What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing (IM), or Content Marketing, is the idea of advertising your restaurant through digital channels, like Google (SEO), Social Media networks, email to your existing customers, creative blog posts and photos and other forms of content marketing. Using cleverly designed content you can earn customers’ attention in a way that doesn't intrude on what they are doing. It’s not considered an annoyance or disruption in their day-to-day activity - hence why it works!

At the heart of IM for restaurants is the belief that you always want to drive customers to your website. By doing this, you can hope to turn your website visitors into bookings, and then, your bookings into revenue.

Read more about inbound marketing for restaurants and how it can help boost your online reservations on the Ignite Hospitality blog!

However, quite often we find that people overlook important aspects of content marketing.

1. The purpose of content marketing is not really to create content, it’s to get noticed and through that increase awareness of your brand and ultimately sales.
2. The “content” in content marketing may need to be digital in order to get shared far and wide, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be a photo, blog post, infographic or video to begin with.

What does that mean? Successful content marketing ideas doesn’t necessarily mean that you sit down with your web agency and discuss edgy blog topics, quirky photos to post to your Facebook Page, or the expensive making of a video in the hope that by putting it on YouTube it will “go viral”.

Content marketing starts in your restaurant. In fact, restaurants have a great advantage due to the visual nature of the business and the willingness of customers to share their dining experiences with their friends.

Here is a great example from Ridley Road Market Bar of a no effort idea that is bound to trigger sharing of photos and comments in social media. We sure did!

There is some serious geek magic at play here, and the magic is called “EdgeRank”. Perhaps you have read our free guide on SEO, and heard the term “PageRank” before? PageRank is a “link analysis algorithm” designed by the clever-clogs at Google with the aim to figure out which pages on the web are the most relevant for certain search queries.

EdgeRank is a similar algorithm, but instead of looking at links between pages it looks at:

• Popularity - how many clicks, links, and other actions your status update gets.
• Relevance - how popular has previous posts of yours has been.
• Recency - when was the update posted, how old is it.

Based on this Facebook decides if your update should be shown in the news feeds of people in your network, or not. This may be a bit of a simplification, but on the whole, that’s how Facebook determines which updates are most interesting to show to people in order to drive their addiction to their news feed.

If you feel your updates don't get noticed enough, your EdgeRank may be too low, which begs the question how to improve it?

For some inspirational examples from restaurants proven to get high levels of engagement, head on over to the Ignite Hospitality blog!

(Thanks to Hicham Souilmi for posting the photo of the Facebook lecture, and to Cambodia4kids.org for posting the photo of the Facebook update clock under Creative Commons!)

As I browsed through the tips and advice I found more than a few that also can be applied to social media marketing. For example:

Enough about you

Nobody likes an always-on sales spiel spewing online equivalent of a specials board. It has been said before, but there are so many restaurant Twitter accounts out there that need to hear it: don’t do the hard sell all the time! 

When you do need to push a sales message, make it about what your customers will get out of it, not just yet another line straight off your specials menu. Know who you are talking to and shape your message accordingly. By making it fun, showing that you care enough to take some time to liven things up a bit, you might get some attention.  

Also, do make the most of the fact that you can thank your customers for recommending you, but if your Twitter feed is an endless stream of re-tweets of how great you are and who checked into your restaurant, you will come across as a bit full of yourself.

Head on over to the Ignite Hospitality blog for all the 3 tips on how to improve your restaurant's social media marketing by taking a few cues from stand up comedy.

Start with checking who you are following? Spend some time exploring Twitter. Look for societies and newspapers and other businesses local to your restaurant. Once you’ve established a rhythm and have followers yourself, consider following people who have tweeted about you - if they haven't followed you already they are more likely to follow you back!

Once you have that basic aspect nailed, dive into detail using this great checklist for your restaurant's Twitter feed at the Ignite Hospitality website!

We’ve all heard the saying: “It’s not personal, it’s just business.” Well this phrase has always bothered me, it just doesn’t sit well with my outlook on life or with my outlook on business.

As an entrepreneur, I have an entirely different outlook on business...

Head over to the Ignite Hospitality website for the lowdown on how to improve your restaurant's Facebook marketing!

However, their Internet marketing is somewhat lacking. Loyal customers want to keep engaged with the restaurant even when not there, in order to keep up to date with what's going on. Starting a blog is a good first step, in order to communicate in the digital world you need somewhere to publish your words.

If budgets don't permit a custom designed blog on your restaurant website, start a blog on Wordpress.com or Tumblr.com - it's free! - and blog about your restaurant, changes to your menu and events in the area.

For more tips on improving your restaurant's online marketing, see the Ignite Hospitality website!