Restaurant Owners: You could be making these online marketing mistakes

“Where should we eat tonight?”

The answer to that question usually starts online and hopefully ends inside your restaurant.

But if online marketing is an afterthought, you could be making costly mistakes.

SinglePlatform says it best. Independent restaurant owners need to get savvy if they want to captivate consumers when it matters most: when they’re making a decision about where to eat next. Take a cue from the stats below and get in touch if you need help with these common marketing bloopers:

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According to SinglePlatform:

93% of people view menus online before dining out.

Do you have an up-to-date menu on ALL digital platforms? That means your website, social media, search engines, review sites and reservation services.

A static PDF on your website doesn’t cut it anymore. For one, search engines can’t crawl that information. Second, it’s just another click for today’s “show me now” consumer. Not to mention, uploaded files can be hard to download or read on mobile.

73% of consumers trust a local business more after reading positive reviews.

You can’t force someone to write a glowing review, and you should NEVER pay for fake reviews, but you can take feedback into consideration.

Have a plan to respond to both positive and negative reviews. Encourage customers to leave reviews after their meal. Share positive reviews from Google and Yelp onto your social channels. Check out Marketing Kit for free social posts using Google reviews, or design your own. Gourdough’s and Wawa do a great job of collecting positive tweets and repurposing on Instagram:

80% of consumers lose trust in a business if their online information is inaccurate.

Wrong contact info, phone number or location? Consumers will go elsewhere (and you better believe they’re telling their friends to come with).

63% of online traffic is from mobile.

If your website doesn’t load properly or is too slow to load, you’ll quickly lose the attention of potential guests. Sure, high-quality photos are a must in the food industry, but not at the cost of speed. Use an image compression tool like TinyPNG or search for WordPress plug-in’s.

And while we’re on the subject: according to BrightLocal, photos matter!

Businesses with more Google My Business (Search and Maps) photos get more clicks, calls and direction requests. They also get more views on search and maps.

However, 6% of businesses with photos have just one photo on their GMB profile and a shocking 24% have just 2 to 5 photos. This is very easily remedied. You can either post photos yourself or get customers to post them.

And finally:

There are 260 million searches with some variation of “restaurant near me” every month!

If someone searches for “best donuts near me” will you show up on page 1? If you’re following the tips above, you’ll have a much better chance!

I’m ready when you are! Your online presence is just a mouse click away.

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Why Online Reputation Management Matters for Restaurants Today

Millennials and Gen Z’ers are notorious maximizers — always looking for the BEST food, clothes, makeup, detergent, even romantic partners. And for better or worse, that leads to a lot of research before taking action.

Research can take many forms these days. The oldest form is word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family. But with the advent of the internet, we can ask millions of strangers for their opinions too. That’s why online reputation is as important as ever for the restaurant industry.