Successful Communication With The Guest In The Restaurant

What kind of communication can be:

For some reason, many people mistakenly believe that only advertising can deliver communication messages. In reality, this is not the case.

For the restaurant, I highlight the following communication channels:

• ATL: classic radio, TV, outdoor advertising.
• LSM: flyers and promotional materials.
• PR: publications in publications (from print to digital), placement with bloggers, holding events to promote the restaurant.
• Indoor: showcases, walls, invoice text, menu descriptions, packaging text for delivery.
• Digital: website, accounts on social networks, pages on reviews, photos on maps.

Find the channels that are optimal for you and start developing them comprehensively. It is always necessary to remember the complexity of marketing and not do something in isolation from the main strategy. You can’t just launch social networks and assume that work is going on and everything will now work perfectly. You need to rely on your strategy and marketing calendar. It is in it that communication channels must be disbanded and what each of them should bring.

It is important to remember that each channel has a very strong effect on the other channel. For example, a guest saw your ad on a target, caught his eye, and remembered the name. A week later, I saw the blogger’s placement, remembered that I had already heard about you, and decided to come. After the visit, I subscribed to your Instagram account (perhaps because you offered dessert for a follow-up). I stayed in my account and began to pay attention to beautiful content — I returned again, but this time with a friend. During this visit, I noticed that you have an event with a very niche artist — booked a table for another evening. This is how it works. Communication is in everything — and this can be combined into a sales communication funnel.

I am telling you how the guest moves along this funnel.

The concept is told in the advertisement. You can tell about your concept personally to guests in a restaurant, you can do cross-promotions or publish articles on relevant sites.

Then your reputation begins to work: the guest reads reviews on maps or special resources. This is how the impression and the idea of ​​your restaurant are formed.

After a few touchpoints, the guest finally forms a desire to visit the restaurant (the guest noticed your restaurant in the “Where to go on the weekend” selection, then saw an advertisement on Facebook and decided to visit your place after seeing the mark from his favorite blogger).

Now we need to convince the guest that he will like it. Create a newsreel: a free glass of sparkling wine every Saturday for breakfast or a live jazz concert every Thursday — find out what will interest your audience and offer it to them.

And finally, the visit happens. Here it is important for you to “digitize” the guest. For example, convince him to sign up for a loyalty program (perhaps even provide a discount on the check) and get his phone number or email. What for? We will tell you further.

Now you can send your guest special offers and, thus, invite him to visit again, announcing various promotions and closed events.

And somewhere there is SMM: you can tell about your Instagram profile via SMS or QR code on the table. The guest will be able to leave their feedback in the comments under the post or publish Stories with your mark. This will help generate UGC and spread knowledge about your place.

How to build communication:

• When building your strategy and marketing calendar, it is important to evaluate which types of communication are really suitable for you in terms of cost and effectiveness.
• All the methods you choose should work towards one goal: to successfully solve the problems of restaurant promotion.
• Determine which channels will work for different types of guests (primary, repeated, and those that have already been, but decided not to come a second time). Design messages according to these categories.

For those who have not yet been to you, it is important to see all the juiciness of the burger in the photo from the banner and find out where you are at all. But for a repeat guest, this is no longer so important — it is more interesting for him to learn about new items in the menu, upcoming events, and the internship that your brand chef took last year, as well as to see the phrase “Thank you for choosing us again at the bottom of your check. Save promo code XXX for a 10% discount on your next visit. “

For those who decide not to come to you ever again, you should also have your own tools. Maybe their opinion will change if they see a blogger celebrating a birthday in your establishment? Or they will forgive everything by reading material about you in the media, where you talk about the difficult path of the restaurant’s development.

Work through each channel carefully and understand what exactly it can give you. Any action will affect all subsequent ones.

Instead of a conclusion.

Marketing communications will turn out to be meaningless if you have not worked out the main components of the business: the dishes themselves, the communication style of the waiters, a comfortable atmosphere in the establishment, high-quality products, and high-quality service.

You can reduce CPC for as long as you like and stay with the top influencers, but guests won’t come to you a second time if they don’t like the product.