8 reasons to choose in favour of restaurant influencer marketing

As social media ads steadily lose their novelty and appeal, restaurant influencer marketing can certainly help spice things up a little bit. Focused on collaborating with food bloggers and social media personalities, this marketing technique helps breathe air of authenticity and trust into your campaign. Think of it as modern ‘word of mouth’, except supercharged with metrics and curated with your specific business goals in mind.

Yet, some restaurateurs still remain unsure: is it really worth the investment? In case you also find yourself among the sceptics, here’s the rundown of 8 main reasons why it might be time to put those doubts to rest.

1. Promote restaurant visibility

With Instagram and TikTok becoming our trusted day-to-day guides, partnering with influencers will certainly help you make it to the ‘must try restaurants’ list for someone’s next outing. By leveraging their social media following, food influencers can swiftly reach a broader audience with real-life snippets of their visit to build stronger brand awareness and help you stand out from competition.

2. Target your ‘perfect’ customers

Unlike social media ads, influencer marketing switches focus from reaching astronomical numbers, to communicating with your perfect clientele instead. Since micro-influencers typically cater to specific niches and demographics, you can easily handpick collaborations with the foodies whose audience matches your ideal customer profile. Plus, this crucial segmentation allows you to tailor campaigns and messages specifically to fit different audiences and hits bull’s-eye when it comes down to generating an increase of ROI, both short-term and long-term!

3. Unleash superior content creation

Out of ideas for fresh and creative content? Step back and let social media experts do their magic. Influencers possess superior story-telling and design skills when it comes down to engaging their audience and can easily ‘translate’ your promotional messages into digestible and relatable content, making sure your culinary escapades will not go unnoticed. This boost in user-generated content can also play into your existing marketing strategy and provide more options for repurposing in your future campaigns.

4. Make your restaurant the ‘it’ place

Partnering with food and beverage trend-setters is also a great way of turning your restaurant from a place known by a few into a local hotspot. Positive reviews and recommendations from local food celebrities go a long way to secure your restaurant as the dining destination of choice and earn some prestige – all to drive even more traffic in through your restaurant’s front door.

5. Magnify your SEO and social media presence

Even though influencer marketing takes place outside of your restaurant’s digital accounts, it doesn’t mean it cannot do any good for your own SEO and social media presence. With foodie bloggers linking to your website, as well as a flow of tags and mentions on social media, influencer marketing is guaranteed to improve your restaurant’s SEO game and bring more engagement on your socials. It also tricks algorithms to recognise your restaurant as something people are interested in and strengthens the impact of all other digital and social media campaigns moving forward.

6. Spark curiosity for effective upselling

Influencer marketing can also play a strong hand in your restaurant upselling strategy. Explore influencer promotions not only as a way to raise general awareness of your establishment, but an opportunity for more targeted influencer campaigns to encourage certain customer decisions. Encourage influencers to showcase your higher price-point menu items, seasonal offerings and share promo codes with their audience to go hand-in-hand with your existing sales tactics. With curiosity already awakened, it will be much easier for your staff to encourage higher spending and upsell in person.

7. Stay ahead of competition

Chances are, if you are not using restaurant influencer marketing – your competitors are, so why stay behind? By working with food bloggers and influencers, you are able to make sure that your establishment gets noticed by potential customers and is remembered by your existing guests, as multiple establishments in the restaurant industry simultaneously compete for their attention.

8. Use metrics to track your marketing success

Unlike traditional forms of advertising, restaurant influencer marketing isn’t hard to track. You can easily calculate the increase to your ROI through metrics such as engagement rates, website traffic and conversions to double check if your marketing efforts are being paid off. This means you can also test which of the influencers generate more interest and work better for your restaurant promos and readjust the strategy accordingly to boost the engagement even further.

Ready, set… influence!

Instead of asking yourself whether restaurant influencer marketing is really worth the investment, let’s for a second rephrase the question. Are you really going to turn down the opportunity to spread positive ‘word of mouth’ reinvented and pumped up with metrics, audience segmentation and careful content curation? We hope the answer is no.

A good starting point is finding a local micro-influencer, who matches your restaurant’s brand and embodies the lifestyle of your target audience, and reaching out to them with an invitation for a complimentary dinner (or lunch, or brunch for that matter) to explore the options for collaboration and pricing in detail. Make sure their visit is filled with an unmatched ambience and plenty of exquisite culinary experiences to share with the audience, and let the power of influencer marketing take care of the rest.

What if something goes wrong?

If positive reviews and social media mentions are that influential, you can only imagine how quickly and easily the negative remarks can be picked up too. Don’t take any chances with Tableo.

Make sure to mark your social media foodies as VIP on Tableo when booking their reservation in, to let your staff know that special guests are joining for the night. With extra care and attention their way, you will leave no part of their experience at your restaurant up to a chance!