason: About half of all consumers learn about food through social networks, and last year, 63% of restaurants used social media for marketing.* While engagement and investment in social media are on a continuous rise, when it comes to using channels to build an audience and bring in new guests, the whole effort can feel crowded, noisy, and inexact.

We tapped OpenTable’s own social media team to try to answer the big questions: how should you use each platform, and what should you post? What works, and what doesn’t – and how can you know for sure? Finally, how can you leverage what other people are posting to promote your own business? Over the next several weeks, we’re rolling out social media best practices for restaurants today, acknowledging that platforms and behaviors continue to change. When the landscape changes (and it will!) you can come here to find more tips and tricks.

It’s Not Matching Luggage

First and foremost, it’s essential to understand that social media is not matching luggage, meaning what works on one channel doesn’t always make sense for another social platform. While you can certainly cross-promote content and post the same image or text across channels to expand reach, optimizing it for a particular platform is key.

For example, each platform has different copy length constraints, and it’s important to tailor your post per channel to effectively get your message across. Also, text on images is treated differently in platform algorithms, so a Twitter post may contain too much text on the image to see strong engagement on Instagram.

Remember to abide by the 20% rule. This is how Facebook and Instagram keep advertising messages from disrupting users’ feeds. The rules states that only 20% of an image can contain text and logos, if the image contains more it will be punished in the algorithm and served to fewer users, negatively impacting reach and engagement.

Social is a great place to build brand awareness and strong relationships with your diners – they are your megaphone! Think about each channel as a separate community so you can set key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure success. Important metrics to consider include impressions/reach (how many people are seeing your content in social feeds) and engagement (how many people are interacting with your content via comments, shares likes, video views, and link clicks). Tracking these metrics helps you optimize content based on what your audience responds to.

Keep in mind that while promotion (impressions) of your restaurant is key on social, engagement (engagement rate) is also essential to fostering a community. In other words, it’s not just about how many people see your content, it’s how they interact with it through likes and shares.

And remember: social media – paid and unpaid – is about brand awareness. It can be difficult to track users who find you on these channels and actually become guests at your restaurant, so set your goals and expectations accordingly. One way to improve assessment is to use your OpenTable restref ID to track reservations back to social media campaigns and measure their ROI. (Or, consider trying OpenTable marketing solutions to drive more bookings – you can customize marketing to your unique needs and see what works best.)

Keeping Track of What’s Working

Social media is ever-changing, adapting for consumers’ changing behaviors. For instance, Instagram adds new buttons and features to their stories feature extremely often, they recently added a group chat option as a solution for people who want to have big group discussions on topics they see in stories. The tips and tricks you’ll find in this article are based on social marketing trends now, but over time best practices may shift.