Did you start a page for your restaurant because you saw how another restaurant had profitable results from branding it on social media? And maybe, you are not getting the results you were expecting! Or maybe you are new to branding. But if you are here, you want to commit to a reliable and strong brand identity for your restaurant! If you own a restaurant, a social media presence can confer ultimate benefits to you.
Instagram is never just about posting content that pleases your eyes. Instagram promotion is a lot more than just posting about your restaurant. It surely takes time, effort, and learning, but it never is impossible. To better understand Instagram promotion, let’s take this ship and dive a bit deeper into strategies that will master your Instagram promotion.
Proven Tips to Promote Your Restaurant on Instagram
Here are the top proven strategies that have helped most businesses to attain reliable brand identity and promote their restaurant on Instagram!
1. Brand Logo
What is the first thing you notice when you notice a new brand?
I am sure you remember the brand symbols of your favorite brands. If your brand has an efficient brand symbol, your audience will gain a strong impression of your restaurant. If you are using a generic brand symbol, you might be killing your performance, literally.
Other than that, it is the easiest way to stand apart from your competitors. Color, Typography, and Tagline are a few important aspects of a brand logo. So if you wish to promote your restaurant on Instagram, make sure you use a unique logo to stand out!
2. Are You Posting Enough?
If we are talking of promotional strategies, we cannot miss the importance of the active addition to your feeds. Here’s how it can benefit your promotion.
Firstly, posting regularly enhances your visibility to potential customers. If your visibility is increased, you are more likely to attain new customers. And by posting more content, your audience will want to follow you for more content.
Trust building is another good reason why you cannot miss it. It has been affirmed by top-rated marketers that it leads to increased traffic, better customer relations, and enhanced SEO rankings. But how often should you post? The experts recommend an average of 3 to 5 posts in a week for the best outcomes.
3. Leverage Hashtags
Hashtags make another key point of promotion using Instagram. But are you using it efficiently? The hashtag strategy must be cleverly analyzed and calculated to give the best results.
The first step here is to find your target audience. Rather than randomly adding popular hashtags, research for your audience and add appropriate hashtags. We do not ask to eliminate popular hashtags, just the ones not covering your niche.
Try to add both popular and low-competition hashtags to enhance your visibility. Use hashtags for offers, holidays, special meals, and combos that will drive the audience toward your posts. One common mistake brand make is to overuse hashtags.
Once you have generated a hashtag strategy, you must constantly analyze the result and relatively refine it. One hashtag strategy that gives optimum results is creating specific hashtags for your restaurant.
4. Reach Out To Food Bloggers and Influencers
If we are honest, digital marketing is incomplete without influencers. Influencers make one of the best investments in any of the marketing strategies. By taking advantage of their reach and brand pull, you can make promotions for your restaurant very easily. When choosing a food blogger or influencer, you have to consider multiple factors.
Find an influencer that is relevant to the image you are trying to build for your restaurant. The next factor is to consider the target audience they attract, including their reach and views.
Another key point to keep in mind is to match the location of the influencer you choose. Make sure you choose influencers from the location of your restaurant.
5. Make use of Instagram Stories & Videos
To enhance the popularity of your restaurant, Instagram stories can be effectively used. Video content has better engagement than other content types. You can make use of Instagram stories to share video updates with the viewers. Instagram stories can be used for updates like offers, coupons, or events of your restaurant.
Instagram Live is another option for the promotion of your restaurant. It tells about your restaurant in better detail to your customers. A view of your kitchen, a message from your chef, a welcome note from your staff, briefly talking about your delicacies, why would it not attract more audience?
6. Exploit Engagement
If you think gaining followers and regular posting is enough for your brand on Instagram, you are wrong here!
Once you have attained good followers, engaging with them remains a crucial task for your brand identity and building trust. Engagement does not have to be a tedious task. Reply to comments you have received on your posts.
React and comment on photos that you have been tagged in. If a customer shares stories, reshare them on your feed. Contests are another fun way to increase the engagement between your brand and audience. You can also share your customers with their meals at your restaurant.
Adding to that, you can add reviews from your customers. When engagement is concerned, make sure your customer services are also efficient. To do so, you can use your bio to mention your customer services.
To enhance your customer services, add contact numbers, make use of quick replies, and respect the privacy of the personal information of your customers. Additionally, you can add key points (like FAQs) that might help your customers in your story highlights.
7. Promotions By Freebies & Giveaways
A report suggested that 44% of customers are encouraged by gift cards to try new brands. This depicts how we can integrate this strategy for restaurant promotion using Instagram. Apart from this, giveaways are one of the easiest ways to gain a wider audience for your restaurant.
This strategy offers multiple benefits like increased engagement, increased brand awareness, getting new customers, and increased traffic to your site. Giveaways for a restaurant might include free meals, discounts on meals, offers, gift cards, etc.
8. Photography: Composition and Color Palette
When it comes to photography, you do not have to be an expert but must know the basics of photography. You can try different lighting to make your food look picture-perfect. In case your restaurant has fancy interiors, you can use them to add a touch to your food.
If your food-related posts are visual-orientated, the audience will find your meals intriguing. If your budget allows for a professional food photographer, your social media performance will increase. In case you have basic knowledge of graphics, you must be aware of how important colors are for promotional purposes and can affect sales.
9. Content, Content, & Content!
In the end, nothing is more important than the quality of your content on Instagram. For an efficient promotion of your restaurant, you may consider hiring an experienced social media manager. This helps in generating content without any errors and with perfection. The manager will make Instagram posts (images or videos), reels, Instagram stories, and captions.
Bonus Tip:
You can use digital screens to showcase your captivating Instagram feed, attracting customers to follow and engage with your brand online. This will directly help you leverage your in-store customers to drive more engagement and sales. Furthermore, you can enhance your brand value and sales by displaying testimonials and various offerings on digital screens. Tools like Aiscreen can be used to effectively display Instagram feeds in your restaurant to enhance customer experience
Take Your Restaurant Promotion to the Next Level with These Instagram Tools
Marketing tools form an integral part of promotion. The top free tools you can use for your brand promotion are listed here:
1. Predis AI
Predis AI is a powerful tool for promoting your restaurant on Instagram, as it effortlessly generates engaging posts tailored to your business. Its competitor analysis and topic research capabilities provide valuable insights to enhance your content strategy. Users can create images, captions, and hashtags with the click of a button.
With Predis AI, you can elevate your restaurant’s online presence and attract more customers through captivating Instagram content.
2. CrowdFire
Helps in managing your followers and accounts you follow and provides related options.
3. Audience Insights
This tool is by Meta, which allows you to target the right audience. It enables you to understand your audience better and make informed decisions to optimize your Facebook Page and engage with your followers effectively.
4. 10Web Social Photo Feed
A WordPress plugin that links your Instagram feed to your website.
5. Later
A marketing tool that allows you to schedule your Instagram posts for the future.
6. Predis.ai Hashtag Generator
A free AI tool that will find trending and relevant hashtags for your page, increasing visibility.
7. Iconosquare
A very useful marketing tool that provides insights about statistical data from your account like total likes, average likes on your posts, comments, followers, etc.
Wrapping It Up
We hope we answered your question how to Promote Restaurant on Instagram. If you want your restaurant to shine as a brand, you have to give a chance to numerous strategies, creative ideas, and techniques. If you are following a restricted strategy, there are chances that you might lack behind in the competition.
Another thing to note is that even if a strategy worked for you in the past, you can not stick to it forever. With marketing, the race to find a perfect strategy that gives you the best results never ends. With this, we hope you reach the full marketing potential of your restaurant.
