Marketing Strategies For Restaurants To Recover From Covid-19 Downturn

Right now, the pandemic situation is unstable and volatile. When the country came out of lockdown, there was a palpable surge in the restaurant walk-ins and restaurant sales. And now, with an exponential increase in the positive cases and casualties, people are again staying away from restaurants. In such a scenario, what kind of marketing strategies should a restaurant incorporate to quickly recover from this dire situation?

To tackle this existential question, restaurants should orient their marketing strategy around digital solutions to reach out to their customers. In the wake of this new reality, investing in digital tools is no longer a unique differentiator, but, an inevitable part of the restaurant trade and strategy.

So, what are some of the best marketing strategies which your restaurant can harness? 

Get Your Own App!

Getting your own app will increase the visibility of your restaurant. This way you can get rid of a third-party food portal, saving your money in the form of heavy fees and saving yourself from the heavy-crowded competition.

With your own restaurant app in place, you can enable online ordering to open up a fresh source of revenue for the restaurant. To ramp up your orders and ultimately your restaurant's popularity, you can harness your app for marketing strategies such as:

Loyalty Points:

Offering loyalty programs is an effective marketing strategy to reward your regular customers, as well as attract new users with an allocation of points for an app download. You can also increase your customer base with referral programs by offering loyalty points for customers' references.

Marketing insights:

You can access statistics and analyze customer data and behavior—favorite dishes, frequency of orders, ordering occasions, etc., using these insights, you can utilize an entire marketing toolkit consisting of news, promotions, banners, and push notifications to drive maximum orders and sales.

Customer Engagement:

Drive customer engagement using marketing automation, where you can launch low-cost marketing campaigns targeting your customers with customized deals, discounts, and promotional offers. This positively impacts repeat orders from customers. 

Associate With Popular Brands

This is a cutting-edge marketing strategy for restaurants to tie-up with platforms like PhonePe Switch and Paytm Micro-apps to have instant access to millions of users. For instance, PhonePe enables its Partner merchant to integrate their existing Web-app or mobile site to the platform and instantly reach out to 60 million active PhonePe users.

The USP of this platform is: Anyone who's using these mobile payment apps can now seamlessly switch to their favorite food ordering, travel, and grocery shopping apps with just a single tap. Users can log in to these apps in the PhonePe (for example) itself without having to download them. 

These payment apps also enable their merchant partners to seamlessly display their exclusive offers and discounts, where, these lucrative promotional deals are just one tap away on the merchant app logo. This Platform has grown by 400 percent in the last 6 months which has enabled faster customer acquisition for merchant partners.

If you are a start-up restaurant, you can highly benefit from this partnership where you can acquire high-quality customers at low-cost! If you are an established restaurant, this partnership will help you drive sales with effortless non-cash payments, and also helps you focus on business expansion in specific geographies.

To harness this excellent platform, you need to get your own restaurant app! Hurry up!

Digital Marketing: An Essential Recovery Tool

With lockdown, a majority of millennials are working from home and most of them are spending a lot of time on social media platforms. This is the best marketing strategy right now would be to shower your target audience with enticing content, be it your pictures of your delicious meals, beverages, nutritional information, cooking tutorial, etc, and drive the traffic to your app or website. 

Retarget those customers who have visited your website and have not placed an order. You can choose to retarget on a single channel or multiple channels, the objective should be to put your restaurant ad on your customer's till they are tempted to make an order. 

Your social media marketing strategy should always include a link to your website on every post or at least every other. Whether you update or upgrade your website, be it with news, promotions, feature additions, etc, an appropriate link has to be uniformly posted across all your social media platforms to drive maximum traffic to order from your Site or your app.

SEO—Search Engine Optimization is another tool to add to your marketing strategy arsenal. Optimizing your website with proper keywords to achieve a higher ranking on search engines is a core tenet in digital marketing.

In conclusion, making your marketing strategy app-centric and website-centric will unleash a ton of avenues for you to reach out and engage with your customers. App acquisition, website acquisition, and digital marketing strategies, all these may sound complicated for you. That's where we come in. Uengage helps you with all the digital infrastructure you need for your restaurant to recover from the unstable and volatile situations of the present day.