What’s that you ask? How can your restaurant benefit from Twitter? Well, let me share a few ideas Catalyst Marketers has for you.
If you own or run a restaurant and are trying to figure out how you can use Twitter to reach prospects and current customers, check out the following 7 tips and let Catalyst Marketers know what you think. If you want to learn more, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
Drive Traffic to your Website
Anytime you setup a social media marketing campaign, it must first be backed by a solid website. Driving people to your website is one of the primary objectives of social media marketing. Twitter is a great way to do that, especially for restaurants. Twitter is a great tool for extending your reach. If you’re a local restaurant with great food and loyal customers then use Twitter as a way reach out to potential customers who may not know about you.
First, get your current customers to follow you on Twitter and then allow them to pass along your information to their network. Occasionally tweet the link to your website. Another must have is your website URL in your Twitter profile. This way anyone who visits your profile, whether they are following you yet or not, is presented with a link to your website.
Daily Specials
Daily specials are a great way to give your customers something different than your normal great food. The only downfall is that nobody knows what your specials are until they come into the restaurant. What if you can use daily specials as a way to entice other people to check out your restaurant by tweeting them to your followers. Now customers know in advance what’s being added to the menu for the night. It may just be what they are craving…
Super Saver Discounts
Do you print coupons and run them in the local circular? How about a senior citizens discount? If you offer any sort of discount or promotion then you should be using Twitter to communicate that to your customers and prospects. Twitter is a tool that extends your reach to customers and prospects that you wouldn’t normally have access to. The key is figuring out how to use it effectively for your brand/restaurant. Tweeting your 10% off your total bill Monday – Friday is a great way to let people know about your super saver discounts.
Don’t forget the follow through…what I mean by this is that in your Tweets, let customers know that they have to mention the tweet in order to get the discount. Then let all servers know that anytime a customer mentions the Twitter discount, it’s an automatic 10% off the bill, BUT that’s not all…You must then create a special discount twitter code for the transaction. This way at the end of the month, you can extract that data and determine just how many folks you reached on Twitter and actually drove to the restaurant.
Behind any great campaign, there must be rich data to mine. That’s the only way you’ll know if your efforts are working. Anyone who comes up with a creative social media campaign but doesn’t mention ROI (Return on Investment) analysis is not someone you want to be working with.
Announce Events
Food tasting & Wine tasting events are fun activities that many people enjoy attending. Perhaps your restaurants hosts these events. If so, I’ll bet you use traditional advertising to lure people to them. Maybe you only use in-store promotions to let people know about the events…If so, you’re not reaching as many people as you could be if you were using Twitter. If you’re having an event at your restaurant, start tweeting about it a week or so before the event. Build up some momentum with your followers. I’ll bet the turnout is bigger than all of your previous events combined.
Run Contests
The latest craze is running contents through Twitter. A number of big companies are doing it. Cadbury is doing it. You can do it too.
Maybe there is a giveaway every Tuesday night at your restaurant. Anyone who comes in and has dinner is eligible. Perhaps it’s something that comes with your meal (a golden ticket so to speak). The only way you have a chance to win is if you come in and order a meal.
There could even be a free dinner giveaway to one person a day. To be eligible you must retweet the restaurant website. This now opens your website up to each followers’ network and if someone in their network is interested, they may retweet as well. Now you’re getting your website in front on another network. Welcome to Viral Marketing.
Announce Wait Times
A simple use of Twitter, but one that customers would certainly appreciate is announcing wait times at the restaurant (especially on busy nights like Friday and Saturday). People are on Twitter all day, either from the laptop, desktop OR cell phone. Instant information is expected from consumers. If they know that your wait time is 1 hour, then perhaps they’ll call ahead and make a reservation for later in the evening instead of driving down and being disappointed that they have to wait. If the wait time is 10 minutes, they may hop in the car immediately in order to beat the crowd. Either way, you’re providing information to customers that they appreciate. This will drive business to your restaurant because it shows people that you’re considerate of their time & are willing to go to the environments (Twitter) which they frequent in order to communicate with them.
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7 Twitter Tips for Restaurants…
Many small businesses are hearing about social tools like Twitter, but they cannot see how those tools can help their business. This post, focused on restaurants, helps readers understand how Twitter can work for them. 7 great twitter tips for restaura…
Hey man I like your thinking. As you know, we work with a lot of auto dealers.
A challenge I find is doing these things for dealers and scaling versus training them to do it themselves.
Check out http://www.new.facebook.com/docmagroganswc
They do a good job with Facebook. They also have a group solely for their events. Smart.
Ryan –
Thanks for your comment. I really appreciate it.
I joined that facebook group to see what they offer. I look forward to checking them out.
As for scaling, yes, I understand. I think that with the tools out there today, like TweetDeck, where you can manage multiple accounts, scaling becomes a little easier. I think you’ll find more and more tools will be created to help this. For now, I think it all depends on how solid your plan is. If you have it spelled out for your team what you’re trying to accomplish with Twitter, how many tweets/day you want to get out, how to find new people to follow, what to talk about in Direct Messages, etc. then it becomes much easier to scale. This way someone can work right from the script. Anytime something comes up that isn’t on the script, he/she can figure out a solution with you and then add it to the script for next time. Thoughts?
For local restaurants to benefit from Twitter I imagine it will require a loyal attentive following in that the masses will not be searching Twitter for this week’s specials at a local restaurant.