Saturday, September 19, 2009

Top 4 Online Restaurant Marketing Strategies

Based on a report submitted by AIS Media, around 89 percent of restaurant customers have actually looked restaurants up over the World Wide Web before they decide to book a reservation or dine there. This means that unless you're going to play your cards right when it comes to online restaurant marketing, especially making your website known to your target audience, you'll never get to enjoy this huge percentage.

There are so many restaurant marketing techniques that you can implement online, yet not all of them can perform really well. Just to give you a good head start, you may want to consider the following modes:

1. Create a mailing list.

What is a mailing list? You can view it as a database of those who signed up to your newsletters and other offers. The list then tells you of your initial prospects or individuals who express high interest over your restaurant business.

A mailing list often accompanies a sales or information page, which provides them reasons why they have to sign up for it or add their name and e-mail address into the list. For example, if they do, they may receive coupons they can use when they visit your restaurant.

2. Perform e-mail marketing.

On a study conducted by Forrester Research, it has been found out that more than 85 percent of e-mail subscribers use information from company e-mails to make purchasing decisions. Moreover, close to 80 percent do read their e-mails daily. You should also not forget that virtually 100 percent of those who surf the World Wide Web has at least one active e-mail address. You can definitely reach out to a huge target group if you can send your promotional materials through their e-mail address.

3. Opt for great online visitor experience.

For your restaurant marketing, don't just settle for any type of website. Make sure that it's not only navigable but also filled with a lot of information that would help your customers come up with the best dining decision. Great additions to your website include polls, blogs, and message boards where customers and prospects can interact with one another.

4. Optimize your website.

This is highly important, as this will be your ticket to make your website prominent in search engines. Most Internet users would go to Google, Yahoo, and MSN to search for restaurants like yours. So they can notice you, you must appear in the first few pages of the results page. You can never achieve that if you don't optimize your pages.

There are two ways on how to do that: off-page and on-page optimization. Both have their own benefits to your website. If you don't know how to do optimization, you can look for cheap but effective SEO specialists in the Internet.

There's one thing you need to remember, though, when you're doing online marketing strategies: never forget to measure them. Just because these work for a lot, they should also work for you. You would never know unless you take time to evaluate their effectiveness in your business.