This is the second part of our 2 part podcast series on Restaurant Marketing Technologies that many Restaurants use to grow their restaurant profitability. The technologies we discuss today are ones that we use and that are either free or very cost effective.
In the last episode, we talked about free and effective marketing tools you can utilize to boost your restaurant’s campaigns. In this episode we’ll talk about more amazing tools you can use!
CRM
Putting in a decent CRM system can be really powerful to track down your workflow to improve productivity. It can help you create workflows around that it’ll keep track of who’s opened your emails and who’s visited your website. This isn’t free but it has been one of the key things that we’ve done in one of our businesses.
We use Ontraport. It has really cool functionality and the ability to link when someone goes to the website. We can use that with Piwik, so it can be a great way to grow and create a richer customer engagement process.
Paid Ads
Facebook retargeting is quite complicated but not as challenging as installing and commissioning your CRM system. But once you’ve got it set up, all you’ve got to do is to integrate it with Facebook Pixel. It is very helpful in engaging with different demographics.
Setting up Facebook Pixel on your website provides data you can take advantage of. The tool will start tracking the people who go to visit your pages. It will then send their details to Facebook to say that this person visited the website. You can retarget them based on the amount of time that they play a video and strategize based on the records that the app captures. If you install it today and decide to run a campaign in six months, you can create ads that target a certain group of people.
Marketing to different groups of people with some similarities can help small businesses get reliable data insights. Facebook can help them find customers who share the same traits and who might be interested in buying from certain merchants. Markets can be compared to one percent of the population to see if they are acting in the same way. The tool is complicated to set up, but once it’s up and running, it will do wonders for your business.
Google has a similar process called AdSense retargeting, you’ll notice this often a lot when you’re browsing websites. It’s not that popular because it’s quite expensive for some. And for other processes our team implements, we haven’t been able to get the conversions that we have been getting with Facebook retargeting, which is why we tend to be a bit more Facebook-oriented.
Graphic Design
This is another tool you might want to consider if you’re going to run ads or even if you’re going to put things up on your website, you need to be able to tell your story visually. Canva is the go-to app if you’re going to do in-house graphic design.
It is an ideal tool to tell your story that’s going to resonate with people. Since images are more powerful in conveying your message compared to all-text content. You have to check out Canva if that’s what you want to achieve. It provides a lot of free stuff like templates, designs, images, etc. If you want the more value-added type of outputs, go for its premium subscription.
Another app you can try is Paint.net. It is like a cut-down version of illustrator or Photoshop. It’s a Microsoft product which they give away for free. It was meant to go into Windows but never made it there for some reason.
You can also use Fiverr to hire someone to do it for you. Many businesses are doing that for their logo designs, especially small businesses that don’t have the capabilities to produce visual content.
Video Editing
Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is a free software that allows you to hook up all sorts of stuff to create video streams. It supports the green screen really well. You can put text, watermarks, and play video on it. There’s a lot of ways that you can play around with OBS, a moderately complicated but pretty cool and very effective tool.
ResourceSpace is an open source digital asset management software. So if you’re going to go down the path of creating a lot of content, you should use this tool.
Next off is Camtasia. It’s a bit challenging at first, but it’s simple to use once you get the hang of it. It requires a paid subscription but works as a really powerful tool for video editing.
Restaurant SEO
Ahrefs is one of the best tools for SEO analysis in my opinion. It’s not cheap, $120 every month, but it’s worth it! Probably the best out of all paid products. You have to utilize this app as often as you can to get your ROI. It’s not easy to use at first , so you might want to get tips from someone quite familiar with it or read reviews to help you build your web presence. Ahrefs can significantly increase the amount of traffic, revenue, and profitability for your pages.
So that’s it. We’ve covered various marketing tools you can use for your food business. They come with different features and benefits so pick the ones that best suit your brand. Just make sure that you’ve got a detailed plan and the objectives are met.
Don’t forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits. If you think you’re missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes. Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.
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