Building a successful restaurant business requires more than just traditional marketing strategies.
Creating video content for your café or restaurant helps you reach a larger audience, engage your followers for more extended periods, and expand your business’s social media presence.
According to Forbes, 75% of Internet traffic is video-based. So if you’re basing your restaurant’s marketing strategy without using videos, you might miss out on a huge opportunity to showcase your restaurant’s prowess to the world.
Still not convinced? Let’s explore a few benefits restaurants can reap from video marketing.
The Importance and Benefits of Video Marketing
- Influence customer’s choices
When people search the Internet for reviews and opinions on pretty much anything, they knowingly allow themselves to be swayed by some people’s views.
Whether individuals eat in accordance with their biological demands or whether food has also evolved into a tool for socializing has been of great concern as a result of the growing popularity of food blogs, vlogs, and food photos by influencers.
Essentially, with videos, restaurant owners can showcase their restaurant’s best offerings on a plate but in video format. In this way, pretty much anyone with a smartphone can access it. As a result, videos greatly influence customers’ choices, and the numbers prove it: studies show that 92% of everyone with an internet connection watch videos online, and nearly 4 billion videos are watched on platforms like YouTube daily.
- Establish your brand
Consumers can better engage with their food when seeing and hearing stories about it. Showing the faces behind the plates of their favorite foods goes one step further in adding a personalized touch to what would otherwise be a mass-produced, soulless meal. Videos can serve as a reminder to bridge the gap between your industrial kitchen and the heartwarming meal that every customer wishes.
Video marketing gives your restaurant a brand, a face, and a story much more relatable to your customers than mere text and images of food.
- Tell your story to the world
A marketing strategy known as “video storytelling” employs the naturally compelling video format to tell the story of your restaurant.
Customers frequent restaurants not only for the cuisine but also for the overall experience. If the front-of-the-house staff is friendly and well-trained, they may make everything seem simple. The gap between seeing what is in front of you and what actually happens behind the scenes, on the other hand, can result in a lack of appreciation for the amount of work and consideration that went into preparing the meal.
Customers need to view the cooks and personnel in the kitchen to connect with the message you’re trying to spread. Through relatable content such as step-by-step recipes, what goes into procuring food items, and how the restaurant gives back to the community, to name a few, video storytelling enables viewers to bring up an emotional response and offers a satisfying resolution.
Various elements, including camera angles, music, characters, and the story’s emotional content, all contribute to drawing viewers into your world.
- Improve SEO
The ability to produce quality content that matters and engages the target audience is a key component of ranking highly in SEO. One such material is video, which continues to be a particularly effective narrative tool.
Video content marketing is an excellent marketing method to help improve consumers’ activity on your website. As a result, more online traffic is generated by video marketing, which also aids in improving your SEO to rank highly. For example, videos are 45% more likely to rank on the first page of a Google search than images and text.
Search engines like Google hunt for high-quality content that provides relevant information to users’ requests. It should be no surprise that when users search for something on the Internet, visual content is the most preferred result as it is straightforward, informative, and gives the audience exactly what they are looking for.
This is because its emotionally potent blend of music, action, and pictures may aid in delivering the correct information and foster more profound, more gratifying ties between your restaurant and your target audience.
- Boost your ROI
While producing videos is not as easy as clicking images, 83% of companies claim that video marketing offers a more substantial ROI than non-video marketing.
Additionally, videos can be filmed by using just a smartphone, and internet video editing programs are getting better and more economical all the time.
The best thing about video marketing is that your videos do not have to be perfect. Some of the most popular videos on the Internet with the most likes and shares are simple, homemade videos offering information that customers want.
- Encourage engagement
Visual search is on the rise, and it might be surprising for some to know that YouTube is the second-largest search engine platform after Google.
According to HubSpot research, video is the second most popular content boosting engagement on social media.
Even on non-video platforms, videos work well, and the numbers prove it:
- Tweets on Twitter receive 10 times more interaction.
- This year, 68% of video marketers want to utilize LinkedIn videos.
- On Pinterest, about one billion videos are watched each day.
Your website’s user engagement and bounce rate go down when you add videos. Indeed, if a video is instructive or exciting, people enjoy viewing it.
Since videos are sometimes several minutes lengthy, including them in your content will result in users staying on your website longer, increasing engagement and resulting in likes, shares, and subscriptions.
How Can You Make Videos Yourself?
Using video to explain the origin story of your business is a great marketing tool.
If you own a small business, don’t be afraid to create video content despite a restricted budget. Video marketing and advertising are one of the most cost-effective methods to connect to new consumers and remain ahead of the competition. You can produce beautiful videos using just a smartphone and a few tricks.
A brand narrative should demonstrate your roots, the story of how your restaurant started. It facilitates the development of a bond with your customers that nourishes leads for conversion. Include a compelling call to action at the end and post it on your landing page.
Here are a few tips to get you started.
- Pick a theme
The first step is to pick a theme for your videos. No viewer wants to watch random videos of your restaurant without any pattern or story behind them. If your restaurant is famous for its location, quick service, the staff, or simply for your lip-smacking dishes, this might be an excellent place to start.
Starting with food, which is undeniably the most critical aspect of a restaurant, you can slowly progress into showing other dimensions of your restaurant. Knowing your target audience is essential to picking a theme for your restaurant.
What do you know about the demographics of your customers? Are they older or younger? You can start by researching this a little based on the people who visit your restaurant.
Demographic research can help you focus and choose the theme that would be most advantageous to pursue. Whatever you decide, give it some thought and effort. Try not to overextend yourself by juggling too many themes at once.
The key here is to pick a theme and stick to it. Some of the most popular style of videos for restaurants are:
- Recipes or quick tips
- Interviews with your chefs
- Food preparation
- Social media food challenges
- Customer testimonials
- Choose your social media platforms
One of the best marketing strategies available to small businesses is social media networking. But not all social media platforms are made equal. Each platform has a distinct group of users who will interact with your content uniquely.
Based on your target audience, you can choose your most popular social media platform and optimize your content accordingly to gain the most likes, shares, and followers.
Facebook and Instagram assist restaurants in increasing visibility, engaging customers visually, and fostering interaction. Additionally, every company ought to embrace YouTube for interaction and sharing. It enhances your restaurant’s legitimacy and is also Google-friendly.
- Invest in devices and an editor
Anyone can easily make professional-looking food films with the expensive equipment and powerful video editing tools available on the market.
Today, everyone from chefs and food bloggers to home cooks and foodies can create mouthwatering videos of their culinary creations and post them online. In fact, Facebook reports that food videos are the most popular type of video content on their platform.
That said, high-end tools and comprehensive video editing software alone are insufficient to produce popular videos. To properly shoot food videos, you’ll need to know the fundamental know-hows to shoot videos for restaurants. And in many cases, your shooting technique is more crucial than the equipment you use. An excellent example would be using natural lighting instead of investing in a lighting kit.
That being said, you do not have to splurge on the best gadgets when starting your filmmaking journey. These days, smartphones are perfectly capable of shooting 4K, Ultra HD images and videos that you can start with. Invest in a smartphone with a good camera and mid-range editing software to start.
- Get down to content and branding.
Before posting, keep in mind that your videos will be posted on several social media sites. Therefore, you should take into account, and take advantage of, every aspect of your video content, from its dimensions and duration to additional effects like filters and music.
You should always aim to shoot your content with your most popular platform. A good example of that would be to use the most popular music trending on the platform at that time or collaborate with other businesses and stars and tag them.
It is always recommended to use a social media calendar and scheduler to ensure that you always post on time, regularly, and uniformly across all platforms.
Bonus: What kind of videos can you produce on a budget?
- Cooking tips and recipes
Effective video marketing includes sharing what goes into making trademark dishes, simple techniques for chopping vegetables, or how your kitchen cleans up thoroughly.
By sharing this information, you may connect with customers and make them feel welcome when they visit your restaurant. A chef’s abilities should be displayed to attract customers and pique their interest.
- Customer Feedback
People naturally trust other people’s views and, most importantly, their friends and family. Word-of-mouth advertising is quite powerful, and this holds extremely true for restaurants. To some extent, this trust may also be earned through listening to other customers’ testimonials.
- Behind-the-Scenes
Everyone enjoys the thought of getting a behind-the-scenes or unique look.
Follow the chef as he prepares meals, show your front-of-house workers lay out tables in supersonic speed to give clients this one-of-a-kind experience. Providing your viewers these behind-the-scenes peeks will increase their faith in you.
Behind-the-scenes films are excellent for attracting diners during the contemplation stage. You may persuade them to visit your restaurant if they haven’t already by offering them a virtual tour with your BTS videos.
- Eating competitions and social media challenges
Your menu and your restaurant’s brand can be advertised through food challenges.
In food challenges, the “wow factor” is everything. Challenges like eating enormous hamburgers often appear abnormal to most people, but it only takes one glance to stick in their minds.
Word of mouth may spread quickly, and before long, even those who don’t know your menu are aware of what your restaurant is doing. In addition, if people are impressed by the work you put into your challenge, they may be open to trying out your restaurant even if they are not interested in participating.
- How do you make the food that everyone loves?
The highlight of your restaurant is your menu. This is what gets your customers hooked to your brand.
The chef is often the reason behind the fantastic dishes you serve. By offering your audience a sneak peek into the life of your chef at your restaurant, you can personalize your restaurant and connect better with your customers.
By doing so, you personalize the food your customers consume, foster a deeper appreciation for your brand, and make them more likely to return and recommend it to others.
The Takeaway
The golden era of social media and food videos is upon us.
With the widespread use of the Internet, social media, and smartphones, video marketing is arguably one of the most effective ways to promote your restaurant. It has the potential to draw in more viewers and develop a loyal following, regardless of it being amusement or culinary inspiration.