Instagram for Restaurants: 5 marketing tips

According to some statistics for the beginning of 2019, Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users following only Facebook (over 2 billion monthly active users) and YouTube (1.9 billion monthly active users). 50% of those are scrolling through their feed each day, 80% of accounts follow a business on Instagram.

If you would like to develop your business, promote your services and attract new customers, you need to be in Instagram where are your potential customers. This is valid especially for the restaurant industry, where one of the most potential customer group are Millenials, a social savvy generation.

Some experts even clame Instagram as a game changer for restaurants. According to some statistics food photos dominate Instagram. You can see everywhere the guests of a venue taking photos of what they ordered, sharing them on social media. Instagram can a be a powerful tool in the online communication strategy of the restaurants.

This is why it is important to pay particular attention to your presence at social media channels. Not only to be there but to develop a strategy which correspond and support your business objectives. Hire professionals who can assure you an outstanding online presence and can provide you a consultancy how to create brand awareness and attract new customers in your venue.

The big question is what to do in order to make a successful Instagram account which works for your brand. There are different technics which you can use. In this article we are going to mention some of them. The focus will be how to make your customers loyal transforming them into “evangelists of your brand”.

Collaborations with food influencers

In order to achieve new target audiences including people who like eating outside and appreciate good food, you need to contact food influencers, who could promote you through their followers. This is much better than launching a paid campaign because here you promote your message through the authority of the influencer to a very targeted audience. Thus, your message has a much stronger impact than if it was promoted by an Instagram advertisement. This doesn’t mean that you should use Instagram paid advertising option. We only point out that if you find the right influencer with the right audience, you message can reach your potential clients faster having a higher awareness impact.

On the basis of the characteristics of your venue and its location you can choose to collaborate, for example, with an influencer from the same city or region, because there is more probability to attract new customers. Get in contact with the influencers and discuss together what kind of a mutual collaboration you can make. In the most cases, the influencer visit the venue, tag them on the location and publish a certain number of posts in their Instagram feed or/and  stories showing through pictures and video the venue inside, menu and commenting their experience.

It will be a good idea to create a special hashtag related to your brand and provide it to influencers in order to use it in all their content sharing when they talk about you. The purpose of the hashtag is to put together all the content published by different influencers and customers and make it easily accessible. Otherwise, there is a risk all the promo content not to be found after its publication.

Other way to collaborate with influencers is to provide a giveaway for an Instagram contest. The giveaway can be a discount or a free voucher for a meal for example. This type of small contests are generally efficient because they create a viral effect. Most often the conditions for users to participate in such a contest is to tag a friend in the comments and to follow the Instagram profile of the venue. Generally, this promo activity is okay for the users and they gladly participate which assures that your message will achieve a lot of people.

Interact with your followers

The fact that  you have a business Instagram profile and not a personal one don’t mean that you can’t interact fully with your followers. On the contrary, the regular interaction is very important in order to create a friendly brand image. Monitor often the hashtag related to your brand saying “Thank you” to those who shared a content related to your restaurant. Invite them to visit again your venue or make another positive comment under the post or on their story. The same advice is valid when someone use your location as a tag. You can also share the post or the stories in your venue Instagram story adding a comment if necessary. This shows to your followers that other users are promoting you and can stimulate them to so the same thing.

Don’t forget, as well, to remind users in some of your posts to share content related to your restaurant if they would like.

Keep an eye on the competition

A successful marketing strategy always includes a competition regular survey in order to know how and where the competitors are advertising and what messages they are using. Thus you can be always a step in front of them, being aware whish should be your focus on communication and how to differentiate or which parameters in your communication should be strengthen. In this regard. You can monitor your competitors’ Instagram profiles and find best practices, what are their activity, what type of content they share, what is the focus of their communication. This information will help you building your communication strategu and be better them.

Instagram statistics regular survey

One of the keys of success in Instagram and other social media is to monitor the profile statisctics. They can provide useful insights what kind of content prefer your users, for example, or when it is the best time to publish content in order to stimulate interaction. If you post content which you like but is not interesting for your followers your Instagram marketing won’t be successful. The statistics can show you which pictures have gathered most likes and which post have generated most interaction in terms of comments or shares. This information will help you to build your communication strategy and make your profile interesting and inspiring for your followers. Also you can experiment with different type of content to see what would be interesting for the users depending on their reaction.

Instagram food and interior restaurant design

Instagram has become a game changer at such point for restaurants that some of them are about to customize their food design, plating and interior to look good on photos at the social media. For this purpose, for example, the interior can include adequate lightening for making pictures, specific colors or materials of the tables in order to highlight the plate with the meal etc. For the meals are preferred bright colors, interesting plating and original decoration. All elements are chosen and combined in order to stimulates venue guests to makes outstanding photos and share them on social media. If you would like to be successful on Instagram you should help your customers promoting you by providing good content and good conditions to make good object photography images.

As a conclusion to this article we can say that, all these advices won’t help if the quality of your pictures is low. Instagram is a visual media and the professional images are one of the main key to success. Don’t leave anything to chance and work on each detail on your Instagram profile to be perfect, well thought out and professionally realized.