Digital Marketing Tips to Help Restaurants Ring In the Holidays
Megan Kennedy
The holidays are a notorious time for people to be dining out, grabbing drinks, and getting together with friends and family. As a restaurant or bar this poses the perfect opportunity to rake in the extra dough and really enhance your customers holiday experience. Theres just one little problem, how do people find out about your great deals and events? Well with these digital marketing ideas staying relevant in the tech space becomes a piece of cake, literally.
1. Make your website user friendly
During the holidays when things are typically hectic, it is important to understand your customers are looking for ease and convenience when deciding where to celebrate. This includes wanting to know what sorts of specials or seasonal menu's restaurants might have to offer, what time happy hour starts, or what an establishment's address is. If they aren't able to find answers to those questions quick and easy, they probably won't be stopping in. This includes making sure your mobile site is user friendly as well, as most people will be checking on the go.
2. Get festive with your online branding
Put your customers in the holiday spirit by making your website, social media channels, blogs and emails festive. This will show your business is just as excited to celebrate as your customers are. So get in touch with your creative resources and show that your restaurant is the place to be this holiday season.
3. Get your customers involved
Getting your customers involved in your digital marketing is one of the easiest and cost effective ways to spread the word about all you have to offer. By offering opportunities like discounts for sharing a visit to the restaurant, or specials for posting a picture of their favorite happy hour drink, you'll be engaging with existing customers and reaching a larger audience than you would have alone. Especially around the holidays there are so many creative ways to increase customer engagement. Get 10% of apps if you post a picture in your halloween costume and tag the bar, easy peasy.
4. Update your social media
Any holiday season is fast paced and updated social channels will allow you to keep customers in the loop on whats new to the table. Since the majority of customers are on some form of social media, by keeping those channels updated with engaging authentic posts they'll likely stumble across them. People check their feeds often, and if you post a Cinco De Mayo tequila special right as 5 o'clock rolls around, that may just be enough to get them in for a drink. Remember to post regularly but don't flood their news feeds, quality over quantity.
5. Reach through email marketing
Newsletters and email marketing is a great way to reach customers during the holiday if you have a growing email list. Email allows you to send out holiday cards, invitations, holiday specials, and discounts all in neat and effective manner. Not to mention most online newsletters allow you to see the open rate and engagement with any links or coupons you may have included, which can be helpful when preparing for the next holiday.
6. Get staff involved
In addition to leveraging the digital channels for holiday promotions, it is important to make sure your staff is engaged as well. Having staff dress in festive colors, or costumes is important as they are the ones who interact personally with customers. But, on a digital landscape by letting staff promote on social channels saves you some of the work and shows that everyone is working together to make for a wonderful holiday.
So with Cinco De Mayo right around the corner, put on your sunbrarrow, get a tequila and taco special together and start posting some amazing content to let your customers know where the fiesta is this May!