Here’s What’s Cooking

Restaurants are a staple in many communities, providing a space for people to gather, socialize, and enjoy delicious food. They also support many families and can generate generational wealth that can be passed down.

When I was first learning digital marketing as a career, I’d occassionally work in restaurants, and quickly learned from conversations with managers and owners alike, of the many daily challenges they had to face.

One the biggest problems they’d tell me about was managing overhead and staffing costs. Effectively marketing a restaurant adds an additional layer of necessary work that must be maintained and mastered if more customers are to visit the establishment regularly.

Restaurant Digital Marketing

In addition to traditional marketing, restaurants need to utilize digital marketing effectively to expand their consumer visibility and stay competitive.

In this post, we’ll explore some strategies for managing overhead and staffing costs, best utilizing digital marketing, and website design trends for restaurants; because you can’t invest in what can move you forward if you’re always standing still.

Before we can even discuss restaurant digital marketin we have to first tackle managing your overhead, managing your day-to-day operations, and related expenses responsibly.

Managing Overhead and Staffing Costs

Overhead costs are the expenses that a restaurant incurs to keep its doors open, such as rent, utilities, insurance, and supplies. Staffing costs, on the other hand, refer to the costs associated with screening applicants, hiring, training, insuring, and paying employees.

Here are some strategies that restaurants can use to manage these costs:

Track Expenses

To effectively manage overhead costs, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what you’re spending money on. Use accounting software to track expenses and identify areas where you can cut back. Know firmly what you’re spending on supplies, hiring, leasing, licensing, zoning, signage, and every other expense so you can compare those outgoing expenditures with your overall profit margins.

Negotiate with suppliers

Work with your suppliers to negotiate better prices for ingredients and supplies. This can help you reduce your cost of goods sold and improve your bottom line. Often buying in bulk from different packers or co-packers or changing shipping options, how often you need specific supplies or ingredients, seasonality of some foods, can lower these rates just enough to make it tangible. You can negotiate with suppliers by simply being open and honest about your needs and limitations and then asking what options you might have.

Use technology

Invest in technology that can help you automate tasks and streamline operations. For example, using a point-of-sale (POS) system can help you manage inventory, track sales, monitor waste (such as overpouring your alcoholic beverages) and reduce the time required for administrative tasks.

Cross-train employees

Cross-training your employees can help you reduce staffing costs by allowing you to have more flexibility with your staffing schedule. This can also help you improve the customer experience by having employees who are knowledgeable in multiple areas of the restaurant. It can also ensure that multiple staff members know how to perform key roles in case someone is out due to illness or just not showing up.

Utilizing Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is essential for restaurants to expand their consumer visibility and stay competitive in a crowded marketplace. Here are some strategies that restaurants can use to effectively utilize digital marketing:

Social media

Use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to showcase your menu, promotions, repeat customer punch cards, special limited-time offers, seasonal offerings, private parties, concerts, speakers or meetings, and free giveaways. Sharing offers and discounts and incentives online can dramatically boost diner intake and table turns especially if promoted regularly and repeatedly.

If your restaurant website is mobile-responsive, you could have a modern restaurant ordering menu on your website that can showcase meals and deals offered. You can share screenshots or links to these pages on social media.

If your website utilizes eCommerce you could permit diners to order online and dine-in or have food delivered. You could partner with apps such as Uber Eats, Bolt, or any of the dozens of other delivery apps out there to boost profit margins and share that information – that availability to consumers – on social media.

If your restaurant has proper licensing and insurance, and staffing, you could potentially have cooking demonstrations and even cooking classes as well as “date night” events for singles, cross-promote those to dating sites and local dating groups as well. And be sure to notify everyone on social media about it, and get the dating organizations to do the same as part of the partnership.

Encourage customers to share their experiences on social media and engage with them to build a loyal following. If negative reviews crop up, resolve them with compassion, empathy, and offer some measure of incentive to correct the negative experience and review. (Remember everything you say, and often even what you view online, can be seen by customers).

Email marketing

Collect email addresses from your customers and use email marketing to promote specials, events, discounts, concerts, special events, meeting space available, and new menu items. Personalize your emails to make them more engaging and relevant to your customers.

Online reviews

To go a little futher on this point, you should want to encourage your customers to leave online reviews on sites like Yelp, Google Reviews, Facebook, Twitter (or X), Mastadon, Instagram, and TripAdvisor as we briefly touched on previously. Respond to reviews, both positive and negative, to show that you value feedback and are committed to providing the best customer experience. Positive reviews deserve appreciation and invitations for the diners to come back any time and encourage them to take advantage of repeat customer punch cards or similar incentive. Negative reviews, again, must be handled with care or not at all.

Local SEO

This one is huge. I’ve seen (and been a part of) many restaurants going from empty dining rooms to turning tables faster than they ever thought they could as a result of local SEO.

Optimize your website for local search by including location-specific keywords in your content and metadata. This can help you appear in local search results and attract customers who are searching for restaurants in your area.

Since most restaurants either have no SEO at all or incorrect SEO, by simply utilizing local SEO repeatedly in your site, blog posts, recipes, ads, you can accelerate past them quickly. This could be as simple as making sure your tab reads something like “My City, My State, My Type of Restaurant” (here’s an example “Downtown Denver Pizza” or “Aurora, CO Pizza” to be even more specific).

Website Design Trends for Restaurants

A well-designed website can help restaurants attract new customers and provide a positive user experience. Many times, as a diner familiar with digital marketing, I’ve shied away from ordering from restaurants with no website or a poorly-designed website with no possibility to order online and no delivery optons.

To add a final course to this meal, here are some website design trends that restaurants can use to create a website that looks great and functions well:

Mobile optimization

More and more customers are using their smartphones to search for restaurants and make reservations. Make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices to provide a seamless user experience. This should be a given in 2024.

High-quality images

Use high-quality images of your food, restaurant, and staff to showcase your brand and entice customers to visit. Avoid using stock photos, which can make your website look generic, unappealing, or (worse yet) fake.

Easy navigation

Make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for on your website. Use clear navigation menus and intuitive design to guide customers to the information they need. (In digital marketing we call this “User Experience,” or “UX” for short.)

Online reservations

Offer online reservations to make it easy for customers to book a table at your restaurant. This doesn’t have to be reinventing the wheel. There are plenty of apps and services such as Open Table you can subscribe to and offer through their site, or you can simply hire a local area digital marketing agency or experienced, professional digital marketer to integrate such a booking into your own website (and test to ensure proper scheduling and eCommerce).

Use a user-friendly reservation system that integrates with your POS system to reduce the risk of overbooking or double-booking. This may seem intimidating but can increase money coming in over the long-term, making it well worth the investment. Check your system out with a few test runs before taking it public to ensure everything from scheduling, to payment, to table numbers and wait staff needs, all match up. You can make this offering even more user-friendly if you enable SMS messaging to confirm reservations, email confirmation, and offer discounts for repeat diners.

Summing Up

At the end of the day, managing and marketing a restaurant should be about providing your diners with emotional experiences they’re going to remember and want to revisit, with delicious, hearty food and drinks a part of that experience.

In order to manage and market, these tips can help you build a solid foundation to start upon. To learn more about how to manage or market, or to get advice on where to begin, feel free to reach out.