3 Social Campaigns: How Restaurants Can Get More Customers

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Generally speaking, small restaurants face an incredible amount of competition regardless of their location. If you have good food, service, and customer satisfaction, yet your in-store traffic still seems a bit behind – consider Wishpond for the social marketing tools you will need to speed up.

As a small restaurant, the proper use of social media is absolutely crucial to the success of your company. By connecting virtually everybody to a social network, there is incredible potential for increased reach of your business.

The restaurant industry is incredibly competitive. The list of those vying for your customers extends from other small restaurants all the way to any food source – including home cooking!

This brief guide will teach you how Wishpond can provide social marketing apps for your company to maximize the reach of your restaurant.

What ROIs can I achieve by using Wishpond?

  1. Increased engagement with your fans.

  2. Reach new customers through their own networks.

  3. Obtain a deeper understanding of your audience through Wishpond’s Analytics.

  4. Differentiate your restaurant from competitors and cut through the clutter of advertising.

  5. Drive up sales and traffic for your business.

Here are the three best types of contests to promote your restaurant(s):

  1. Photo Contest

  2. Vote Contests

  3.  Group Deals

There are various types of contests available for your company on Wishpond, but these three are particularly effective for small restaurants.

 

Photo Contest

Photo contests are incredibly simple to set up on Wishpond, and are very effective. To put it in short – participants are given a photo theme, and then they upload a photo of that theme to your Facebook Page (or other social media vehicle of choice), and a winner is chosen. This encourages people to create relevant content, has a chance of becoming viral, and builds brand loyalty for all participants.

Of course, this requires relatively more effort, so the turnout will undoubtedly be relatively lower. Keep in mind that those who enter will have a stronger attachment with your company. Think of it as quality over quantity.

To select a winner, you can manually choose the contest winner, or allow followers to vote on their favourite entry. You can even choose to have multiple winners!

How do I spice up my photo contests?

There are two broad ways a restaurant can approach a photo contest: internally or externally.

If done internally, the theme of the contest could revolve around one of your food products. For example, the photo contest could revolve around who can submit the best photo of your restaurant’s spaghetti and meatballs dish. In theory, this would encourage people to visit your restaurant to take the photos and build a stronger attachment between your business and the participants.

However, the fact that participants are forced to purchase food from your restaurant may increase the barriers to entry, and as a result, lower the overall participation.  

If done externally, the theme would be relative to the food the restaurant serves, but not from the restaurant directly. In contrast with the above example, the contest could

revolve around who can submit the best photo of homemade spaghetti and meatballs. By doing so, the contest can still be about your business while not seeming like a cash grab.

Another important tip for photo contests (and contests in general) is to keep the prize relevant. Don’t make it for an iPad or something unrelated to your business. The majority of your participants will be interested in the iPads and may not care about your restaurant at all!  A coupon for a free night out or a significant discount are both good places to start.

Check out  “7 Great Photo Contest Examples” for more inspiration.

Vote Contests

Vote Contests are one of the most versatile and effective contests that Wishpond has to offer. It works for virtually any industry, has very low barriers to entry, and can even empower your followers.

Quite simply, participants submit their email addresses and are then allowed to vote between any number of options. There is often no real prize for the winner, but it gives your audience a chance to voice their opinion on a variety of topics.

How do I spice up my vote contests?

This method is particularly effective for small restaurants for a number of reasons. Firstly, a vote could be tailored towards which item people want to see on sale for the next week.

This increases initial awareness about the promotion, and allows your business to give them a sale that they actually want. If the results are evenly split between two entries, put both of them on sale, or one after the other.

Vote contests are also a great way to gauge interest about potential new menu items. By planning out a couple of new dishes, followers can view a photo, read a short description, and vote for which item they find most appetizing.

After the contest ends, your company could even title the new dish with “Community Favourite” to give it some extra impact. This is perfect if your restaurant wants to expand its menu line, but is having trouble deciding which way to go, or are unsure if any of the options will have a good return on investment.

Group Deals

One way to help temporarily boost demand for your business is to have a limited time (or quantity) offer. In such a competitive industry, followers are often very price sensitive and whether or not they decide to go to one business over another can wholly depend on the price of the product.

How do I spice up my offers?

Using Offers are a great way of exposing your brand to people who may not have heard about your restaurant, or those who are on the fence about trying your food because of the current prices.

There is often a fine balance in setting up the price of the offer. If the savings do not appear high enough (5%-10%), people may not feel like it is worth the effort. However, excessively low prices may encourage a large turnout, but may not be worth going so far below margins.

One way Wishpond allows you to deal with this problem is to limit the maximum number of people who can redeem the offer. This way, the low prices are still accessible to the public, but are constrained enough so that it doesn’t make a large dent in the bottom line.

 

Tracking and Analysis

With Wishpond, tracking the effectiveness of your campaign is incredibly simple. Most of the work is done for you and condensed into an intuitive dashboard. All the contact information collected (if any) is also available for your company databases and mailing lists.

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Setting up comprehensive social media promotions has never been easier. This guide is by no means exhaustive of Wishpond’s many features and analytics. Take a look at Wishpond’s apps today and see for yourself!

jordan-lore

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