Marketing Restaurant Online

Blogging has definitely become one of the most powerful marketing tool for small businesses like restaurants. If blogging done properly, it can be powerful than tv, radio, newspapers, yellowpages all combined. Content is the king with the blogs. As a restaurant owners one has to think about their customers first. While creating contents for the blog one has to recognise what customers wants to read that would be valuable  and yet interesting enough to them with some some humour injected in them if possible. Don’t be boring. Most of the corporate blogs fail because there is no passion in the writings. Their corporate style of writing doesn’t resonate with their fun loving casual customers who likes casual conversations.

If it seems confusing and you would like to see the examples of other restaurant blogs, I would highly encourage you to do that first. May be even before you start a blog for your own restaurant,  it would be a great idea to follow couple of restaurant blogs. One that you could check out is kogibbq. The other ones are  Tyson chicken, Dairy Queen. Just by observing and engaging with the bloggers you learn a lot.

The key thing to remember is that you have to be ready to engage with your customers in a two way communication channels format. Join the converstation by replying back to your customers comments, answering your customers questions. That is how you build relationship and trust gradually. It is better if you yourself can do the blogging. If you are writing your content, opinions, expertise then it coming straight from you. So there is originality and authenticity. However if you are very busy then you could hire someone from your own company who is natural at blogging. If you don’t find some one in your company then it might be a good idea to look into a pool of your own customers. Who knows,there might be great fans with a passion for your restaurant’s products and service.

5 Reasons Why Blogging is Important to your success in Restaurant Marketing.

1. Easily indexed by major search engines.
2. Helps understand your customers problems.
3. Helps in sharing valuable and interesting information relevant to your customers.
4. Acts as a complete guide about your service or product and not as direct advertising.
5. Is a great platform to create your own fan base tribe.

Easily indexed by Major Search Engines- One of the main reasons you want to blog is that it helps your restaurants to be found by major search engines like Google, Yahoo and many more on the internet. Now since this is a natural organic search results found by your prospective customers these are all free traffics that cost not a single dime to you. That means virtually the marketing expense is zero. Can you imagine when you don’t have to spend those thousands of dollars on tvs, radios, newspapapers and yellowpages. All that money now becomes a profit that you could put into your pocket instead of handing it over to those tv executives.

Helps understand your customers problems-When you write contents about your products, service or some useful information for your customers, then they have a chance to express their own opinion- good or bad and also problems of their concern. Once communication is made transparent through a blog, it is easier to understand customers real problem and solve it instantly rather than having to live in the darkness of unkown and building mistrust.

Helps in sharing valuable and interesting information relevant to your customers-Since blog is a medium of broadcasting, it helps you to share valuable information and yet interesting to your customers.The biggest mistake that one should not make that is worth repeating is not to be boring. Don’t present yourself as structured corporate officer. Rather be very casual, informal as you would talk to your friends and hopefully with humour you would be able to make your customers’ days.

Acts as a complete guide about your service or product and not as direct advertising-Blog essentially acts as a ccomplete guide for your restaurant. It will provide all the information regarding menu, services, contact information, directions, opening closing hours to all imaginable informations to prospective customers. So instead of acting like direct advertising that we see on the television or newspapers that says like ” hey come to our restaurant. We have the best steak.” It displays what products or service can your restaurant provide to customers in non threatening environment at their control of time.

Is a great platform to create your own fan base tribe-I have seen so many Facebook fan pages of several restaurants that has several thousands of loyal fans. Blogs acts as a spring board to create loyal followers on to your blogs and turn them into loyal fans that you could continue building and nurturing your relationship. Possibly later you could take them even to Facebook via the Blog. So that means any one who would visit your blog would have a chance to join your Facebook Fanpage and become a fan. This would make conversations more dynamic as the social viral effect would be be compounding.

Looking at all the above benefits of blogging, if your restaurant doesn’t have a blog presence on the internet, hope it encourages you to start building one. If your restaurant does have a blog, I hope you can still take some ideas  and take your restaurant blog marketing to the next advanced level.