Restaurants with highest restaurant marketing success share one single strength in that they make it very simple for users to find the information they’re looking for. The solution to this is a professional restaurant website with specific functions that will be discussed in this case study.
The significance of this comes from 82% of customers saying they look for a restaurant’s website and browse it before they eat there, order takeaway, or have food delivered. Shockingly, of that group, almost 74% have been deterred from going to a restaurant due to an underwhelming website.
It’s becomes apparent that a well-designed restaurant website is essential for attracting customers and facilitating online ordering, but outstanding website design for restaurants is more difficult to produce than you may imagine.
Why Have A Modern Restaurant Website With Online Ordering?
After the epidemic hit, many restaurants around the world reached out to GBoosts Restaurant Marketing Agency to see how they can recover their lost revenue. They were shocked by how hard it was to get the word around about their restaurants re-opening and serving customers full-time like before.
In the meantime, it was a totally different game for online food delivery services like DoorDash, UberEats and Grubhub. With surging sales and rising interest in online food ordering, these services took advantage and gained jaw-dropping profit from just having a powerful presence online.
To decipher this, We studied over 450 restaurants including the ones reaching out us, to find out the most shocking result. Jordan Santino from GBoosts writes: “We discovered that approximately 88% of all the users who decided to order food online, searched for a specific restaurant that they already knew prior to ordering from a major food delivery service, of that group, only 10% would successfully order from a local restaurant, and the rest would either use a major delivery platform or simply give up. The main reasons for Restaurants Failure online were: 1. Lack of a modern restaurant website, 2. lack of Restaurant SEO or Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and 3. not having a modern menu and online ordering system implemented in their website.”
Restaurant Website Strategy
- Presence is the bane of restaurant marketing strategy. If majority of local restaurants had invested in their online presence, they wouldn’t allow major platforms to take up their market share. An updated website with proper SEO is absolutely decisive for achieving online presence, according to our study of 450 restaurants. In addition, an active social media (mainly Instagram and Facebook) with content strategy and regular posting proves to be a good complimentary to your website.
2. Competition is often ignored by local business owners with no marketing strategy. Among the restaurants that reached out to us, there were few that had their website fully updated and functional with pretty decent local SEO. As a result they had conquered online sales, winning over leads from all other local restaurants and were seeing up to ten times the orders they had before. Their reason for outreach was simply maintaining the volume of orders. This is the first lesson in marketing, if you are fundamentally better than your competitors, the demand will flow towards you, and the reward is enormous. This is especially true in the case of local restaurant business, since most restaurants are pretty terrible at marketing.
3. Time is valuable and comfort is essential. Eliminating the wait time between placing an order for food in a restaurant and receiving it, or between finding a table and sitting down, equals raising customer happiness, boosting our revenue and more referrals. This allows customers to reserve tables and place orders in advance.
4. Online Ordering & Table reservation for restaurants can make all the difference. Jordan Santino writes: “If I, as a customer of your restaurant, have an easy time coming to your website, navigating the menu and placing an order online, you can be sure that I come back every time I am looking to order food or reserve a table. A restaurant website is basically a convenience offer, so user experience and ease of use are top priorities, if a user has to figure out something on their own or essentially use any brain power trying to place an order, it’s safe to say that with omitted convenience which is the basis of this offer, your website isn’t adding any value to your business.
Restaurant Competitive Audit
We then carry out a competitive audit by looking at competitors websites, their methods of operation, and the services they provide to customers. The competitive audit reveals major findings, areas where they are underperforming and are leaving a gap that we can fill. Marketing is essentially competition, it needs effort, and it needs your business to be better in order to win. Having a companion in this journey that can fight for you and along you seems to be very profitable for many local businesses.
As in the case of Girl And The Goat, Dasher And Crank, and Thunder Cut Alley, these winners completely devoured the competition by being visually pleasing, having great user interface and placing menus and navigation bars at the right place. This strategy in the restaurant industry is a “low investment, high yield” type of deal.
Restaurant Website Development (What To Look For)
If you have decided that it is time to create your main marketing weapon, by building a website or modernizing your current one, The most important things to look for in a Restaurant Website Agency or a Restaurant web design Agency are the following:
- Responsive Design: Most users use their phone to navigate your website. Having a fully responsive restaurant website is vital.
- Local SEO: Within the SEO field it’s a must to set things right from the beginning, because correcting them will be hard and expensive. An agency that has SEO experts along their restaurant web developers would be a smart choice. For local businesses, building a solid SEO strategy is the most important marketing investment.
- Reputability: As you should stay away from freelance workers for many reasons, it is also wise to audit the agency you want to work with, a few ways to do so are: 1. Booking a meeting with them. If you are able to see someone’s face and talk to them, it already instills you with a sense of connection and trust. 2. See the clients they have worked with, and ask for previous projects 3. Pricing is telling. If the price is too low, you are not going to have strong foundations in your main marketing weapon. If it’s too high, you are probably dealing with a new agency that has to charge customers high to keep the doors open.
- Development: We recommend sticking to a popular CMS (content management system) like Magento, WordPress and OpenCart where the cost of maintaining is extremely low, and it is easy for your staff to update menus, prices, etc.
- Modern User Experience: Investing in your business, you have to make sure that it is going to be an asset for you that will last long and can be upgraded and improved over time. Choosing the right agency, will make having a website with great user experience, facilitated online ordering & reservation, and ranking your restaurant on Google a reality.
Conclusion
In the restaurant Industry, majority of business owners neglect real marketing. We went over the case study of hundreds of restaurants struggling heavily because of solely relying on word of mouth, undisciplined social media marketing and using 1-page menus, without putting any effort in boosting the revenue of their business through marketing.
We observed how fruitful it can be to take the initiative and be competent in restaurant marketing where the competitors are lousy and incompetent. Lastly we covered what to look for in a web design agency for your restaurant.
If you’d like to know how GBoosts can deliver the perfect website with affordable pricing Book a Free 15-min Call With Our Team.
