Promote your restaurant on the World wide web
Have you considered marketing your restaurant on the Internet? If not, you may be missing out on hundreds of potential customers who are out there looking for a restaurant in your area. Internet Marketing is a big subject, with a large number of distinct aspects. Indeed, books, and thousands of websites are devoted to the topic. Nevertheless, this post can give a brief overview of the many different ways to get additional customers online.
Creating a website for your restaurant is the first project if you don’t already have one. It can seem like a daunting job if you haven’t created a site before. In fact it’s not that hard – but the majority of people are too busy and have other things to do with their time (like running their restaurant !). So why not find one or two sites that you like, and speak to the designers of those for a quotation (the designers name is sometimes displayed at the foot of the web page). On the other hand, you could outsource the work on a website like Rent a Coder – which will often cost less.
One vital word of advice – set up an analytics program on your site so you can track the success of your online marketing efforts. Experienced Internet Marketers would not be without a good analytics system on their sites, so don’t sabotage your endeavours with a beginners mistake. There are great web stats programs available absolutely free – and they’re quick to deploy and set-up – so there’s no reason not to do it.
One of the most effective ways to begin promoting your site, is to post it to a few directories. Right now there are thousands of general directories on the internet – some are free, and some you have to shell out for. Yahoo Directory is perhaps the best known paid directory – but at $299 annually, it’s debatable whether it offers good value for money. DMOZ is a well known free directory – but it may take months to get accepted, if you actually do. Nevertheless, it’s well worth making use of a directory submission service to send your site to a hundred or so of the best free directories – which they’ll do for only a few cents each.
Websites that specialise in restaurant are few and far between – which is a shame, since that sort of vertical market website is invariably an extremely valuable place to publicize your site. There is one site that concentrates on restaurant and will let you list your details without charge – and that’s http://www.ClickRestaurants.co.uk/ – it’s definitely worth checking out.
If you have some money available to bring customers to your website, then look into Pay Per Click advertising. The best known system is Google Adwords, which can display your advertisements alongside the Google search results – but there are also several other systems to choose from. You produce your advertisement, select which search results you’d like to show up next to, and how much you’re ready to pay for every visitor to your website. Your ad can be online within a matter of minutes and visitors will usually turn up straight away.
It’s terrific getting targeted traffic to your site – but one of the easiest ways to get site visitors is to remind individuals who visited in the past to return and find out what’s new. Email is a great way to accomplish this – and you’ll want visitors’ email addresses and their consent to email them when you’ve new stuff for them to take a look at. Use a service like GetResponse to achieve this. You can even automate the whole process by writing a sequence of emails upfront and scheduling them to be sent at regular intervals – without you having to lift a finger.
In an article this size, I’ve only been able to supply a limited summary of the most important topics involved in advertising your restaurant on the net – there’s a whole lot that I’ve been forced to leave out. Happily, all the info you will need is out there on the internet, and freely available – so you’ll easily be able to find more detailed information on any of the subjects covered above.