Blogging is the last thing on your mind as a restaurant and bar owner. You already have a full day coming up with new menu items, making sure your employees get paid, ensuring customer satisfaction, and everything else you have to do to keep the show running right. Who has time for a restaurant blog?
While not every finds the time to blog, every restaurant should! Even if it’s something small, yet valuable, to readers who can potentially become customers.
Whether you use your restaurant blog as an educational platform, part of your e-mail marketing campaign or as an effective SEO strategy, blogging can help take your restaurant to the next level. Here’s why.
Show Guests Your Restaurant’s Personality
Blogging is a good opportunity to show people your team’s individual personalities. Celebrate good news, welcome incoming staff members, or simply give a little bio on who’s whipping up the delicious recipes behind the scenes.
Curious consumers connect with brands that invoke an emotional connection. Make them feel a part of your restaurant before they arrive through a fun, engaging, and informative restaurant blog.
Promote New Dishes and Menus
Restaurant blogs are an excellent free promotional tool when rolling out a new dish or cocktail. If you’re connecting with local farms and breweries, let guests know. In your blog post you can showcase local ingredients, talk to viewers about flavours, and even how they can use it in their cooking at home.
Not only is this a thoughtful backlink for vendors to their site, the cross promotion emulates community and gives guests a better idea of your values and morals.
Create Content to Share on Social Media
Write blog post. Share on your social networks. Become the best restaurant blogger on the web! Alright, while it may not be that easy, good on ya if get the idea yea?
Pictures of your food are enticing, but there’s more you can do than replicate Pinterest on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. A short blog post gives your fans content they can engage with beyond a quickly-tapped like.
Browsers can comment on your blog. Engage in conversation with each other. And share on their networks if they find the information highly valuable. Ultimately leading to increased brand awareness and more traffic to your site, and through your doors.
Improve Your SEO Efforts
You’ve probably heard the term before. SEO this, SEO that. Get ranked #1 on Google if you do it this way.
Here’s the truth. SEO is not a one lane highway. And no SEO company can’t promise you the #1 spot.
So you can pay some internet marketing company to write blogs for you. Or you can do it yourself with a seriously simple content management system like WordPress.
Google rewards a site which updates fresh content regularly and brings in new readers. By blogging, you can consistently update new pages, increase traffic to your page, and improve your visibility for when browsers search for restaurants in your area.
Start Your E-mail Marketing Campaign
Restaurant blogs are an excellent way to collect browsers emails so they won’t hit the spam button when they see you in their inbox. What sounds like a difficult process is really quite simple.
When you set up your restaurant blog on WordPress, download one of their plug-ins that collects emails for you. As a viewer scans your page, a completely intrusive pop-up will arrive and ask to sign-up for updates.
Pro Tip: Customise what you want this button to say. Be funny. Use an actionable verb.
Once you have an email you can (spam) send special loyalty promotions, updates when you write a new post, and info on upcoming events.
Final Thoughts
Create a restaurant blog you’d want to read if you were in the shoes of a curious consumer. Here’s your chance to really let that gleaming personality of yours shine. Break up text with pictures, gifs. Make a video. The options are near endless and leave plenty of room to get creative.
Whether you want to expand your reach, improve your SEO, or become the leading educational resource for restaurants everywhere, every restaurant & bar can take the leap and start a fun, engaging blog that can generate leads and bring traffic through the door.
If you’d like to find some more tips, checkout our “Hyper-local Restaurant Marketing” article
Recent Comments