You’ve invested in your restaurant, now’s the time to place it in the spotlight using some effective marketing tools. What could be better than using social media platforms of course! Social media platforms offer some of the best and cost effective marketing tools available to restaurants. With a huge amount of people of all ages spending their downtime browsing and interacting with social media, your audience is already there waiting for you. In this article we look at one of the most popular platforms – Instagram!
Instagram has been around just over 12 years, and in that time has acquired over 1 billion global users. Instagram has become a staple browsing platform for all ages, but particularly with younger people. With Instagram, it’s all about visuals – images and videos – that provide colourful and engaging insights into everything and anything you can think of. For restaurants, Instagram offers the perfect place to showcase venues and culinary offerings with the opportunity to appeal to, and connect with huge audiences.
To get you started on your journey, here are 10 cool ways to use Instagram in order to improve your restaurants sales…
1: Make an eye-catching Story Highlight
It’s the first thing someone sees when they land on your profile below your bio, so make the most of it! Engage people immediately with information about you, the dishes you specialize in, weekly specials and favourite pictures. Use anything that you think will attract users and encourage them to follow you.
2: Use colours consistently
Continuity in using certain colours in your Instagram content will make your profile look more focused, pleasing, and memorable. Perhaps a key colour from your logo or from your restaurant’s walls, table tops, or certain plates and dishes that you use?
3: Food glorious food!
Over 60% of us take pictures of food that’s served up to us – we simply love great pictures of great food! Your Instagram food pictures must have impact – they need to be high quality, detailed and most importantly mouth-watering.
4: Don’t forget your hashtags
Give hashtags to the images you post such as #foodporn, #vegan, #homemade and #nomnom. Using hashtags is important as it helps Instagram users discover content that’s relevant to them. If you need help with hashtags, why not use the free services offered by someone like https://ritetag.com/
5: User Generated Content
Customers to your restaurant will (hopefully) want to post up pictures of the dishes you served. This of course needs to be encouraged as it shows authentic and genuine content from people who actually visited you! User generated content like this helps build your Instagram profile and customer base.
6: Engage, engage, engage!
With Instagram it’s all about engaging users; any type of image or video content that you create has to be audience-focused. As with all other Social Media postings, make sure you keep on top of responding to all comments as this will retain and boost interest in your restaurant.
7: Make your restaurant fit for Instagram
Users will want to dine out at the most Instagrammable restaurants in Toronto, so make sure your restaurant interior, crockery and culinary offerings are visually exciting and photo worthy. A little investment could quickly pay off big time!
8: Make it unique and interesting
What makes your restaurant so special? Is there something gimmicky in your décor or outside space, or unique in how you serve your dishes? Promote and highlight these differences in your Instagram images to get make users curious and want to visit you.
9: Use a Social Media Management Platform
Yes, you can actually forward plan the release of your Instagram posts, as well as posts for other social media channels. Using a social media management platform such as Hootsuite https://www.hootsuite.com/ allows you to create and release your posts over a period of time – all in one convenient place.
10: Make time for Instagram
Yes, you’re running a busy restaurant, but generating customers is everything. Maintaining your Instagram account will be very hands on, so make sure you allocate regular time to keep it interesting, up to date and to engage with users. It will be time well spent!
CHI is dedicated to keeping up with local and national trends in the Restaurant Industry to help serve our customers better and keep them one step ahead. If you are interested in opening, purchasing, or selling a restaurant CHI Real Estate can help. Get in touch with our team today.