A Restaurant’s Starter Guide to Content Marketing

If you're a restaurant owner, you know it's essential to understand how content marketing can help your business grow. But how do you create a restaurant content marketing strategy? What are the steps? In this blog, we'll walk through each one so that you can start creating your strategies today!

Define your business goals.

You need to define the business goals you want to achieve. These should be realistic, and they should be based on the current state of your restaurant. Within this list, include a section for each quarter's goals to keep track of what has been achieved and what needs improvement.

You can also add an annual goal as well as a quarterly one at the end of every quarter so that you can see how much progress has been made over time (and where there are gaps). This will help guide future decisions regarding content marketing strategy development and execution, which we'll discuss next!

Develop a content marketing strategy to support your goals. This will include steps like determining what topics you want to cover, who your audience is and how they can be reached most effectively.

Defining your business goals and supporting them can be done in several ways. Start by defining your short-term and long-term goals for the coming year. How many new customers are you hoping to attract? What is the average revenue per customer? Where do you want your restaurant content marketing efforts to fall in terms of percentages of time spent on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter versus Instagram or TikTok—or even something more specific like email newsletters versus blog posts? Answer these questions, as well as any other questions you feel, would help you start forming your strategy.

Develop a buyer persona.

Once you have your target audience in mind, it’s time to start creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is a description of who your customers are and how they behave when they visit your restaurant, website, or mobile app.

A great way to get started is by asking yourself: What do I know about my customers? How do these people think about what they want from me? What kind of content would appeal most strongly to them? From there, you can create a list of potential personas based on their answers and their behaviors online. For example:

• Restaurant goers who love ordering off-menu items at restaurants but also order regularly from local chefs.
• People who love trying new things but need some guidance when deciding what’s best suited for them.
• First-time guests looking for advice on which restaurant offers they should use as well as how to use them. 

When you understand your restaurant guests, you make your job much easier!

Look for inspiration from other restaurants.

The best way to get inspiration for your content marketing strategy is by looking at the content that other restaurants are creating. Analyze their strategies and find what works the best, as well as what doesn’t work so well. Remember, just because something was successful for one restaurant doesn’t mean it will work the same for yours. However, it’s worth a try!

Check out restaurants in different niches, like upscale fine dining or fast-casual chains. You can also look at restaurants in different locations—a chain of coffee shops may have one location in New York City and another in Los Angeles County but still use similar language and branding strategies across all locations (and even when they're not technically part of the same chain).

Decide on your distribution channels.

Once you’ve identified the needs of your target audience, it’s time to choose a distribution channel. Decide what type of content will work best for each channel and how often you plan on posting. Start small so you don’t go overboard. One successful channel is better than many less-successful channels. 

Here are some ideas:

• Email: Use newsletters or email blasts that include promotions for special events or discounts going on at your restaurant.
• Social media: Post new menu items, upcoming specials, and customer favorites on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 
• Share coupons with guests via SMS marketing and other automated marketing notifications.
• Content marketing: Create blog posts that include industry-related news and tips to help expand your restaurant brand!

Analyze your content performance.

The first step is to track your content performance. The metrics that you should track are:

• Conversions - How many people come to your website and order online?
• Engagement - How much time do they spend on the site, and what pages do they visit most often?
• Traffic - How much traffic does each piece of content generate (i.e., how many people see it)?

After analyzing this information, you’ll have all the tools you need to revamp your content marketing strategy. Find the areas that need improvement as well as the areas that worked well for your business. The world of content marketing is constantly evolving, so your strategy should be too!

Create a restaurant marketing strategy that leverages content distribution to drive engagement and grow your audience.

If you're a restaurant owner, the best way to create awareness about your business is by creating content that's relevant and consistent. Content marketing is a great way to connect with your audience, but it's also essential for restaurant marketing. Content can help you build trust, loyalty, and authority—and ultimately drive more revenue.

In this blog, we’ve explored the basics of creating a restaurant content marketing strategy. We started by defining the goals you want to achieve with your strategy and then created buyer personas that represent your ideal customers. From there, we looked at ways to make sure you’re using the right distribution channels for your brand. Finally, we broke down how to measure success through analytics data so that you can track progress along the way without relying on guesswork! We hope you found this helpful!