Most restaurants these days have a website to try and drive more business,
but few have the strategy right.
The issue is clear.
Most restaurants get their websites built, not by internet marketers, but by web designers. The end result is that the strategies for driving more visitors to their websites are often not appropriate for businesses with a local client base. Many restaurants the allow their web presences to die since they only get a tiny trickle of visitors when they depend on google.
This is true because search volumes for locally based businesses are low. They are low because their customers already know where they are and often don’t need a search engine to find them. Search as the only strategy for locally based businesses is a recipe for web failure….but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Unfortunately, at web design school, web designers were not taught about marketing, and locally based businesses like restaurants suffer from this as a “one size fits all” web marketing strategy is applied to most web designers clients.
Restaurants need to change the focus of their websites from…telling people about how great their restaurant is…to capturing and following up with people who find their site either through inhouse promotions, current advertising campaigns, joint ventures or through search engines.
This single change in the purpose of the website enables a restaurant to build a customer database to which it can send its messages over and over again. What most restaurants need isn’t a “brochure” type website describing their business, but a “lead capture” type website which helps them to build their network and leverage the networks of their customers.
When restaurant owners build a database of their customers, they get several great benefits.
Here are the top 10:
- They can communicate directly with their customers through email quickly, cheaply and frequently
- They can better measure the effectiveness of other advertising methods
- They build a growing asset for their business
- Messages can be optimized over time as responses are completely see through, unlike newspapers
- Market research on the fly becomes a breeze
- It becomes easy to measure and split test offers
- It becomes easy to turbo charge referrals using the web
- They can easily get their messages into the electronic networks of their customers to take advantage of booming social media and information sharing trends
- They move away from dying media like newspapers and onto new, booming media like mobile web, social networks and text messaging
- Its more fun!
If you liked this, please stop by http://socialbuzz.co.uk and download the Maverick Marketing Mastery Report to take your business to the next level.
To a better future!
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Barry Walls currently lives in Ireland and is a man with one mission. After marketing online for several years, he was shocked to find the quality of the web marketing strategies which local businesses had in place. His goal is to show businesses how to use the new emergent opportunities on the internet to boost profits. You can follow Barry on Twitter @Barry_Walls or at his website: http://socialbuzz.co.uk