Social Media Marketing for F&B Outlets
Social Media Marketing for restaurants, cafes, bars and even food trucks, is without a doubt the best way of growing your customer base and at the same time, allowing for conversations to happen with your customers directly. The local food scene wouldn’t be as alive as it is now without the power of social media.
Safe to say that practically every F&B outlet has a social media presence of some kind which comes to no surprise! Social Media, particularly Facebook and Instagram, can help F&B businesses in a multitude of ways, if done right.
Here’s some obvious and not-so-obvious examples of how social media marketing can help restaurants, cafes, bars, food trucks and other F&B outlets;
Engaging and communicating with your customers. Facebook and Instagram offer easy ways to listen and respond to your customer base, whether through private messaging or comments on posts.
Profiles with buttons. Having a profile on social media also allows you to customize how you want your customers to engage with you. Every business profile is given options on the types of functions you can use such as make bookings, call or getting directions to your business. All just one click away.
Keeping your customers updated with your latest foods and beverages. Have a new dish or drink you want to show off? Then there’s obviously know easier or better way than posting your latest products on social media. Letting your customers know what you’re up too let’s them know you’re busy, active and present.
Delivering your brand and personality to the public. Whether you serve up organic food or authentic Malaysian cuisine, letting your customers know what your brand is all about helps attract the right customers.
Make special announcements. Want to introduce a new menu item or inform your customers of an event happening, promotions or perhaps a contest? Social media is the best place for shout-outs and keeping your customers in the loop.
Collaborate with Influencers and Media Outlets. Once you’re on social media, there’s a list of things your business can do to reach audiences outside your customer base, taking your business to new heights.
Location-based advertising. One of the most important factors of social media marketing is social media advertising. For a small budget, you can easily and quickly reach customers through Facebook and Instagram’s location-based targeting, allowing you to reach people closest to your business location.
Build relationships with Live videos or Stories. In recent years, going live and showing your followers what you’re doing in this very moment brings your customers to you, virtually. Whether you’re sharing your finest moment or have something special to say, Live videos allow for instantaneous conversations to happen between your customers and your business. It’s as personal as it gets!
Gain insights with customer reviews. Positive reviews not only help keep your motivation going, but negative reviews can also serve as a way to find improvements for your business. A business that listens to it’s customers is seen as a business that cares, helping build stronger relationships.
Bringing your customer’s experiences online. F&B is just as much about people as it is about food. There’s no better testimonial than your customer’s enjoying your food and drinks while you’re busy snapping photos of them to post to your social media pages. Photos of happy people in your establishment means you’ve got something special to offer.
Sharing knowledge and value. People love free knowledge, especially from their favorite brands. If you have cool hacks on how to make a killer fish head curry, you’d be happy to know that people generally appreciate it when businesses go the extra mile. After all, sharing is caring!
Shout-out on exclusive deals and offers. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as social media contests that get your followers to share certain posts to win giveaways, or events to celebrate a special occasion and the obvious promotion announcements to boost traffic to your establishment and garner more followers.
While it’s important to take into account points above, it’s also important not to over do it and spam your followers with excessive content. Just like supply and demand, when there’s an oversupply, it’s seen as less special, leading to lesser demand. It’s important to find a sweet-spot between how much attractive content you’re putting out versus relevancy of your content. There’s a fine-line trying to be trendy or just plain annoying.
According to research conducted by sproutsocial.com back in 2016, here’s what people thought to be the most annoying things that brands do on social media.
At the same time, customers need to see something a certain amount of times in order to leave a big enough impression to try out your menu items. Here’s another 2016 survey conducted by sproutsocial.com that shows the number of times people need to see your postings before making a decision to purchase.
It takes an average of 2-4 times to see your social media content for a potential customer to make a purchase. Which sounds just about right, however, depending on the nature of your F&B outlet, you’ll most likely need to experiment to find your formula for success.
Location-based Advertising
Here’s what location-based advertising looks like on Facebook. You have the option of identifying target locations, and go further by identifying the radius.
While most of what you can do to level-up your social media game-plan is through free and organic content, many businesses miss out on location-based advertising. There’s times when I meet with owners of such businesses, they’ll say they’ve tried everything but just never seems to work!
After looking through a couple of failed examples and doing mini-audits on their Advertising accounts, it’s clear why they don’t work and there are 2 prime examples based on my findings:
Excessive over-the-top targeting.
Irrelevant ad objective and zero targeting.
The success of any ad campaign is about finding balance and allowing for Facebook’s machine learning to do the heavy lifting. Also, knowing and understanding what your objectives are and which objectives that allow for ads to be placed within it’s audience network, outside the Facebook family of apps.
Although Facebook has tried it’s best to simplify their advertising platform, there’s more to it than meets the eye!
Aside from location-based advertising, how your business puts out organic content will become the image that your customers will associate with your brand. It’s imperative to put thought into how you want to position your brand with the types of content you put out on social media.
For example, if healthy organic fast food is the anchor of your brand, then you’d want to have 3/4 social media posts per week about organic food at least, while the remaining days can be about your customers or other cool things!
If you’d like to reach out for more details, I’m just a click away.
Drop me a message here to learn more.
