Expanding the digital footprint of your restaurant, and why that helps

For the longest time, restaurants have relied on fairly traditional means of communication. Whether print advertisements, shoutouts through electrical mediums (television & radio) or the most important - word of mouth marketing techniques.

With the world constantly spinning out guerrilla marketing gimmicks, experiential marketing, and OTT techniques for customer acquisition, the simple base of a digital footprint can get lost in translation most of the time. The tech wave is slowly and steadily on the rise in the F&B world, right from preparatory techniques to operational uses. The implementation of digitisation can make everything simpler, cohesive, and easily accessible.

It also aids one of the foremost problems plaguing the industry, discovery. Post the onset of COVID, the F&B and hospitality world, on the whole, became hyper-aware of getting their businesses out there for the world to notice, and for consumers to binge on. A driving factor in the ‘hype’ that got consumers so engrossed in restaurants and their food was content. Content on digital platforms, easily consumable and put together with the main motive of going viral.

On the flip side, consumer focus has shifted towards deliveries, online ordering experiences, and the way you showcase your product and services on the digital front. The F&B space has hence taken up its next challenge, maintaining a strong presence across all digital channels - hence strengthening their digital footprint.

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Through digital advertisements (web pages, search engine marketing, sponsorship ops), email marketing campaigns, search engine optimization techniques, and social media marketing (Facebook ads) you can have a great base set in place for consumers to discover your restaurant. Everything doesn’t have to happen all at once. It can be as simple as a promotional campaign run on Instagram that includes your direct ordering link, navigating customers through a swipe up feature (on stories) directly to your Thrive home menu. A simple email marketing campaign promoting your seasonal offers can do the job just as well too.

Social media and email marketing are a great place to start, post which you can expand further through more modes of communication. Through Thrive Now’s marketing suite, you can carry out campaigns and ads on your own, with a comprehensive guide and a self-explanatory UI to take you through the functional details. Through this suite, you can carry out email marketing campaigns, SMS campaigns, and very soon, you will be able to adopt the hype of conversational commerce through a WhatsApp integration as well. Apart from the basics, further advanced functions help exponentially when it comes to ‘targeting’. Automated engagement, segmentation of your consumer base, automated campaigns sent to a specific segment, all of these are now possible using Thrive’s marketing suite. Apart from this, conversion campaigns have also been introduced on the SMM front, where you can track and optimise purchases, take customer feedback, and win consumers over with remarketing.

A simple example. A customer or few  leave bad reviews on a certain dish in your restaurant. Using segmented targeting options, you can create a custom audience of these users on Facebook and run a specific ad campaign targeted to them itself and win them back. It probes consumers to give it a second shot, and micro-targeting takes the lead. These are a few tools that you can use to the maximum extent to play around with your digital presence, in turn, building a stronghold on the virtual world.

We know just how important digital mediums are. Take for instance the amount of screen time we all get in a day. If through the day, you could insert your product/service in a digital conversation a potential consumer is already a part of, doesn’t it make acquiring them as a prospect more likely? The tech wave seems to be affecting the F&B industry on all fronts. It’s just a matter of capitalising on it in the right manner.

Author:
Aaliya Panju

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