Facebook Marketing for Restaurants in 2023

If you’re a restaurateur, Facebook is a powerful marketing platform that you should be using to reach your customers. Facebook has millions of active users, and many of them are looking for food. By focusing on Facebook marketing for restaurants, you can reach your target audience and promote your restaurant in a way that is effective and cost-effective. 

In this article, we’ll show you how Facebook marketing can help your restaurant’s success.

Restaurant Facebook Marketing Facts and Figures

Much of the food business’s online success is attributed to your overall Facebook Marketing for Restaurants Strategy. According to experts from Statista, the food business industry went through a tremendous growth pattern during the last 3 years or so.

And why wouldn’t it be that way? 

Facebook has more than 2.7 billion active worldwide users. While it is a phenomenal platform for any online business to reach new audiences through organic posting, paid ads take it to an entirely different level. 

That being said, it’s too soon to talk about Restaurant Facebook Marketing Strategy in reference to paid marketing, but we will get to it later.

Rest assured, we have looked through every crevice to highlight everything there is to ‘Facebook Marketing for Restaurants in 2023’

Even though the topic itself is a bit of a cliché’ thousands of other online food services platforms have already covered it by now. But then again, Blink is a hyper-growth and quick commerce enablement platform, which means that we share insights from a very different perspective. 

At Blink, our business partners use deep-level granular data from various forefronts towards an optimized buyer journey. 

Therefore, this guide on Facebook Marketing for Restaurants in 2023 will help you to increase your food and retail business turnover tenfold.

Read on…

Facebook Marketing for Restaurants: Strategy Pointers for Small and Large Businesses

As stated earlier, the sheer number of people that actively use Facebook is roughly around 2.7 billion. And that’s just the “active” users who log in regularly to their accounts. If we were to talk about the total user base with inactive users, that’d be gigantic.

Moving on, here are some of the other highlights that make restaurant Facebook marketing strategy a promising prospect for business owners:

• 88% of the people are influenced by Facebook influencers
• 70% of the online purchases are made through in-app restaurant Facebook stores
  • That’s one more reason for restaurant owners to incorporate social commerce plugins into their online Facebook food menu page
• Facebook check-ins, user-generated content, and other resources work flawlessly towards the ‘word of mouth marketing effect
• 30% of the restaurants reportedly benefit from the viral buzz and hashtag mentions attributed to brand-specific terminologies

Overall, Facebook is the most used platform next to Twitter and Instagram. With 91% of the marketing revenue going to Facebook campaigns, food and beverage businesses can easily double their investments over time.

How to Market a Restaurant on Facebook

Are you an established restaurant brand and have yet to target Facebook as a platform to scale your growth? Are you wondering where to start and how to market a restaurant on Facebook?

Facebook is a powerful marketing tool for restaurants, and there are several ways to use it to your advantage. 

First of all, Facebook has a massive user base – nearly three billion active users. This means that you have an opportunity to reach a wide range of potential customers who likely wouldn’t visit your restaurant otherwise. 

Second, Facebook lets you target specific demographics very accurately. You can select users based on age, location, interests, and more – which gives you the ability to connect with exactly the customer group that you want to attract. 

And finally, FB is effective in generating leads and converting them into customers – so if you’re looking for an efficient way to market your restaurant effectively online, Facebook is definitely worth investigating!

Facebook Marketing Ideas for Restaurants

Regardless of which marketing vertical you’re looking to scale your food business in, don’t forget that it takes patience and consistency for the results to show up. With data-driven metrics to fall back on, don’t forget to improvise your marketing strategies to convert leads into repeat customers.

Without further adieu, let’s see what Facebook’s marketing ideas for restaurants is all about.

Engage Followers on Facebook

When it comes to social media marketing for restaurants in 2022 , one of the best ways to engage with customers is by speaking with them. You can do so by not only posting regular content but also by getting back to customers whenever they share their opinions or ask questions underneath the posts’ timeline.

Did You Setup Your Business Profile Correctly?

Of course, this one is a mandated practice whenever you’re looking to start with a Facebook marketing strategy for restaurants.

Start with a full profile analysis of your restaurant business before porting it over to Facebook, or any other social media network.

For Facebook-specific do’s and don’ts, we recommend filling your page’s sections with relevant and up-to-date information. Your ‘About’ section should highlight the most pertinent information regarding your restaurant business.

The same goes for your contact information. While you’re doing so, make sure that you have shared enough information for customers to easily reach out to you. Sharing your restaurant’s official website won’t cut it. Make sure to include an active Support Team email address, and contact number with direct access to your restaurant reps and vice versa.

Moving on, the ‘Our Story’ section is also a relevant field where you get to highlight your restaurant’s history and some of your USPs indirectly. To be able to write down a killer section for the ‘Story’ area, go through your competitor pages and take notes on how they’ve filled their profile.

To say that ‘people eat with their eyes wouldn’t be an understatement when it comes to online food businesses.

It becomes more true for the Marketing Strategy on Facebook as you can include high-resolution closeup shots of your friendly staff, happy customers, and anything that highlights the significance of your ‘About’ section.

Moreover, when it comes to images, don’t forget to share the signature dishes that will at least tantalize your customers to try them out through the online order page. Similarly, if your restaurant business has received any awards or titular accolades from the health industry, mention those as well.

While you’re busy curating your Facebook business page for the first time, don’t forget a catchy title and description wherever it’s relevant. Facebook encourages businesses to be more creative. If you are not good with spinning words, hire a food business copywriter to get the work done. Rest assured, it’ll all be worth it from a long-term online business perspective.

Setting Up Your Facebook Food Menu

The modern-day version of Facebook offers plenty of perks to online food businesses to showcase their products. For instance, the menu tab plugin for Facebook is a free resource for anyone looking to create an integrated food order menu on a Facebook business page.

However, before you create or set up a menu, please ensure that you have the in-house infrastructure to manage your online orders. Especially, at times when the menu is outdated and doesn’t properly list out-of-stock products, it creates frustration on customers’ end.

In that order, it doesn’t take long for customers to share negative feedback or share their “grievances” through your restaurant’s Facebook reviews section. Moving on, as far as the food order menu is concerned, it falls directly to the bottom of your list of Facebook for restaurants page. However, you can edit your menu bar to have the food menu list higher – that’s how people will be able to quickly peruse through all sorts of food items that you have to offer.

You can also direct your main CTA button to your online ordering system in case your food menu on Facebook is just for informational purposes.

Facebook Reviews Are a Big Deal

Reviews are a great way for people to learn about a restaurant, or a business’s services without trying them beforehand. Many people’s buying behavior is positively influenced through the Facebook reviews section. After someone sees a bunch of stellar 5-star reviews from other online food connoisseurs, naturally that first-time buyer will be more than willing to give your services a shot.

What’s more interesting is that the reviews’ star rating also shows up in search engine results from time to time. It seems like Google favors the integrated reviews system that social media networks have made available for online shoppers.

Since reviews are the first thing that people see when they’re looking to try a product, food, or business service for the first time, why not add/ enable it on your restaurant’s Facebook page to take full advantage of it.

Here’s the best part though: as reviews start pouring in, you can respond through your business profile to them. This action has two main benefits:

1. First-time buyers, who haven’t tried your restaurant before, will see and recognize your restaurant as an active business on Facebook
2. In case of negative or unverified customer reviews, you can directly respond to the poster with enough evidence to clear any confusion or misunderstanding about your restaurant’s services

All in all, responding to customer reviews is a great addition to the Facebook marketing strategy for restaurants stack. Before writing down personalized responses, draft them in a separate tab. If you play your cards right, a lot of customers will change their 3 or 4-star reviews to 5-star reviews.

This activity is a great way of making your customers feel heard and important throughout the continuity of your restaurant business’s lifecycle.

Building a Healthy Follower-Base

Of course, for any thriving restaurant business on Facebook, it’s the staggering number of active followers that count the most.

However, if we were to go all the way back to the day when the brand is incepted on Facebook, everyone has one thing in common – and that is ‘0’ followers. Over time, restaurants build these followers by engaging with customers, posting regular comments, encouraging user-generated content submissions, and vice versa.

The only thing that we’d advise is to not buy any followers to give your Facebook for restaurant’s page that tempting initial boost. Almost every time, these followers are fake – as in, they’re just newly created dormant profiles.

In order for your Facebook presence to grow and scale, you will need real followers; actual people who’d turn into repeat customers and engage with your restaurant regularly.

To build or increase your followers, start with an organic Facebook marketing strategy for restaurants. To do so, post regular content, and encourage your on-site customers to visit your Facebook page. Inform your customers about any possible discount campaigns that you’re running, and people will actively partake in them to avail those offers.

Another great way of increasing Facebook for restaurants’ page followers is by hosting giveaways. People will be more than excited to hear about the latest offers from your restaurants. Given that the program is incentivized enough with reward points or free/ exclusive menu deals to show for, sharing your Facebook content won’t seem like a chore to your customers anymore.

Post Regularly, and Post More Often

Here are some additional points to add value to your Facebook marketing strategy for restaurants.

• Make sure that you are posting content on your restaurant’s Facebook page at the right time. 1 PM – 4 PM slots are reportedly known as active hours to engage with customers on social media.
• Share exclusive BTS footage of your restaurant’s crew every once in a while.
• Share recipes if you can. Of course, some of the recipes are confidential to restaurants as they are part of the signature dishes, but there’s no harm in sharing common recipes that people can create on their own.
• If someone posts content and tags your restaurant’s Facebook page, encourage him/her to do it regularly. After all, user-generated content is the best ‘word of mouth marketing strategy these days.
• Don’t shame customers, even if they are wrong at times. Except for some exceptional cases, customers deserve 5-star service.
• Online customers have a sharp memory. If you do something nice through a personalized Facebook message, they’ll remember it for years to come. These actions result in repeat and referred business opportunities for restaurants.
• Share your seasonal dishes through the Facebook menu page.
• When handing out business cards, make sure that you have your restaurant’s Facebook page information printed on them. Also, be vocal about asking people to visit and Like your restaurant’s Facebook page. This serves as a reminder for them to do the needful, the next time they’re looking to order food from you.

Facebook Ads for Restaurants

Using Facebook Ads for Restaurants can be a very lucrative strategy for businesses of all sizes. By targeting your audience specifically, you can reach them in the most relevant and effective way possible. Facebook’s massive data network allows business owners like you to get very specific with advertising outreach. This means that your ads will be more likely to succeed because they will be targeted at people who are actually interested in what you have to offer.

So how do you go about utilizing this powerful tool? The first step is determining what types of ads are best suited for your restaurant or catering business. Next, create ad campaigns based on those descriptions (for example, “Catering Services Near Me”). You can then set parameters such as budget size and daily target audience engagement rate (DAER), which will help make sure your ads are reaching their desired targets. Finally, monitor results regularly so that you can fine-tune and adjust as needed!

 

8. Creative Facebook Posts for Restaurants

A Facebook page is essential for any restaurant looking to increase its reach and attract more customers. But not all businesses are aware of this fact, or understand the importance of regular posts on their page.

 

Facebook has over 2 billion active users, which means that your business can easily find potential customers who might be interested in what you have to offer. 

 

However, generating effective content isn’t as easy as just dumping out articles without thinking about how they will be received by your target audience. 

 

You need to think about what topics are relevant to your industry and target market, and make sure that you publish quality content that resonates with them. 

 

Here are some ideas for posting creative Facebook posts for restaurants:

• Share blog posts from other restaurants or food-related articles that you’ve found interesting (this will help build links back to your website). 
• Promote upcoming events or special offers (these sorts of things can generate excitement among potential customers). 
• Write short but effective blogs focused on specific topics related to dining out (such as menu recommendations or etiquette tips).

At The End of The Day

Having talked about Facebook’s marketing strategy for restaurants in this post, their are still a lot of issues that we haven’t discussed. 

For instance, how to use Facebook marketing analytics, how to convert customers through boosted posts and paid ads etc. These are the kinds of topics that we will be discussing in the near-future extended content section of this post.

Therefore, don’t forget to bookmark this article, and revisit it in a week or so. In case you have any comments about Facebook’s marketing strategy for restaurants, feel free to use the comments section below.