Why does every restaurant social media page look the same? Are they out of ideas?
Are they playing follow the leader or do they need more ideas about what type of content to put out on social media and in their marketing for their restaurant?
Let’s be honest, ideas are easy and there are a million of them, yet we still see restaurants leaning into food shots as their primary and sometimes only content being created.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a beautiful zoomed in shot of a perfect burger with melty cheese as much as the next guy. But seeing it on everyone’s Instagram feed is getting a little redundant.
For a restaurant, picture quality does not differentiate your business. So, let’s leave the pretty pictures to the foodie bloggers who actually support those pictures with wonderful stories about their dining experiences.
And how do we stop the food porn from flooding the social feeds of restaurants across the country? The simple answer is content strategy.
Every restaurant needs a content strategy.
A strategy not only provides purpose, direction, and thoughtfulness to your approach, it also allows you to differentiate from the competition, leverage trends, engage customers, and build a better brand story.
Why is that important?
Simply put, if you don’t have an authentic story to tell and a strategy to tell it, you are wasting valuable time and money creating content that is not moving the line for your business.
There are some key components to a content strategy; brand goals, brand guidelines, brand voice, messaging mix, and distribution.
BRAND GOALS
Brand Goals help us align the entire company behind one strategy and helps us clearly define how we measure success. Developing brand goals start with a deep dive into understanding what the values of the company are, defining a mission and objectives for the business, and laying out what the priorities are from a business standpoint including food sales, customer acquisition and retention, promotions, etc.
If you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish, you’ll never know if you are succeeding or failing.
BRAND GUIDELINES
Brand guidelines are all the criteria you put in place that can be consistently applied to each piece of content. These guidelines dictate how the brand is portrayed top to bottom from the fonts and colors used, to the words and images chosen to describe the restaurant and its products. Every menu item should have clear guidelines for each type of marketing material whether it be pictures, audio, video, with people or without people.
BRAND VOICE
Brand voice speaks to the personality of your brand. That personality can be conveyed with specific tones and word choices appropriate for your business. This is typically a balance of the owner’s preferred communication style, the environment of the business, and what resonates with the customers. You can have some fun with this, but the important thing is that the experience in the store carries through to the marketing materials and content being created in a consistent manner.
MESSAGING MIX
A messaging mix describes how all the content lays out across common themes and goals. This is where a lot of businesses get tripped up. It’s not that they don’t have a messaging mix, it’s that they haven’t taken the time to lay out the strategy behind it and to test and learn how effective it is.
Broadly there are three types of messages; brand messages, product messages, and promotional messages.
- Brand messages tell our story, explain what differentiates the business, and connect with the emotions of the consumer.
- Product messages highlight our overall menu, drive cravings, and bring to light the special qualities of each of our products.
- Promotional messages are more timely, creating a sense of urgency around the product or restaurant such as a discount, limited time offer, or special event.
To truly be effective in this area, the business needs to layout the messaging mix across micro and macro levels, from hourly messaging, to daily/weekly messaging, to monthly and campaign window specific messaging. There may be overall themes such as food occasions like breakfast/lunch/dinner, seasonal offerings like summer or holiday themes, or campaign themes like bacon month. This all contributes to a holistic content calendar that you develop.
DISTRIBUTION
Distribution is where you take all the amazing content you are creating and figure out how to place it across all the various media channels in a way that works best for that channels format. There are best practices across all the media channels so that each consumer is more likely to engage with the content.
To help with this, it’s a good idea to have a portion of your content that is created ahead of time so that you can deploy it as needed at regular intervals. And a portion of your content that fits within your guidelines but captures the nuance of what’s happening in restaurant at the time.
Effective content distribution is a balance of preparation and real-time action.
You have to have all your creative ready to go while leaving yourself the flexibility to be timely, live in the moment, and capture real time experience so that the content is authentic and engaging.
BONUS: CONTENT IDEAS
If you are really struggling with ideas on what content to put out, a simple google search should provide some inspiration. But I’d suggest you actually take a look at your restaurant, think about what makes you unique, talk to the customers, and then share some of those stories and perspective.
A customer looking at your social feed wants to know what it’s like to be at your restaurant. It’s up to you to paint that picture.
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