Your Restaurant’s Website is Your Greatest Asset
There are two entities that can change your business income significantly. Your staff and your website. In this blog post we’ll discuss why your restaurant’s website is the biggest non-human asset you can have. It truly is something that can change your revenue and often it is under utilized or completely neglected. This should be the center of your restaurant marketing.
When I call your website an asset, it is exactly that. Here is a definition of the word asset… “property owned by a person or company, regarded as having value and available to meet debts, commitments, or legacies.” You own your website, the content, the data, the user info, and more. You can do what ever you want with the asset or do nothing at all (which most restaurants do nothing).
What isn’t an asset of yours in which you do not own and can not do anything you you please?
- “Your” Facebook Page
- “Your” Instagram Account
- “Your” Twitter Account
- “Your” Linkedin Page
None of these are yours. They are owned by the companies letting you use their platform and the fans/followers of your pages are actually theirs.
Take for example Facebook. In the beginning of fan pages and place pages, everyone following your page would see your post once you added it to your page. Now, the stats say less than 5% of your following actually see your post. UNLESS, you pay Facebook to boost it now. It is all about inventory and Facebook needing to make more money. You might have spent years sharing your page and getting people to follow you, but in the end, you have no control over the platform or audience. Facebook could eventually make you pay to keep your page active.
Your Website as a Content Hub
This is the single most important concept we teach our clients. Your website allows you to generate traffic/people, get them to make reservations, read your menu, check out your upcoming events, give you their email addresses (another huge asset), request private parties and see all your beautiful food photos.
You control the data, the content and the audience. It contains the ability to turn the traffic into paying customers through lead generation optimization and other tactics. The website can literally produce money for you. It is the definition of an asset!
Source: https://coschedule.com
What You Can Do With Your Website
Like I mentioned before, your website needs to be a content hub. STOP only posting to facebook, twitter and Instagram, then never posting to your asset. You have it all backwards..Do the opposite!
You need to grow your asset with content and here is how you do it.
Hub and Spoke with Content
When I say content I mean event posting, food photos, announcements, specials, etc. Basically everything you already post to Facebook needs to originate from your website, THEN automatically distribute to your other social channels.
Most businesses have a website and most of them have wordpress. If you have wordpress, great. If not, you might need to get a new site. Squarespace is a close second, but lacks a lot of the many features from wordpress. Wix is a runner up, but why if you can basically get wordpress for the same cost.
WordPress is the platform used by over 30% of the worlds websites. There are endless plugins to add to sites which advance its capabilities. I’ll talk about wordpress plugins in another post. There is a wordpress app and you can create then submit posts right from your phone. (iphone App and Andriod App)
Whether you have wordpress or something else, you need to have a blog and rss feed. WordPress and squarespace are built with blogs at the core.
Start all your posts from your blog. have a new entree for this week? Add a new post to your website. Add the title/name, some text about the dish and its ingredients, then add some juicy photos of the food. Most importantly, add links in the body text to other areas of your website. I usually suggest a link to your reservations page and add it near the top. Its a CALL TO ACTION.
Syndicate Your Blog Content Automatically to Social Media
As I mentioned earlier, wordpress has many plugins to help you with your website and blog. Such plugins allow you to automatically syndicate your blog posts to other channels.
Imagine posting once to your website’s blog and it automatically post to your twitter, facebook, linkedIn and many other sites. AND all the syndicated posts were basically links back to your website to read the full post or see more of the photos.
Think about the increase in traffic to your ASSET if everything routed back to it each time you post. Then on your asset you have a email capture form, maybe a pop up to win a free happy hour, a reservations link, and a page for booking groups/private parties.
What Next?
You need to start posting on your website’s blog immediately. Then share it on social either manually or automatically through a plugin or more advanced system like using Buffer and Zapier and IFTTT. Post often and make sure you add links to your CTAs (call to action) like reservations and group bookings.
Even better, because you have no free time to figure this out, just hire us to do it all for you. We have done this dozens of times and will make sure it is set up properly for success.
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