The Top Five Restaurant Digital Marketing Trends for 2019

Advertising for a retail food business has always been challenging to a certain degree. Serving food is much more than providing a service to your customers.

Marketers always come face to face with new challenges, because of the special nature of restaurants as businesses. And 2019 isn’t an exception. What might be a sign of things to come is a change in how customers actually order food.

This time last year, six percent of all orders in US restaurants were made via smartphone apps. With this in mind, it’s time to focus more on digital marketing.

With this list of five restaurant digital marketing trends for 2019, you can learn how to accommodate your customers and grow. Food is artistry, and it’s high time your customer become aware of it.

1. Focus on nutrition.

One thing people care about more than ever is health. If you want to improve your customer retention, show them you care too. Perhaps the biggest restaurant marketing trend of 2019 will be that people care about what the food is made of. Before, the emphasis was on how the food tasted.

Now, customers want specialties that are both nutritious and tasty at the same time. This change in priorities means that you have to adjust your digital marketing to the wishes of the majority.

Lots of famous food retailers have incorporated health-conscious messages into their food advertising. To revamp your digital marketing sector to attract more customers interested in nutrition, take a look at this list of tips.

• Even if you supported nutrition-related advertising for your restaurant, you have to change the method. People don’t respond to numbers, calories, and claims anymore. Instead, make your ads a message that connects your food to positivity and good health.
• Add a more human touch to your advertising. Smiling and fit people will send a subliminal message to your customers.
• Nature is also a great way to remind people of the natural character of your food. A good idea would be to photograph your food in a natural setting. Also, wood should also be pictured due to an “organic,” and natural feel it adds to the entire marketing campaign.
• Another way you can make nutrition a crucial part of your marketing campaign is by using minimalist settings for shooting photos. By doing so, all the light and the colors can be focused on the natural tones of your food.

2. Don’t avoid content marketing.

Having a content marketing sector as a part of your restaurant brand is something you can’t afford to avoid. Offering premium food is pointless if you can’t direct your customers to it.

To increase brand awareness, position your brand in a way that people will always be directed to it. This can be accomplished in several different ways:

• Provide written content related to the food you’re offering. Connect culture and gastronomy to connected the food to a feeling or sentiment.
• Descriptions are important. Your website should feature hi-res images accompanied by custom and unique descriptions relating to each dish.
• Be creative with other forms of content. Give video tours of your restaurant’s kitchen, or a “how it’s made” series of videos on your most popular dishes.

It may be difficult to think of your own descriptions and written content. For it, you can use the following tools:

• Australian writings: If you’ve already written a food description and need to publish it urgently, use this tool. They will quickly check your work for grammatical and other errors, correcting it on short notice.
• Papersowl review: For lengthier blog posts, food descriptions, and other more demanding tasks, in comparison with different writing services, Papersowl review is an excellent choice. Use their services to have words as your most powerful marketing tool.
• Essay writing help UK: When you decide to use an essay writing service, you don’t want to waste a huge amount of money. Fortunately, they have affordable prices and great discounts.
• Assignment masters: This particular tool is best suited for more technical blog posts and guides about cooking. They also offer multimedia input, if you need more than just text.
• Thesis writing service: Yet another great option for writing and proofreading your content–as the thesis, this service can transform the way you post. Your restaurant’s website will see more visits due to interesting content on it.
• Rushmyessay: This is a great tool for more ambitious projects. You can even contact the writers themselves for better communication. A great way to upgrade your content.

3. Upgrade your social media channels.

Every bit of content that is on your website should also grace your social media channels. Although some say that social advertising has declined, 63 percent of all restaurants use social media platforms for advertising.

Social media is still the most popular solution for advertising, more than any form of outbound campaign. A good way to increase your influence on social media is to separate different tasks onto different channels.

As you probably know, many marketers advertise their restaurants in the same way on every social media channel. Separate different forms of content to make them all work together, instead of against each other.

• Facebook is great for posts and text. Out of all the social media websites, Facebook is the one least focused on brevity and visual content. Focus your text posts on your Facebook page for more informative content.
• Instagram is all about visual advertising. 2019 will place a lot of value on visual representations of food. Upload short 3D videos of food, and showcase the aesthetic appeal of both your premises, and the food you serve.
• Twitter is great for contents and polls. Short questions and queries will also succeed if you use Twitter as a platform for them.
• LinkedIn is great for written content, just like Facebook. For restaurant digital marketing, LinkedIn is excellent for upgrading your team, and attracting other professionals.

4. Mobile Before Everything

If you want your restaurant to take off, and be more popular, invest in optimizing for mobile. Lots of people explore eating options on the run, while not having time to sit at a PC or laptop.

Google’s search engine algorithms also value mobile performance for your website. Therefore, the majority of your marketing resources should be devoted to keeping your websites and app running perfectly.

Having a mobile responsive site as a restaurant is more important than ever. It gives your customers the opportunity to interact, order, and browse your catalog. Additionally, releasing an app might broaden your options for restaurant digital marketing.

You can organize in-app competitions for free meals, discounts, and special promotions at your restaurant. Here are some ideas about how to design your website for mobile:

• Have a minimalistic approach. Smartphone screens may be bigger than before, but they’re still small and can’t fit everything. Avoid a lot of clutter and unnecessary menus. They shouldn’t drop down, because the other content will be blocked. Every tab should lead to another page for a better focus on each post or section.
• Make the entire design, so that it revolves around the image. This means no bright colors, too much text, or details. The key is to emphasize the food itself, without jeopardizing the entire design. Simple, contrasting colors are always a great choice.
• Pay for a good hosting service. You don’t want your website crashing or loading slowly. A low response rate, and lots of content on the website will negatively impact your SEO.

5. Hire a photographer.

Outsourcing is never a bad idea. Some marketers believe that they will save money by not spending it when they “don’t need to.”

Instead, they spend much more money by missing out on future revenue. Therefore, you should take every chance to make your restaurant more appealing to customers. On both ads and social media, you need to have high-quality photographs. Food can’t be tasted or smelled online. So, it is your best bet to be memorable.

How memorable are we talking? In a recent experiment, people remembered 65 percent of visual content after three days, compared to only 10 percent of the written text. Therefore, a great solution for your business would be to hire a photographer. Photographers know all the ins and outs of visual representation. Work with them to show your food in the best possible light.

Also, having professional photographs of your food gives a luxury feel to your entire restaurant. Don’t be afraid to use these photos on all social media channels. After some time, you can make a direct campaign by framing some pictures on the walls of your restaurant.

It’s important to recycle old content, and photographs seemingly never get old. Investing in photographs is something that will improve the way you approach digital marketing, and let people take notice of your brand.

Concluding Thoughts

Show people you care about nutrition, and showcase that sentiment via different types of content. Don’t be afraid to outsource, and you will find 2019 to be your year. Stay confident in your vision, and hone it with precise and effective digital marketing.