How To Market Your Restaurant Franchise?

How to market your restaurant franchise?- This is the second part of our “How to franchise your restaurant?” blog series. In the previous article, we discussed how to get ready for franchising, including legal requirements, FDD and franchisee registration, as well as hiring and training. In this blog, we’ll focus on the marketing aspects of restaurant franchising. We are going to take you through the basics and the most important aspects of franchise marketing- what it is, the types, and how you can market your franchise effectively.

In this post, we’ll discuss franchise location marketing rather than brand marketing, which includes things like mass media. Because the tactics we propose are focused on local marketing rather than television advertisements or other forms of mass media that help franchisees establish their brands.

As of June 2021, Subway had 37,540 locations in more than 100 countries and territories.

Does your franchise have what it takes to become the next Subway? The right marketing strategy is one of the most important factors here. Anyone, with the right marketing, can reach these figures.

What is restaurant franchise marketing?

How To Market Your Restaurant Franchise?

Before you even consider marketing your restaurant franchise, you must first understand what franchise marketing is.

Franchise marketing is basically all those activities that you do to grow as a brand. Franchise marketing might involve pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, SEO, trade exhibitions, content marketing, commercials, and other activities that a franchise engages in to expand.

It entails attracting new customers, keeping them engaged so that they become loyal patrons, and raising brand awareness.

Now, let’s quickly hop on to the marketing strategies required to market your restaurant franchise.

How to market your restaurant franchise?

Answering the question- “How to market your restaurant franchise?– might seem like a lot of work, but trust us, with careful planning and implementation, it’s not that hard. Here, we’ll walk you through some best practices for a smooth and effective approach.

The first stage in planning any marketing strategy, let alone franchise marketing, is to conduct thorough research on your customers, their interests, geography, demographics, and other factors, as well as to define the personas you will be targeting. Following that, you’ll need to choose the channels through which you’ll put your message out.

Franchise marketing channels-

We’ll go over the franchise marketing channels at each stage of the A2A funnel.

1) The Awareness Stage

Social media marketing-

One of the most effective ways to raise awareness has been through social media. People spend an average of 1.4 hours every day on social media sites, sharing their thoughts and opinions and conversing with others.

This is the time to make a good first impression and position yourself as a thought leader in your field. The goal of the plan is to present your brand to customers by producing material that catches their attention. The benefit of incorporating social media into your marketing strategy is that it allows you to reach a much larger audience without requiring significant marketing spending.

Optimizing the customer experience at each of these touchpoints is critical to converting a cold lead into a profit-generating customer. Developing a social media funnel attitude may assist you in fine-tuning your approach, increasing audience engagement, and, most crucially, increasing conversions at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

2) Engagement stage

a) Online Reputation Management

Restaurant franchises have long relied on word of mouth to reach out to their consumers and establish their brand, in addition to traditional marketing techniques and paid advertising. While the internet’s expansion provided chances to promote your company to a larger audience, it also brought a number of obstacles.

Maintaining an online presence isn’t enough; you need to monitor and update your listings on a regular basis. Customers are attracted to a restaurant based on online ratings and reviews. A negative review is no longer limited to a disgruntled customer’s personal circle of friends; instead, it can reach millions of potential customers. As a result, managing your restaurant’s online reputation is critical.

b) Local Marketing

Local restaurant marketing is more than just handing out flyers. Contributing to causes that are important to your customers and match your company’s beliefs is, in fact, the best approach to generate goodwill with your customers. Collaborating with local companies can provide your restaurant with a number of advantages, including increased brand recognition and revenue.

In fact, most well-known restaurants, such as Chipotle and Pizza Hut, have regular fundraisers with public schools, sports organizations, libraries, and youth community groups.

Working with local groups such as animal shelters and non-profits, you can organize charity events, fundraisers, and Spirit Nights for your franchise businesses. The collaborating organization receives a percentage of the traceable sales revenues.

c) Email marketing

According to Marketing Sherpa, 72 percent of consumers prefer to communicate with businesses via email.
Every day, at least 91 percent of consumers check their email.

Sending emails to promote your business is known as email marketing. Restaurant Email marketing has been around for a long time and is still being used by businesses to send out brand updates, promotions, coupons, and to stay in touch with new and existing customers.

Emails are an excellent way to communicate with your consumers and stay in touch with them on a regular basis. In fact, there are a plethora of inventive methods to use emails to communicate the proper marketing message to your restaurant’s patrons.

3) Acquisition stage

a) Website

77% of the diners visit a restaurant’s website before placing an order. 88% of online website visitors are less likely to return to a website after a poor experience [Gomez], losing you a wealth of potential customers. Numbers speak for themselves, hence you need to consider creating a quality website, that is fast, easy to navigate through, and the most important thing, it should be mobile-friendly.

There should be a balance between having a single website and having several location-level websites – restaurants are hyperlocal in nature, yet managing a single website provides the appearance of a chain and comes with scaling and ensuring consistency. You should make sure that your store’s information is up to date on Google My Business, Yelp, and other sites.

Also have a properly optimized and easy-to-understand menu, with proper descriptions for your customers to easily place orders. Make sure that you have proper contact information and pop CTAs (order online) for you to not lose a single customer to the fact that they didn’t know where to place an order on your website!

b) SEO

According to research based on more than 80 million keywords and billions of results, 28.5 percent of searchers click on the first Google result, 15.7 percent on the second, 11% on the third, and 24.8 percent on the fourth to tenth. Many people rely on Google to discover the appropriate answers to their questions, with little over 3.5 billion searches per day. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play in your franchise marketing plan. The difference between a continuous flow of leads and no visitors can be determined by optimizing and ranking for the right keyword.

4) Loyalty Stage

a) Birthday clubs and loyalty programs

Restaurants had been successfully using punch cards to create a regular client base long before the switch to mobile platforms. The entire landscape of loyalty programs is undergoing a revolution as a result of the introduction of simple mobile platforms.

With nearly 30% of restaurants offering a customer loyalty program and 69 percent of consumers reporting that where they may earn rewards influences their restaurant decision, it’s clear that a loyalty program is a great way to market your franchise restaurant.

Birthday clubs can be a fun way to interact with your clients.

Customers who had not planned to visit your restaurant may decide to do so after hearing about the deal.

5) Advocacy Stage

People are more likely to trust a brand that comes highly recommended by their friends and family than any other type of advertising. Referral programs are a great way to turn your most loyal customers into brand ambassadors while also collecting consumer data.

IMPORTANCE OF DATA DRIVEN-MARKETING IN MARKETING YOUR RESTAURANT FRANCHISE

In practically every industry, data is used, and the restaurant industry is no exception. The days of restaurant owners thinking of this as a day-to-day operation are long gone. Read this post to learn how to adopt data-driven marketing in your restaurant franchise- https://www.mkonnekt.com/blog/resources/7-strategies-to-boost-your-restaurant-sales-with-data-driven-marketing/

Wrap up

Now that you know how to promote a franchise, you can pick and choose which strategies to employ and get to work.

We can be of great assistance to you if you’re wanting to market your franchise restaurant. Know more and request a demonstration of our 4Q-marketing platform today!

How Do You Get Customer Data To Boost Your Restaurant Sales With Data-Driven Marketing? – The Answer, The A2A Approach

It is very vital to get customer data to boost your restaurant sales with data-driven marketing. Understanding a customer’s journey as they learn about your organization, develop an affection for your products and services, and eventually become an advocate for your brand is an important part of expanding your business.

The process isn’t easy, but once you grasp the customer’s perspective, you’ll be able to guide them through the many stages of the journey.

The customer life cycle boils down to this. You carry out marketing operations that move customers through the stages of the customer life cycle. This allows you to expand your company.

One of the key problems that arise when talking about data-driven marketing is, “Where do you get your consumer data and how do you collect it in order to analyze and use it afterward?”

The answer is simple; it is just a matter of understanding marketing to see how you can turn small platforms into data-producing machines.

Get Customer Data To Boost Your Restaurants Sales With Data-Driven Marketing

Here in this article, we’ve gone over the foundation of how and where you may get customer data to boost your restaurant sales with Data-Driven Marketing in each buyer stage of the A2A funnel.

Get Customer Data To Boost Your Restaurant Sales With Data-Driven Marketing at Different Stages-

The Awareness Stage

Organic and paid social media–

One of the most effective ways to raise awareness and collect customer data is through social media. People spend an average of 1.4 hours every day on social media sites, sharing their thoughts and questions and conversing with others.

This is the time to make a good first impression and position yourself as a thought leader in your field. The quantity and quality of leads you generate at this level are determined by your actions. At this point, the aim is to expose your brand to the customer by posting material that catches their attention. The benefit of incorporating social media into your marketing strategy is that it allows you to reach a much larger audience without requiring significant marketing spend and in turn Get Customer Data To Boost Your Restaurant Sales With Data-Driven Marketing.

The Engagement Stage-

Specials and contact page on your website

Create a contact page on your website and invite people to sign up for your restaurant’s specials. It’s a really straightforward method of obtaining client information.

You may also run Facebook and Instagram advertisements and give a CTA for the same when your aim is to collect customer data.

Social Media

Determine the variants of posts that drew the most attention and write content that engages your customers and distinguishes your product while answering the question of why they should buy from you.

It would benefit you to also plan activities such as live Q&As, webinars, tournaments, or live events, as well as host contests or giveaways.

Spend some time responding to reviews, comments, and mentions of your brand. These activities with help you get customer data to boost your restaurant sales with data-driven marketing.

Chatbots

Chatbots are an excellent method to connect with your visitors, interact with them in real-time, solve their queries, make the ordering process seamless, and send promotional offers directly to your consumers’ inboxes. They deliver an interactive experience that is completely automated. When you communicate with a chatbot, it’s as if you’re conversing with a real person.

According to Statista, 11% of the world’s population uses Facebook Messenger every month. Facebook Messenger and other live chat services can gather a wealth of information about each individual customer.

The Acquisition Stage-

POS systems

You have complete control over your POS systems. You’ll be able to manage your delivery and takeaway orders while simultaneously collecting and tracking all of the information your customers give you. This provides you, as a restaurant owner, to categorize them, ranging from the casual user to committed customers. You may contact your consumers directly, send them excellent offers, retarget them, and fully automate the process—your restaurant, your customers—using the power of data and information. From beginning to end, the service is completely branded.

Integrated feedback software

At mkonnekt, we have developed a software called Kritiq, which is incorporated into our online ordering platform Foodkonnekt and sends a feedback email with each order. This allows you to learn extensive information about your customers’ experiences and how you can use it to vastly improve your strategies.

You can do something similar by sending out feedback email campaigns and online surveys and getting a hold of your customer experiences.

The Loyalty Stage-

Loyalty Clubs And Birthday Programs

On multiple media platforms, ensure that you promote your birthday clubs and loyalty programs. These are some of the most effective methods for gathering vital client information. You may give your consumers personalized weekly deals, birthday specials, and many more freebies using these platforms. When a customer joins your program, it’s a sure sign that they’ve reached the loyalty stage of the marketing funnel!

The Advocacy Stage-

The ultimate goal of your marketing funnel should be to convert loyal consumers into proactive advocates for your company. People are more likely to trust a brand that their friends and family recommend over any other form of advertising. Referral programs are an extremely beneficial method to transform your most loyal customers into brand advocates and collect customer data as well. Essentially, they function the same way targeted promotions do, attracting customers who have brimming interest in your restaurant’s products.

Wrap up-

Getting customer data at every part of the marketing funnel is essential to a restaurant’s sales and performance. Learning how to incorporate this data in our technologically reliant society is a must to ensure success.

How to measure your social media ROI?

With social media getting used as a great device in enterprises to grow, it’s been more and more vital to track the effects of your social media ROI, ie, your social media efforts.

The most pressing question now is how to comprehend the consequences of your social media strategy. Are you on the right track when it comes to your content strategy? Return on investment, or ROI, is the solution. It is nothing more than the returns a company would expect from the time, resources, and minds invested in the company’s entire social media strategy.

In terms of math, it boils down to–> Revenue-Costs/Costs*100.

Now imagine you were running a grocery store and you purchased the groceries for $100 and sold them for $150, then you’d get: 150-100/100*100= 50% by plugging these numbers into the formula.

Isn’t it easy enough? But, in terms of social media marketing, how do you apply this concept?

The return on investment (ROI) on your social media campaign is the amount of money you’ve made. But not all social media efforts are directly attributable to monetary benefits. As a result, all marketers must be able to extract and apply relevant data, as and when required.

Why is it important to measure social media ROI?

It’s crazy how many marketers have no idea what kind of ROI they’re getting from which channel or how their social media practices are impacting their enterprise. Since every step, every effort you put into your business has repercussions, this underestimation of social media can cause havoc for your business. As a result, it’s past time for you to start treating your social media sites with the respect they deserve.

If you’ve figured out which social media activities are yielding the best results, you can start planning strategies in that direction. For example, you will discover that posting stories on Instagram or running competitions on Facebook generates more momentum on specific days, resulting in increased monetary benefits to your company; as a result, you’ll know what you need to do in the future. That’s the power of studying ROI.

Step-1

Identify your goals:

Always determine the goals you want to achieve from your activities before calculating returns or even thinking about analyzing the consequences of your social media efforts. Do you want to increase your following? Do you want more people to sign up for your newsletter? Do you want to increase your sales? Following that, you should consider calculating the social media ROI.

Step-2

Understanding marketing funnel:

After you’ve figured out your marketing objectives, you should move on to understanding your marketing funnel. Understanding how social media metrics connect to the customer journey is a crucial first step.

Engagement with the consumer, which translates to reach in social media terms, is the first step in the customer journey, as it is in the early phases.

Similarly, while learning about your audience in the middle stage, it translates to CPC, or cost per click, and CTR, or click-through rate. Finally, at the last stage, encouraging your audience to purchase equates to conversions like sales, subscriptions, downloads, etc.

Step-3:

Calculate!

Now that you have targeted your KPIs and understood what to calculate, now comes the tricky part, calculating them.

In order to determine your ROI, you’ll need the correct tools. Many built-in technologies, such as Facebook insights, Instagram insights, and LinkedIn insights, provide granular information on how people interact with your material.

With these, you can keep track of all of your engagement. You can observe when your audience is active, where they are from, what demographics they have, so on and so forth. You can check how your audience reacted to your ad using Facebook Ads Manager.

Another significant tool is Google Analytics. To find out how much traffic and conversions your social media marketing efforts are producing, add Google Analytics UTM parameters to the URL of your social media ads.

Why is measuring social media ROI difficult?

Due to a variety of factors, social media managers and executives are finding it increasingly challenging to measure social media marketing ROI. Executives are unsure about what to measure. Many people believe that if their content gets a lot of likes and shares, their strategy is good enough; however, this is not always the case. We need to see if our efforts are yielding any quantitative results.

Is your product being purchased? Is the quality of your online orders improving? Is your eBook gaining popularity? Always measure all the relevant KPIs and do analysis accordingly.

Wrap up:

Social media marketing ROI is a parameter that should never be overlooked, if you are putting in genuine efforts in it, and want good results out of it, keep measuring and keep analyzing!

How To Increase Restaurant Sales With Online Ordering?

Competition in the restaurant industry can be cut-throat and with the rapidly changing trends, it can be difficult to acquire new customers or retain existing. As more customers seek out the ease of take-out–and especially delivery, third-party for delivery services provide an easy way to increase restaurant sales with online ordering.

Although these delivery services offer an opportunity to reach new customers and increase sales, the benefits come at a cost: giving up access to valuable customer data and losing loyal customer base to the delivery partners.

It, therefore, becomes pertinent for restaurants to explore strategies to engage with their customers to keep the regulars coming back, attract new customers, and build their native platforms to increase online orders on their website. In this article, we will discuss some strategies to increase restaurant sales with online ordering.

How to increase restaurant sales with online ordering?

Opt for A Robust Online Ordering Solution
Streamline your online ordering menu
Optimize your online ordering platform
Make it easy to order from your website
Leverage Digital channels to Promote Online Ordering
Optimize Your Website For Local Search
Promote your Online Ordering Platform

1. Opt For A Robust Online Ordering Solution

Many restaurant owners/managers opt for third party delivery services to provide the convenience of online ordering to their customers. The general belief is that it is easier to get started on such platforms and get more orders without any investment in terms of time and resources. However, what they fail to factor in is that the additional revenues generated by orders received via these platforms is usually diluted by the hefty commissions charged by them.

At this point, it is advisable to consider the long-term benefits of building your own online ordering platform. Initially, you may have to put in some efforts to promote your online ordering platform but these are resources invested in building your brand that have the potential to deliver huge dividends in the future.

There are several robust online ordering solutions in the market, which are commission-free and are available to restaurants totally free of cost. There are a few things you should keep in mind while selecting an online ordering solution:

What are the key features of an online ordering solution?

Simple configuration: Most modern solutions are easy to setup and configure and allow to start taking online orders within 24 hours.
POS integrations: An integrated online ordering solution does away with the need for manually updating orders. Your online orders appear on your POS along with other orders, and all menu updates on the POS are automatically reflected on your online ordering platform.
Customer data: if your online ordering solution is integrated with your pos, the customer data from online orders appears with all other data on your POS.
Customizable: You should be able to customize the platform, upload pictures and add descriptions to align with your brand identity.
Customers should be able save their preferences and customize their orders easily.
Accept Multiple Payment Options
Integrated feedback and loyalty program help you to build a loyal customer base.

A lot of thought should go into creating your online ordering menu. Some items that may be very popular in-store might not lot lend themselves to pick-up or delivery. Evaluate each menu item on the following three criteria to come up with the ideal menu.

Whether they do or do not travel well
Whether the margin on the food item is enough to cover packaging/delivery costs.
Packaging considerations

Your online order menu should include only those items that travel well and at the same time have a high popularity and profitability score.

3. Optimize Your Online Ordering Platform

The online ordering platform is an extension of your brand, and you should take utmost care to build the same customer experience on your online ordering page that customers have come to expect from your brand.

Customize every aspect of the solution to align with your brand identity.
Upload good quality food images and detailed descriptions of food items.
Arrange menu items like they would appear on your in-store menu.
Create up-sell or cross-sell opportunities by creating pop-ups for popular items or items that are usually ordered together.
Streamline and smoothen the customer journey on your online ordering platform by setting up automations such as helpful tips and suggestions or allowing customers to save orders or delivery address etc.

4. Make It Easy To Order Right From Your Website

In most case, customers land on your online ordering platform from your website. The order online button should appear prominently on the top of your home page and menu page to grab the customers attention. Highlight your specials and consider adding add to cart buttons to menu items.

5. Leverage Digital Channels to Promote Online Ordering

You should build a strong online identity by adding the order online button to all your social media handles including Facebook, Instagram and GMB page. Platforms like Yelp and Tripadvisor also allow you to build your restaurant page and add an order online button to lead customers to your order online platform.

6. Optimize Your Restaurant Website for Local Search

Each day thousands of customers are searching on Google for restaurant like yours using keywords or terms related to your business/menu. You should optimize your website for these key search terms. Research keywords for your restaurant and include them in your page’s body, header, title tags, and Meta description and your sit’s SEO.

Build your website’s credibility and trust with the search engines by adding your restaurant to relevant local listings including Google maps, Apple maps, Yellow book, Map quest and Nextdoor.

7. Promote Your Online Ordering Platform

You would want your customers to know that you are accepting online orders. Promoting your online ordering platform through organic and paid channels can help your reach more customers and increase restaurant sales with online ordering.

In-Store Promotions

Promote your online ordering link via window displays and posters in prominent places such as the check out counter.
Grab the attention of your customers when they are waiting for their food to arrive with table tents.
Menu inserts are also a great way to reach your customers.
Ensure that your online ordering link is prominently printed on your takeout packages and receipts.
Train your staff to promote your online ordering platform to your customers.

Online Promotions

Social Media platforms can be a great tool to reach your customers. Besides regular posts promoting your online ordering link, you should also consider advertising to reach your target audience on these networks.

You could create a special offer or discount to promote online ordering among your customers.
Run contests to promote online Orders.
Run Ads to promote online ordering

8. Leverage Data To Build Loyalty

Use data from your online ordering solution to create targeted promotions fostering brand loyalty. Segment customers based on their purchase history, preferences and visit frequency and come up with customized offers to bring back customers. For instance;

Offers to bring back dormant customers
Offer on kids meal to bring back customers with kids
Deals to increase average order value of regulars
Flash offers to increase online orders on slow days
Offer available only on online orders to incentivize customers to place pickup orders during rush hours.

Streamlining the customer experience on your online ordering platform and targeted promotions can help you build your brand and increase restaurant sales with online ordering.

Increase Your Restaurant Revenues with FoodKonnekt Online Ordering

Learn More

Best Social Media Marketing Tools in 2021

Social Media Marketing Manager! No matter how glamorous and delightful it may sound, but, if you have handled social media accounts for even a handful of clients, you probably know how overwhelming it can get. From keeping up with the current trends to strategizing, creating, and publishing content.

Thankfully, there are a bunch of awesome tools out there that can help you streamline most of your work and get a competitive edge over your peers.

So, let’s start from the top. Here, we are dividing the tools into the following categories:

Content creation and curation tools
Automated scheduling of content
Measuring and data analysis tools,
and lastly, Social listening tools, which we will cover in the later part of the article.

So let’s get started:

1) Content Creation and Curation-

a) Canva:

Canva- Image Creation tool for social media graphics

When creating content for your social media platforms, you always need some pictures, graphics, infographics, etc. Canva is an extremely useful tool with which can help you create beautiful graphics. The best part is that you don’t need to be a graphic designer to use Canva, it’s an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, and tonnes of free and paid templates can be used by anyone to create stellar designs. It has a free and a paid version, so depending on your needs, you can use either one of them.

The free version provides you with plenty of features but if you want to take your designs to the next level, you should definitely try the pro version which allows you to set up a brand kit by uploading your own logos, fonts, and setting a color palette to easily create designs that are aligned with your brand identity. You can also remove background from images or resize your images for different social media platforms.

Recently, Canva Pro also added the ability to schedule content directly to social media handles.

b) Animoto:

Did you know that the native videos that are uploaded on Facebook have 10x more reach than the videos on other video search engine platforms like Youtube? However, it takes a lot of effort and time to create videos from scratch.

Animoto is an amazing video creation tool that allows you to create professional-looking slideshows and marketing videos. It has a vast galley of pre-customized templates that you can use to create powerful videos. You can upload your own media such as videos and photos and use the simple drag and drop feature to customize them by adding text and music.

c) Quuu:

Your audience wants to hear from you. But creating-3-4 pieces of content each day is not possible even for the best of us and you don’t always know what to share. This is when the CURATION of content comes in. And Quuu does just that for you.

Once you have created an account and set up your niche, the platform sends you hand-curated content to your dashboard every day. Each and every piece of content is hand-reviewed by Quuu’s own staff to ensure that you share only quality content relevant to your followers. You can connect your Quuu account to Hubspot, Buffer, Hootsuite, SocialBee, or its own free scheduler SocialChief to automatically publish your content to Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter. You can choose to select your content and schedule manually through the Quuu dashboard.

d) Buzzsumo:

As social media managers, we are required to keep an eye on the competition, and this is where Buzzsumo can help you. It is really killing it in terms of research and curation. It is literally one of the best tools I have ever come across.

Have you ever gone through those days when you are just not able to come up with content, no matter how hard you try? Well, Buzzsumo comes to the rescue!

All you need to do is type in the relevant keyword in the Buzzsumo app and it gives a list of the best performing content related to a specific keyword. Now that you have viral content at your disposal, you can analyze it to figure out what makes it popular and use the ideas and inspiration to create your own content.

You can use it to track competitors and set up alerts based on keywords, brand name, links, author name, or domain. It also allows you to research trending topics your audience is interested in or find influencers in a particular niche to plan your influencer marketing strategy.

2) Automation and Scheduling-

a) Hootsuite:

Hootsuite is one of the oldest marketing tools in the game. It is a boon to any SMM. It has many such features which can help one in the long run. It gives options to schedule bulk content in advance, helps to create and analyze streams, keeps track of your social media performance in terms of engagement and other metrics and analytics. One of the best features it provides is the collaboration of team members and the approval feature. Hootsuite has also acquired Heyday. Heyday is a customer messaging platform that blends Conversational AI’s capability with your team’s human touch to help you offer 5-star customer experiences at scale. It provides a free trial period of 30 days. It is a very beneficial tool for any brand which has multiple social accounts to be handled simultaneously.

b) Tailwind:

It is for your audience that digests a lot of picture-related content, that is Pinterest and Instagram. Not only does it help you in scheduling bulk content for Pinterest, but also lets you find the best people to reach out to (with hashtags), tells you what’s working for your page and what’s not, and also gives you an option of collaborating with your team. Its drag and drop calendar feature helps you in easy content strategy planning. There are four versions of this tool: Pro, Advanced, Max, and Free forever. The Pro version has

1 Pinterest Profile(s)
1 Instagram Profile(s)
100 Posts/mo
Across both Instagram & Pinterest
200 Post Designs/mo
5 Tailwind Communities
Smart.bio Custom Link
Advanced Analytics
1 user

The Advanced version has double these features and Max has triple.

c) Buffer:

When talking about marketing tools for automation for scheduling, Buffer would always be the front-runner. It is kind of an all-rounder tool, as you can do anything with it, from scheduling to analysis to group collabs.

One of the most amazing features of Buffer is that it helps to seamlessly iterate on content to customize posts for each channel. It makes sure that your posts will be shared at the best possible times. You can also track links to see which content is most popular with your readers. There are many other features available, which you can check here.

3) Measuring and Analyzing data-

a) Sprout Social:

If you want to try an intuitive platform whose dashboard will help you to manage and analyze all your social media efforts on major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin, then do give a try to Sprout social. It offers a 30 day free trial period. The most unique feature about this tool is that it helps a brand to receive genuine feedback from customers which allows you to build long-lasting relationships with them. The new Engagement Report provides insight on team interactions (Premium Plan only). Expose trends in social engagement by day & time and see how you stack up against profiles with similar message volume.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox is the ultimate social media monitoring feature; it combines every message, alert, and action from all your profiles into a single, filterable stream.

Sprout combines profile-level, group, and roll-up analytics reports to get a high or low-level look at performance. You can report on your social profiles in a way that makes sense to your business.

b) Adespresso:

Do you need a customizable dashboard that can automatically monitor all your ongoing ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads? Adespresso is one of the best marketing tools for you. It checks out all your active ads and suggests what is working for you and what is not, and automatically promotes new posts, and uses some extremely intelligent filters to decide what should be promoted for how long. This is legit fire!

c) Socialinsider:

SocialInsider is a benchmarking and analytical tool that helps you to measure the different metrics and KPIs depending upon your social media strategy. It can be used for all influential platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube. The tool uses powerful analytics to provide in-depth information for every social media profile, resulting in increased interaction, better content design, automated report generating, and dashboard management from a single spot. Users can also do in-depth competitor research across major social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube. As a result, consumers may compare their channels to those of top competitors, influencers, and other important industry players.

4) Social listening:

Whenever you run a business, online or whatever, always remember, it’s not just about you. It’s not just about selling. It’s not just about announcing your offers, your products. It’s also, not also but to a great extent, about your customers. What do people feel about you, your product, your brand? Are they even happy with you? Do they respect you? Would they want to make a purchase with your brand? Would they want to come back to you? More than talking, LISTEN. (Ahh, you see what they did there?)

Social listening is just this. Your reputation is on the line when people put in mean comments about your company, your product online. Listen to what’s going wrong with your product, respond to them online, make your customers feel respected, make them feel that you care. Let’s see some marketing tools which may help you in this:

a) Mention:

If you want deep insights into what people have to say about you, Mention is just for you. You can track 1 Billion sources across the web daily with it. 1 Billion. As I discussed above, protect your reputation, build relations. It offers real-time social media monitoring of your social media presence. It helps you to respond to all the tags, comments and mentions on one single dashboard. It also gives you an option to sort out the mentions based on priority and N number of other filters available.

Shared notifications and tasks allow you to collaborate with your team. Connecting social accounts allows you to respond directly from your dashboard. Produce clear and concise reports that make tracking and analyzing your performance a breeze.

You can also share your post on social media and schedule it.

b) Awario:

Awario is one of the majorly discussed marketing tools when Social listening is talked about. It not only lets you know whenever your brand is mentioned or other related keywords are discussed on all major social media platforms, but it also segregates the mentions into positive reviews, negative and neutral ones. It provides you with a detailed report on how many times your brand was mentioned, and by whom, if they were influencers, it gives you a list of them too. Hence, it helps you in monitoring your social media presence in terms of mentions to great heights.

c) Brandwatch:

Brandwatch’s analytics data is ideal for illustrating the meaning of social media marketing. Signals is another feature that sets Brandwatch apart. You can set up an alert to get notified anytime a keyword is discussed by the writers you select. Signals are triggered when major changes in the data set occur, such as a sudden surge in unfavorable comments or a sudden peak in the number of mentions.

This platform provides the critical social intelligence that brands require to make informed marketing campaign decisions. 50+ filters, sophisticated segmentation, tailored sentiment, real-time graphing, a fast and intuitive interface, filters and search tools, shared dashboards, search operators, and proprietary technology are the primary characteristics of Brandwatch.

4 Tips to Create a Powerful Brand Online

Outstanding customer experience is the basis of any successful restaurant. It’s what sets you apart from the plethora of competitors and drives loyalty with your customers. In the digital age, knowing how to create a powerful brand online is as important as the in-store experience. Online presence not only strengthens your brand identity but also helps you reach a larger audience.

In this article, we’re going to show you how to create a powerful brand online by delivering seamless customer experience.

How do you attract customers to your restaurant?

1. Use Social Media to share pictures of your food and restaurant
2. Mobile Optimized and SEO Friendly website
3. Use Email Marketing to Reach More Customers
4. Run a restaurant Birthday Club
5. Partner with the local community for fundraisers
6. Host Local Events
7. Give Coupons for Local events
8. Run a loyalty Program

How do you create a restaurant brand?

a. Define Your Identity
b. Identify your Target Audience
c. Give Your Brand a Voice
d. Work on your Look and Ambiance
e. Ensure that your Online Platforms reflect your brand identify
f. Customers service should be a reflection of your brand identify
g. Reward Loyalty

Tip 1: Respond To Every Comment and Complaint

For online reviews, the way you answer can affect other users’ experiences because they can read the reviews. So, as you respond, don’t forget that your comments are for more than just one customer. Best practices recommend you respond to every review, both positive and negative, in a timely manner. Online Reputation Management is therefore very important for a restaurant business.

Tip 2: Incorporation of Chat-bots

At the core, restaurants are service businesses — they primarily care about providing the best possible experience for guests who visit their physical stores. Everything else, from their website to their marketing campaigns to their online customer service, is just a method to accomplishing that goal. For this reason, we think that chatbots are perfect for service-based businesses that are so focused on in-person experiences.

By answering questions automatically to real humans only when necessary, chatbots can help restaurants concurrently improve customer service and also save up time for their staff to spend promoting their actual in-restaurant experience. Dive in into these 8 examples How Restaurants Can Effectively Use Chatbots

Tip 3: Emphasize On Customer Reviews

Capitalize on your positive customer reviews.

If a restaurant has great reviews on Google, make sure they show up on the website and all social media handles. Do the same with Google my business reviews.

By highlighting your reviews on your website, you’ll improve the customer experience. Your potential customers want to see social or material proof. They want to know others think highly of your restaurant. Learn more about our product KritiQ to take care of the reputation management requirements for your restaurant business.

Tip 4: Make It Easier To Place An Order

One more thing you can do to enhance the customer experience is making your online menu and shopping cart as easy as possible. A bad online ordering experience does zero for your website’s overall usability. Don’t dissipate your customers’ time by asking for too much information or by asking for too many item confirmations before the ultimate purchase. Discard the pop-ups and don’t incorporate too many additional offers. Have a look at our product Foodkonnekt-our integrated solution that can help you to add an additional revenue source while expanding your customer base.

Make it easier to place an order on your website

Wrap Up:

The grounds of any strong and successful restaurant begins with providing exceptional customer service. Whether you are a large chain restaurant or a small business, going above and beyond with your customers is a tactic that will drive repeat customers and thrust your revenue today, as well as in the future.

Images by: Rod Long, Jonas Leupe on Unsplash, Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels

Proven Strategies For Increasing Your Restaurant’s Online Orders

Providing the ease of online ordering to your customers can help you generate incremental sales for your restaurant and boost profitability. Besides, it can also help you to expand your reach, improve order accuracy, and help you get over the hassles of taking orders over the phone.

However, in a crowded restaurant space, just adopting an online ordering platform for your restaurant may not cut the mark. You have to work constantly to increase your restaurant’s online orders by making the platform more visible and making the online ordering experience smooth for your customers. Here are a few strategies for increasing your restaurant’s online orders. We can categorize these strategies into three groups.

What are the advantages of online ordering for your restaurant?

1. Online Ordering drives revenue: You can reach more customers online. The average order value of online orders is higher than in-store orders
2. Free up your Employees to provide a superior customer experience. Taking orders over the phone interferes with in-store services especially during rush hours and over the weekends. With an online ordering solution, employees do not waste time taking orders over the phone.
3. Improves Order Accuracy: Disturbances while taking orders over the phone, can result in incorrect orders. On an online ordering solution, customers can easily enter the orders to the last detail improving order accuracy.
4. Losing customers: You will no longer lose orders during rush hours/ weekends due to busy phone lines.
5. Provide accurate estimates of pick-up and delivery times.

What features should you be looking for in an Online ordering Solution?

1. Ability to work across different browsers such as Chrome, Safari or Bing.
2. Availability on Mobile Platform
3. Multiple Payment Options including wallets like Apple Wallet and Samsung Pay.
4. PoS integrations

What are benefits of having a native online ordering solution for your restaurant?

1. Full Control Over Customer Experience
2. An extension of your brand identity: You can customize your online ordering platform to align with your brand identity; upload food pictures, add specials and offers, make instant and real-time changes to your menu.
3. Collect Crucial Customer Data to create customized experiences, and personalize your marketing messages and encourage repeat visits. Further by integrating your loyalty program to your online ordering solution, you can ensure that your loyalty customers can redeem their offers and coupons on online orders.
4. Keep Your Profits: By opting for an in-house solution, you can do away with commission charged by third party services on each order. All profits from online orders are your own.

How to increase your revenues with online ordering?

1. Native Online Ordering Platform
2. Optimize User Experience On Your Website and Online Ordering Platform:
3. Optimise your menu
4. Provide Multiple Ways To Order
5. Make it easy to reorder Ensure that your online ordering system has the ability to save previous orders based on the timings, delivery address, and card information.
6. Offer Delivery
7. Promote your online ordering link via window displays and posters in prominent places such as the checkout counter.
8. Grab the attention of your customers when they are waiting for their food to arrive with table tents.
9. Menu inserts are also a great way to reach your customers.
10. Ensure that your online ordering link is prominently printed on your takeout packages and receipts.
11. Train your staff to promote your online ordering platform to your customers.
12. You could create a special offer or discount to promote online ordering among your customers.
13. Online promotions: If you are running any offer exclusively for promoting Online Orders, you must ensure that you are posting about these offers on your networks or running ads to reach a larger audience
14. Run contests to promote online Orders.

Technology Parameters for increasing your Restaurant’s Online Orders

1. Native Online Ordering Platform

Until a few years ago, only large restaurant chains could afford sophisticated software and global data infrastructure for the benefit of their business. However, the breakthroughs in cloud computing have now made these services accessible even to small family-owned restaurants.

There are several different solutions out there from third-party online ordering solution that can be integrated with your POS to the restaurant point of sale systems that have their own integrated restaurant online ordering software.

You can select a platform that meets your requirements. Here are a few things you should consider while building your native online ordering platform.

Ability to work across different browsers: Your online ordering platform should work seamlessly across different browsers such as Chrome, Safari or Bing.
Availability on Mobile Platform: The millennial customers prefer to order food-on-the-go using their mobile phones. So, it becomes important to ensure that your online ordering platform is optimized for mobile screens.
Multiple Payment Options: Your online ordering system must have the ability to accept multiple payment options including wallets like Apple Wallet and Samsung Pay.
PoS integrations With the advent of AI, smart online ordering options would become the norm of the day. POS integrations make it easier to automatically process orders accepted from the Online Ordering platform.

FoodKonnekt Online Ordering is one such solution that is available absolutely free of cost to restaurants. It is integrated with several PoS platforms including Clover, Focus PoS, FoodTronix and can be fully customized to align with your brand identity.

Foodkonnekt Online Ordering Platform: Increasing your restaurant's Online Orders

2. Consider a Mobile App for your Restaurant:

With the rapid advances in technology, developing an app for your restaurant is no longer going to burn a hole in your pocket. There are several benefits to having an independent app for your restaurant. An app makes it easier for you to promote offers and deals, or to roll out personalized offers based on customer’s purchase history to boost online-orders. It is also much easier to administer a loyalty program through a dedicated app.

However, regular maintenance and updates of a mobile app require additional resources in terms of time and money. Add to that the concerns associated with acquiring and retaining customers on your app, which may require consistent marketing efforts. So, you should consider the return on investment in the long-run before investing in an app.

Subway Online Ordering:Increasing Your Restaurant's Online Orders — Subway App Promotes Online Ordering

Optimize User Experience

Competition in a crowded market space provides customers with a wide array of choices. This has led to increased emphasis on user interface/user experience. A customer would not spend more than 2 minutes on your website/ online ordering platform if he/she does not find it appealing, intuitive and easy to use.

1. Optimize User Experience On Your Website

Optimize User Experience on website for increasing Your Restaurant's Online Orders — **Wendy’s website is optimized for different devices**

The user experience on your website should be seamless across multiple devices. However, you would want to prioritize the mobile part of the user experience as the majority of the traffic comes from there.
Your “Menu” should be easily accessible from the homepage of your website.
The Order Online Button should appear prominently on the header of each page.
Your Menu should feature good quality pictures of menu items with a description and price.
Add to Cart options on the menu can make it easier for customers to save their preferences.
Having a consistent menu across all platforms is another feature that you want to focus on to enhance the customer experience. Integration with POS should ensure that once an item is added on PoS the same should be automatically reflected on the online ordering platform.

Domino's Website — **The Order Online Button appears prominently on the header of Domino’s Homepage**

Domino's Menu Page: Optimize your website for increasing Your Restaurant's Online Orders — **Domino’s provides the Order Now Button below each menu item**
**to make it easier to place an order**

2. Optimize User Experience On Your Online Ordering Platform:

Ensure that your online ordering system has the ability to save previous orders based on the timings, delivery address, and card information.
Pop-up or menu-suggestions are a good way to draw attention to new menu items.
The ability to keep track of the order status enhances user experience. Domino’s, for instance, enables customers to see where their order is in the delivery lifecycle.

3. Provide Multiple Ways To Order

In the digital age, where every other brand is vying for customers’ attention, you would need a broader strategy to stay on the top of your customer’s mind. One way to do this is by offering them the convenience of online ordering via multiple platforms – website, mobile, social media, voice assistants (Alexa, Google home, etc). The use of the latest cloud-based technologies will enable this kind of transition.

Popular Brands like Dominos and Pizza Hut are already using technology to push online orders on various platforms. Take a look at all the ways you can now order a pizza from Domino’s

Text: If you have “Easy Order” set up in your Domino’s app account, you can order a pizza by texting a pizza emoji to DPIZZA (374992)
SmartWatch: If you own an Android Wear or Apple Watch, you can “Easy Order” your pizza from Domino’s. You can also schedule a pizza delivery.
Smart Car: If your Ford vehicle is equipped with the technology, you can order pizza on your way home via the Domino’s app Ford SYNC AppLink.
Twitter: You can also order your Pizza from Domino’s by tweeting #EasyOrder or sending pizza emoji to @Dominos via direct message.
Amazon Prime Now: If you’re using Amazon Prime Now services—you can order pizza from not just major brands but also from participating vendors in your local area.
Amazon Echo: With the Domino’s Skill for the Echo, you can reorder your last order, place an Easy Order, or track your order.

4. Offer Delivery

There is no denying the convenience of having food delivered to your doorstep. Most customers say they prefer to order online from restaurants that offer delivery. Offering delivery services can help you increase your restaurant’s online orders.

However, providing delivery services may not be the easiest thing to do. It involves a significant amount of logistics and can be a drain on resources. A good way to check if the benefits of providing delivery outweigh the costs is to run test cases in your local area for a stipulated time and work out the logistics before going for full-scale delivery service.

Tying up with third-party delivery services can also help you to take care of the delivery aspects. There is a lot of data to support that third-party delivery services can bring incremental sales for restaurants, however, there are costs associated with such services that you must factor in to adjudge the real value they bring to your business.

Once you have made the decision to go ahead with delivery, you should ensure that provide a great experience to keep your customers coming back.

Chipotle offering delivery: Offer delivery for increasing Your Restaurant's Online Orders — **Chipotle Promotes Delivery Services on its Website**

Here are a few tips that could help you to optimize the delivery experience:

Your delivery menus should ideally have only those food items that deliver well.
Food Packaging: You would want to ensure that food is packaged in proper containers so that it does not spill and get messed in the containers.
Invest in insulated food bags that keep hot items warm and cool items cool.
Ensure that you include add-ons such as sauces, dips, seasoning, paper napkins, and bio-degradable cutlery.
You could consider apps that help you to assign the delivery orders to your riders based on their availability and location. These apps can also help you track the location of the delivery person and the average time is taken to deliver an order.

Right Marketing to Increase Your Restaurant’s Online Orders

Promoting your online ordering platform consistently can help you reach more customers to increase your restaurant’s online orders.

In-Store Messaging:

In-store promotions should be a major part of your strategy to reach your regular customers and make them aware that they can order from your restaurant from the convenience of their homes.

In-store promotions to increase Your Restaurant's Online Orders — **Pizza Hut Promotes Online Ordering through Offers**

Promote your online ordering link via window displays and posters in prominent places such as the check out counter.
Grab the attention of your customers when they are waiting for their food to arrive with table tents.
Menu inserts are also a great way to reach your customers.
Ensure that your online ordering link is prominently printed on your takeout packages and receipts.
Train your staff to promote your online ordering platform to your customers.
You could create a special offer or discount to promote online ordering among your customers.
If you don’t already have one, you should consider launching a loyalty program to promote your online ordering platform. Regular customers are your restaurant brand ambassadors and account for a major part of your sales. Loyalty programs are an easy way to keep these customers returning to your restaurant and build a loyal customer base. They are also an ideal target to promote your online ordering platform.

In-store promotions — **Pizza Hut Runs Offers Exclusive to Online Orders**

Online Promotions

Social Media

Here are a few other tips:

Replace the Call Now Button On Your Facebook Page with a Shop Now Button which leads customers directly to your Online Ordering Platform.
Remember to include the link to your Online Ordering Platform On Your Instagram Bio.
Instead of leading people to your Website from your twitter profile, send them directly to your online ordering page.
If you are running any offer exclusively for promoting Online Orders, you must ensure that you are posting about these offers on your networks or running ads to reach a larger audience
Run contests to promote online Orders.

Chipotle promotes delivery on it's Facebook Page to increase online orders — **Chipotle promotes delivery on it’s Facebook Page**

Online Presence

GMB Listing: Promote your online order link on your GMB page
Reputation Management: Before ordering food from any restaurant, customers usually check the website and review sites like TripAdvisor to get an idea of the quality of food and services. Ensure that your website is updated regularly and you have a well-organized system of monitoring and replying to reviews.

You may have to invest some time to promote your online ordering service in its initial days, but once it has taken off you can sit back and reap its benefits over the long run.

Increase Your Restaurant Revenues with FoodKonnekt Online Ordering

Learn More

How To Use TikTok For Your Business?

TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media apps. It allows its users to create, edit and share short looping videos with filters, musical overlays, animations, special effects, and more. You can lip-sync to popular songs, shoot comedy sketches or cringe videos, record a “duet” with someone by replying to their video or upload your own sound.

The app was developed by Chinese Internet technology company ByteDance. It was released in China in September 2016 as Douyin. Almost a year later, ByteDance launched the app as TikTok for markets outside of China. TikTok and Douyin both use the same software, but maintain separate networks in order to comply with Chinese censorship restrictions.

In August 2018, TikTok merged with the US digital platform musical.ly to leverage ‘s its young user base. The existing accounts were consolidated into one app to create a larger community. Since then, there has been no looking back! With more than one billion all-time downloads, it had surpassed Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat in monthly installs by September 2018. It has 500 million active users worldwide, which is much more than sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat. As of February 2019, it had 27 million active users in the US.

Why Should You Start Using TikTok for Marketing campaigns?

Gen-Z has already taken to the platform to flaunt their creative side, while several brands have started experimenting on the platform to engage their audience.

TikTok is actively seeking partnerships with brands in its bid to expand in the U.S. market. As such juncture brands have more opportunities and autonomy on TikTok than on established social media channels. Moreover, in a less-crowded brand space, you have more opportunities to show off your creative and funky side.

How Can Brands Use TikTok?

The majority of users on TikTok are between the ages of 13 and 24 and most of them are females. 24-30-year-olds constitute the next demographic. For your marketing efforts to make sense, your products should have some appeal for people in this age group.

There are three main ways that brands can use TikTok for Business:

You can create your own channel and upload videos showcasing your products or services.
You can work with influencers to target a broader audience
You can pay to advertise on TikTok.

Using TikTok For Business

#1: Install TikTok On Your Mobile Device

Download the TikTok App on your mobile device to get started. The “For You” feed is the default screen when you first log in, so you don’t even have to set up an account to start viewing videos.

Tap on “Discover” to see content categorized by hashtags. You can use the search bar in this section to discover content that you may be interested in. It is a good idea, to search for brands in your category and see how they are using the platform. You may even want to check your competitors profile to learn how they are engaging with their audience.

Now its time to create your account, use your business email to create your brand account. You can even login using your Facebook or Google account. If you are signing-in using an email, it may ask for a phone number to verify your account.

Signing up on TikTok: Using TikTok for Business

Once you have signed in, you can edit your profile by clicking on “ME” in the bottom navigation menu.
Click on Edit Profile to add your Name and User Name. Remember this is your brand account, so your Name and User Name should ideally be your Brand name.
Just like on Instagram, you can add a short bio of around 80 words to describe your business to your audience.
You can also link your Instagram and Youtube profiles.
Add a profile photo or video; In case of a brand account, this should be your logo.
Click on save to complete.

#2: Start Populating Your Feed

Tap on the plus icon to create a 15-second or 60-second video. You can either upload an existing video that you recorded earlier or record something on the fly.

For first time users, it is always better to start by uploading a previously recorded video. When you click on the upload icon, you will be led to your gallery, select the video you wish to upload and click on Next to continue.

TikTok Provides you several options to edit your video. You can trim the video, add different filters, and adjust the volume.

You can choose from a wide of filters available on the app.

Creating Posts on TikTok: Using TikTok for Business

Add special effects to make your video fun. You have a wide array of options from visual effects, stickers, transitions to splitting your video into parts. You can even control the speed of your video- show it in slow motion, increase the speed or show it in reverse. See the screenshots below.

Creating Posts on TikTok: stickers, filters and Transitions

Add sound to your video by choosing from the options available on the app or add your own audio.

Sharing Posts on TikTok: Using TikTok For business

Just like on Instagram and Snapchat, you can also add text to your videos.

Adding Text to videos on TikTok on TikTok: Using TikTok For business

When you are satisfied with the editing and ready to share your video to the world, click on “Next” to continue. You can add a caption, add any relevant hashtags, and adjust your sharing settings.

Click on “post” to share immediately, or save to drafts if you wish to come back to it later.

By default, people can download or share your content on other social media sites. Although all videos downloaded or shared from TikTok will bear the TikToK logo. While this feature does increase the organic reach of your videos, if for any reason you do not want to allow people to download or share your video, you can control this within the privacy settings.

Build your own Feed

Tiktok is the place for quirky, funny, casual and cool. What is it about your brand that you want to showcase on TikTok? Once you have a strategy in place, you can start creating and uploading fun videos to bring out the fun, creative side of your brand. Here are some examples to inspire you.

The Washington Post

The Washington Post was one of the earliest brands on TikTok. If you are expecting breaking news or political analysis from Washington Post’s TiokTok handle, you are in for a big surprise.

The newspaper uses its account to share behind-the-scenes videos of their staff having a good time in the newsroom. These videos are quirky, musical, and just everything the audience on TikTok is looking for.

NBA

With a whopping 5.1 million fans, NBA’s TikTok Account shows a different side of the organization. They often post videos of players working out or having fun on the court, videos of team mascots and fans.

Calvin Klein (@CalvinKlein)

Calvin Klein shares campaign footage, videos showcasing their products or customers chilling out in their products.

Restaurants on TikTok

Several restaurants Have already started experimenting with TikTok. Quirky videos of the service staff handling multiple orders or videos of your chef’s preparing menu items are very popular on the platform.

The Bailey Bakery creates videos of their bakers decorating cookies with music in the background. They have already accumulated 4.4 million fans.

Chipotle

Chipotle has over 55,000 fans on TikTok. They publish a variety of posts from quirky original content to memes and videos showcasing menu items.

Promoting Your Brand On TikTok

a. Hashtag Challenges

TikTok users love creating and uploading videos. You as a brand can leverage this to your advantage by creating a challenge. Challenges are a pretty common feature on TikTok. You only have to think of a fun and creative way of including your product or service in the challenge. Once you have come up with an idea, give it a Hashtag name to make it memorable and easy-to-find and invite your followers to participate in the challenge.

On National Avocado Day, Chipotle posted a #GuacDance challenge, encouraging fans to post videos of themselves dancing with Avocados inspired by Dr. Jean’s “Guacamole Song.” The challenge generated 250,000 video submissions in six days and became TikTok’s highest-performing branded challenge in the U.S. The promotion also resulted in Chipotle’s highest guacamole sales in a single day.

Popular brand Guess issued the #InMyDenim challenge, which encouraged users to show off their moves wearing Guess’ new denim line to the tune of Bebe Rexha’s “I’m A Mess.”

Challenges help you reach a wider audience and generate brand awareness. They also allow you to engage with your audience in a meaningful way.

If your Brand has just started out on TikTok, Hashtag Challenges may be difficult to pull off. In such a scenario, it is best to collaborate with influencers on TikTok to kickstart your #hashtag challenge.

b. User-Generated Content

UGC is one of the most sought after content forms, primarily because word-of-mouth referrals are the best kind of referrals. It lends your brand social currency if your customers step into the role of advertisers and share videos of themselves using or interacting with your products. Like on every other platform (remember Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke Campaign), UGC is very popular on TikTok.

Chinese restaurant Haidilao came up with a DIY option on their menu. Customers could create their own dish using a selection of ingredients from the Haidilao menu and film the entire experience. Haidilao encouraged their clients to share their videos on Douyin(The original Chinese version of TikTok). Almost 15000 people flocked to the restaurant to try the DIY option on the menu and a total of 2,000 videos were uploaded, which received 50 million views.

c. Influencer Marketing

Another way to reach a wider audience on TikTok is through influencer marketing. If you have tried it for your other social media channels, then you know how it works. There are several young people who are incredibly popular on TikTok. You can work with them to create videos showcasing your products.

Before you start hunting for an influencer, consider your goal —is it to drive UGC or to generate brand awareness and sales? Search the TikTok creators whose audience aligns with your target audience. The ideal match would an influencer whose online persona is in line with your brand values. You would also want to check the quality of their content and how much engagement do they generate on an average.

Work on the terms and conditions of the agreement and help them understand how you would like your product to be showcased. Once you have taken care of the basics, you can leave the creative process to their discretion.

Wrap-Up

TikTok offers a great opportunity for brands that are targeting young audiences. In terms of advertising, the platform is still in its infancy, so it is the right time to get on board!

How to Optimize Google My Business Listing for your Restaurant?

Are you looking for a place to eat or a plumber maybe? In the good old days, you may have asked your neighbors or friends for recommendations! Now, you have a personal assistant – “Google” at your fingertips. Each day millions of people are searching on Google for places to eat, nearby salons, plumbers and every other imaginable thing. Google provides businesses a great opportunity to meet their target audience right where they are looking for them- A Google My Business Listing.

Google My Business is completely free to you. It can help boost the local SEO of your website by showing it in local searches. If you have not claimed and optimized your Google My Business listing yet, you are missing out on substantial traffic.

In this article, we will show you how to create and Optimize Google My Business Listing for your Restaurant to reach more customers.

Creating a Google My Business Listing

First off, search for your Business on Google to ensure that it is not already listed on GMB. If your business has been around for a while, chances are that it is already listed on GMB and you just need to claim it. On the other hand, if you’ve used Google tools such as Google Places or Google+ Pages in the past, you would have automatically upgraded to Google My Business.

To claim your business, head over to https://business.google.com/create and enter your Business Name. If the listing has already been created, GMB will show you the following message, you can use any of the options listed here to claim your Business.

Once successfully claimed, you can start optimizing and managing your GMB page.

If you do not already have a GMB listing you would need to Create one

Step 1: Head over to google.com/business, it will prompt you to log in to your google account. Login with your Business account. Once you have logged in, select “Start now” in the top right-hand corner

Step 2: Enter your business name.

Step 3: Business address

Step 4: Select Delivery Area

If you deliver your goods and services to your customers’ locations, check the box “Yes, I also serve them outside my location.” You can also add the delivery area.

Step 6: Choose your business category.

Step 7: Add your business phone number or website.

Step 8: Choose a verification option.

How to Verify Your Business on Google

There are several ways to verify your GMB listing:

By postcard
By phone
By email
Instant verification
Bulk verification

Postcard Verification

If you are opting for this method make sure your business address is correct. Do not make any changes in the business name or address before you receive your code as that could impede the verification process. The postcard should normally reach you in five days, however, if your postcard does not reach you, you can request a new code by signing in to Google My Business and clicking on “Request another code” Once you receive the code, login to GMB and select the listing you want to verify and enter the code to verify your account.

Phone verification

Google allows certain businesses to verify their location by phone. This option will appear for you only if you are eligible. Ensure that you have entered the correct phone number before you select this option. Enter the verification code received via text message to verify your account.

Email verification

You can also choose to “Verify by email.” In this case, google sends a verification email to your registered email id. All you need to do is click the verification button in the email.

Instant verification

If your business has already been verified with Google Search Console, Google will instantly verify your GMB listing.

Bulk verification

If you own more than 10 locations for the same business you might be eligible for bulk verification. Learn more about Bulk Verification.

Once your GMB page has been verified you can start optimizing your profile. Navigate to the left-hand menu and click on Info. Here you can edit the information under each heading/subheading by clicking on the pencil icon

Optimize Google My Business Listing for your Restaurant

1. Ensure your Business information is accurate and up-to-date

Name
Address including Pincode
Service Areas: Let your customers know whether you provide delivery or other services. In this section, you can also provide information regarding the distance or area in which you provide these services.
Provide Accurate Business Operating Hours: Ensure that you update this info on a regular basis- to keep your customers up-to-date on holidays any other changes in operating hours.

Phone Number: (Preferably a Local Number)
Website: In addition to your website, restaurants can also provide the links to their Menu, Order ahead or reservation pages.
Menu/Services: GMB provides the option of adding your menu/services to your GMB listing. It allows you to list out your menu/services so that your customers can see what your business has to offer directly on Google without having to navigate to your website. This feature is only available for food and drink, health, beauty, and other services businesses that don’t have a third-party “menu” link.

Attributes: In this section, you can provide detailed information about the services available at your business. If you are a restaurant, you can provide information about the various amenities that your restaurant provides including dining options, acceptable modes of payment, other things which customers can expect at your restaurants such as kids menu, salad bar, Hallal food, and the like.

Description – add a short description of your business.

The information that you provide on your GMB page should be consistent with that on your website. You can edit and update this information at any time by logging into your GMB account and navigating to the Info tab.

2. Add Photos and Videos

According to Google, Businesses with photos receive 35 percent more click-throughs to their websites than businesses without photos. Photos help you to showcase the best of your business- it gives potential customers a vivid idea of what to expect from your business. Remember the instances, when you are searching for a new place to eat on Google, don’t you like take a look at the interiors of the restaurant to get a better idea of what to expect in terms ambiance or the photos of food to make a fair estimate of the kind of food to expect. Your customers looking for the same.

Good pictures can make or break your business. GMB allows you to upload different kinds of photos of your business to help increase the reach and visibility of your business and is one of the essential steps to optimize Google My Business Listing for your restaurant.

Logo image: Your logo is an important part of your brand identity. Google recommends that you upload your brand’s logo on your GMB listing.

Cover photo: Your cover photo could be anything that fosters your brand image, from a picture of your products to the interiors of your establishment, you could even update your cover image from time to time to showcase the latest offers and deals.

Additional photos: Google allows you to upload additional Pictures of your Business. This could include pictures of your products or interiors and exteriors of your shop or business place.

Videos: You can also add short videos up to 30 seconds.

All information that you have updated on your page is verified by Google and may take up to 3 days to be published. Your GMB listing is now complete and ready for the world.

Monitor Regularly

However, your task is not complete, you must realize that anyone can suggest a change or edit to your business listing. Anyone who searches for your business/or business like yours online can see the “suggest an edit” option marked in the picture below.

By clicking on this option they can edit any business information they want to. And if you do not monitor your page regularly, these changes can go live without your approval. When these changes are made, Google sends out emails to the people managing your Google My Business account, but most account managers claim that they never receive notifications about changes to their listing. So, how do you monitor these– Log in to your GMB page. On the left-hand menu, navigate to manage locations listed towards the bottom. When you click on it- you will be lead to the page below.

Click on review updates to see the updates or edits made to your page.

The changes are highlighted in red- You can confirm these or edit them from here.

Also, it’s important to note that Google crowdsources information about your business by allowing people to answer questions. They can simply click on the “Know this place – answer quick questions” To answer these.

Now, it is all good if a genuine customer answers these questions, but there have been instances when people with malicious intent or your competitor may choose to provide incorrect information that may harm your business. Google, nevertheless, encourages this type of user-generated content as they feel this helps them in providing them a more complete business profile. The only way to regulate these unauthorized changes is to log in to your GMB page regularly and keep an eye on these changes.

Some Additional Features You Should be Using

a. Messaging

Your GMB page provides a great way to connect directly with people interested in your business via Messaging. Your customers can send direct messages to your business via this platform, you can respond to their queries and send them updates on offers and deals. Currently, this service is only available in select countries to only certain types of businesses.

To activate this download the GMB app and open it

If you have multiple locations, open the location you’d like to manage.

Tap Customers.
Tap Message- Tap Turn on to activate.

Once activated – you can see all messages under Customers > Messages

For more information on this click here.

b. Questions & Answers

Questions & Answers is another great feature on your GMB listing. Q&A allows people to ask questions about your business and you can answer those questions, but so can any other person. Chances are that when the answers are provided by a customer or any other person, the information may be incorrect or incomplete. But ironically, most of these questions are being answered by customers rather than business owners. The simple reason for this is that business owners are unaware that these questions being asked about their establishment. There are no notifications on your Google My Business dashboard or the GMB app letting you know that there are new questions to be answered. However, there are a few ways to find these questions:

Search for your business on a desktop/ laptop and see if there are new questions.
Install Google Maps on your phone, log in and check for questions/notifications.
Search for your business on a mobile browser and check if you have new questions that need to be answered.

Qn A

A great way to use this feature is to prepare a list of FAQs about your business and add them to your GMB listing- this would help in providing all essential and correct information about your business to your customers.

P.S. Google has recently started sending out email notifications letting you know that a new question has been asked.

c. Booking Button Feature

Google’s Booking button feature can help your customers book an appointment with your business directly from your Google My Business listing. To enable the booking button, choose and sign up with one of their scheduling providers. You can receive bookings through Google once your scheduling account is linked to your Google My Business account. (This might take a week after you sign-up).

If you already use a scheduling provider, the booking button is automatically updated on your GMB listing. You can see your booking history with that provider under the bookings tab in your Google My Business account.

Another area of concern for businesses is that sometimes a booking or ordering ling appear automatically on their GMB listing in Google search and Google Maps. For instance, if you are a restaurant owner- you would suddenly see a Doordash – link on your profile which you have not added- Here’s what Google has to say about these links:

Why some links appear automatically

d. Manage & Respond to Customer Reviews

Your customers can leave reviews for your business on Google. These appear on your GMB page under the reviews tab. These reviews also appear on the knowledge panel when a customer searches for your business on google or google maps. Most people searching for your business online would go through these reviews before making a decision to purchase from you. So it becomes important to respond to both positive and negative reviews to engage your customers and show them that you value their feedback.

Encourage customers to leave feedback by creating a link they can click to write reviews for your business.

e. GMB posts

Google provides you a great opportunity to update your customers with the latest and the greatest at your establishment via GMB posts. Your customers can view your latest posts on the knowledge panel when they search for your business on google. You can create offers, events or general posts showcasing your products.

Wrap Up

Here we have rounded up some of the interesting features available to you on your GMB page and strategies to optimize Google My Business Listing for your restaurant you make the most of them.

5 Restaurant Marketing Strategies For The Holiday Season

The holiday season starts in Nov & Dec but for some, it starts much before – 40 percent of consumers begin their holiday shopping before Halloween each year. It is the busiest season with some retailers accounting for 30% of their annual sales. The projected retail sales during the holiday season are around $700B. Most restaurants witness a major jump in sales during this time. If you want to promote your small business this holiday season, you need to prepare in advance. We have detailed five Restaurant marketing strategies for the holiday season.

Start Early & Have a Plan

a. Hire & train staff:

Given the seasonal nature and high competition, start looking at hiring and training staff early on. You want to put the best foot forward and highly trained and motivated staff is what you want during the holiday season rush.

b. Plan out the specials & events you want to organize –

Halloween contest, Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals and Christmas specials.

c. Inventory Check:

Make sure you have planned the required inventory for your events and specials.

d. Back-Up Plan:

Based on your prior experience come up with “what if” scenarios and have backup plans for these scenarios.

Focus on Customer Engagement

Now that you have lined up your ducks in terms of events and specials it is time to let your existing and potential customers know about these specials. The earlier you let your customers know about these specials/events the better off you are

If you plan to host any kind of event, it is better to have a landing page where your customers might sign up (on Facebook or on your website).

b. Email marketing:

Build your customer email list and start informing them along with links to events and specials so that your customers can plan accordingly.

Use social media to the hilt – have an advertising budget that you would like to spend on promoting these specials and events.

d. In-store decoration:

Decorate your store early on based on your planned activities. Have posters, lights and another kind of decor that would give the festive look.

Plan Co-Marketing Activities

The more the merrier and this applies to the holiday season. Have a plan as to what other local merchants/partners you can work with

Identify strategic partners with whom you can work with to execute co-marketing activities
Come up with a value proposition for your partners, their customers, and your customers. For example, if you are a retail toy store, reach out to local Montessori schools with specials for kids, or if you are a restaurant- work with a local mall and see if you can give customers with black Friday bill a freebie
Come up with an execution and promotion plan (see customer engagement) that includes the customer base of yours and your strategic partner.

Emphasize on Gift Cards

If you are thinking of restaurant marketing strategies for the Holiday season, you cannot ignore gift cards. Over the past ten years, there has been an increase in the amount that customers are spending on gift cards. As a small business you can ride this wave:

Identify whether you want to have physical or e-gift cards or both.
Identify with whom you would like to partner with (for example you can join OpenTable Gift program
If possible have an offer on gift cards and promote the availability of the cards (sell them online, social media and in the store).
Run a special for your gift cards.

Partner with a local charity

Even though this falls within the ambit of co-marketing activities we want to emphasize the fact that the holiday season is also considered the season of giving.

Identify a local charity that your customers associate themselves with
Approach them to organize a fundraiser or some sort of an event. For example work with local Salvation Army or Toys For Tots to raise funds for kids/toys.
If possible involve your customers – for example, if you are a restaurant explore the option of involving your customers in organizing a Thanksgiving feast at a local soup kitchen.
Promote the partnership and announce the results so that your customers can understand what kind of impact you/they had on this non-profit.

To have a great holiday season, it is imperative that you start early with a plan and set of activities that are in line with the plan. Define a set of metrics that you want to measure so that you can understand whether your plan was successful for this year and how it can be improved for future holiday seasons. With the above restaurant marketing strategies for the Holiday season, you can ensure a higher footfall at your restaurant. Happy Holidays!!!

What is restaurant franchise marketing?

How to market your restaurant franchise?

Franchise marketing channels-

1) The Awareness Stage

Social media marketing-

2) Engagement stage

a) Online Reputation Management

b) Local Marketing

c) Email marketing

3) Acquisition stage

a) Website

b) SEO

4) Loyalty Stage

a) Birthday clubs and loyalty programs

5) Advocacy Stage

IMPORTANCE OF DATA DRIVEN-MARKETING IN MARKETING YOUR RESTAURANT FRANCHISE

Wrap up

Get Customer Data To Boost Your Restaurant Sales With Data-Driven Marketing at Different Stages-

The Awareness Stage

The Engagement Stage-

The Acquisition Stage-

The Loyalty Stage-

The Advocacy Stage-

Wrap up-

What is Social Media ROI?

Why is it important to measure Social Media ROI?

How to measure social media ROI?

Step-1

Identify your goals:

Step-2

Understanding marketing funnel:

Step-3:

Calculate!

Why is measuring social media ROI difficult?

Wrap up:

How to increase restaurant sales with online ordering?

1. Opt For A Robust Online Ordering Solution

What are the key features of an online ordering solution?

2. Streamline your online ordering menu

3. Optimize Your Online Ordering Platform

4. Make It Easy To Order Right From Your Website

5. Leverage Digital Channels to Promote Online Ordering

6. Optimize Your Restaurant Website for Local Search

7. Promote Your Online Ordering Platform

In-Store Promotions

Online Promotions

8. Leverage Data To Build Loyalty

Increase Your Restaurant Revenues with FoodKonnekt Online Ordering

1) Content Creation and Curation-

a) Canva:

b) Animoto:

c) Quuu:

d) Buzzsumo:

2) Automation and Scheduling-

a) Hootsuite:

b) Tailwind:

c) Buffer:

3) Measuring and Analyzing data-

a) Sprout Social:

b) Adespresso:

c) Socialinsider:

4) Social listening:

a) Mention:

b) Awario:

c) Brandwatch:

How do you attract customers to your restaurant?

How do you create a restaurant brand?

Tip 1: Respond To Every Comment and Complaint

Tip 2: Incorporation of Chat-bots

Tip 3: Emphasize On Customer Reviews

Tip 4: Make It Easier To Place An Order

Wrap Up:

What are the advantages of online ordering for your restaurant?

What features should you be looking for in an Online ordering Solution?

What are benefits of having a native online ordering solution for your restaurant?

How to increase your revenues with online ordering?

Technology Parameters for increasing your Restaurant’s Online Orders

1. Native Online Ordering Platform

2. Consider a Mobile App for your Restaurant:

Optimize User Experience