Pro Tips on Marketing Your Restaurant on Instagram 

As every savvy marketer knows, it is not the product that customers buy but the story about it fires their imagination. It is certainly no different for cafes, bistros, bars, and restaurants because each of them needs to tell a great story to grip the imagination of their customers and build a fan base. Social media, especially Instagram, is the ideal platform for building a community, encouraging engagement, and telling the story of your brand. Here are a few proven tips for leveraging the power of Instagram to market your restaurant on Instagram.

Humanize Your Restaurant 

Even though it can be tempting to plaster your Instagram account with shots of delicious food and drink, it can be far more impactful for you to post pictures and videos of not only customers enjoying their meals in your restaurant but also of the people you employ that toil hard to deliver an awesome experience. You can encourage all your staff, right from the head chef to the servers to share their experiences of working in your restaurant and bringing to the table the customer delight that your restaurant is famous for. Content that your staff posts serve to humanize the restaurant and the food! The stories of their experiences and passions can serve to highlight all that makes you unique and promote engagement with your brand. An easy way of ensuring that your video posts have greater engagement is to conduct interviews with them or ask them to tell their most interesting experiences with a customer or even a vendor.

Make Engagement a Top Priority 

It is well established that despite all the technology, people still like to interact with human beings. Therefore, businesses need to focus on interacting genuinely with their target audience. Some of the ways you can demonstrate your willingness to engage are by re-posting the user-generated content, responding to their comments, observations, and complaints promptly, and display genuine interest in asking for and listening to user feedback. More engaged followers are more likely to tag their friends, share their experiences, post awesome photos of your food and restaurant ambiance, all of which go a long way in building the critical positive social proof required to drive footfalls into your restaurant. In the beginning, you may consider asking social media marketing agencies to buy followers on Instagram to give a buzz to your restaurant brand.

Collaborate with Popular Food Bloggers

While you need to focus on posting great content and interacting with your followers to build a vibrant social media community, you should also collaborate with food bloggers and influencers. By doing so, you can not only get invaluable recommendations but more importantly, access to the followers of the food blogger. If you are a small restaurant but looking to grow fast, you can try locating and reaching out to different food bloggers and invite them to visit your restaurant or experience your takeaway services. The easiest way of locating food bloggers is to visit the Instagram accounts of foodies with more than 5,000 followers. Usually, by working with the smaller food bloggers, you will be able to strike a collaboration deal with nothing more than a free meal at your restaurant or a takeaway hamper of your goodies. To get the best results, you should try working with bloggers that have a large local following. It is also important to work with bloggers in your niche, says a BBC report.

Leverage the Right Hashtags for Your Restaurant

By using the right hashtags, you can help to drive the visibility of your restaurant. According to studies, posts that use hashtags can achieve that is more by a whopping 12% compared to posts that do not have any hashtags. Of course, getting the hashtags right can take the engagement to even greater levels. Choosing the most appropriate hashtags can be tough because millions of them are food-related. While it is best to use a location hashtag to attract local customers, you can also make use of one of the many available hashtag research tools to evolve a productive hashtag strategy. Even though Instagram permits the use of up to 30 hashtags, research reveals that is best to use anywhere between seven to eleven. It is also a good idea to keep the post clean and uncluttered and insert the hashtags in the first comment following the post.

Conclusion 

No doubt, it is important for your restaurant to offer a great menu to its customers. However, restaurant marketing, particularly in the contemporary context, is not just about great food. Instead, you need to focus on marketing your restaurant well to your target audience so that you can drive its visibility, develop an engaged and loyal customer base, and a stream of bookings. Investing in effective Instagram marketing campaigns will be a major factor in making your restaurant a big success.