Taste the Success: 5 Social Media Menu Promotion Tips for Restaurants

Key takeaways — TLDR

• Emphasize Personalization and Brand Identity:

—Personalize your brand across all customer-facing platforms, both online and offline.

—Integrate your brand identity into social media content, including menu promotions.

—Ensure a consistent brand experience in visuals, tone, values, and offerings at every customer touchpoint.

• Leverage Social Media for Direct Selling (Social Ordering):

—Utilize social channels for social selling or social ordering, allowing customers to order directly on the platform.

—Simplify the customer journey by enabling easy, one-click navigation to your site or marketplace from social media posts.

—Ensure direct links in social media posts lead to specific, relevant menu items.

• Collaborate with Influencers and Utilize Interactive Content:

—Partner with food bloggers and influencers to promote specific menu items.

—Regularly update and highlight different sections of your menu based on trends and data insights.

—Engage customers with interactive content like polls, surveys, and quizzes, and use these for promotions and driving menu awareness.

brandor It doesn't matter what type of restaurant, virtual food brands, dark kitchen. The fact is that your digital strategy can make or break your business in the modern restaurant industry. 

Nowadays, consumers and businesses are going digital, so it’s not just about building brand awareness; it’s about staying relevant and competitive in a saturated field. Social media plays a pivotal role in your digital strategy because you have a golden opportunity to drive growth through your social channels.

Your core offering is central to your menu and the items within. 

How do you promote your menu to attract more people to your site, the food delivery platform, and even your physical location? How do you do it to increase your visibility among the competition?

Let’s talk about all of this and more. Here are the social media menu promotion tips you need to know.

Personalization Takes Center Stage

Personalization is one of the most important elements of a successful brand in this industry, if only because it sets you apart from the competition.

Of course, there are many reasons you need to personalize your brand and all your customer-facing online and offline processes–success on social media being one of them. To stand out on social media, you must start by weaving your brand identity into everything you do on these channels.

This includes menu promotions and all posts about your core offering. 

Creating a consistent experience means branding every part of the customer’s journey, including the digital receipts you send out at the end of the transaction. You need a consistent brand experience in visuals, tone, values, and offerings across all the steps to bring people from your social posts to the online marketplace.

Use your brand’s style guide to create visual menu posts using key colors, typography, and graphic design elements that make your brand unique. 

Tying Social Media with Your eCommerce Operation

Social channels are no longer just about building a community–this is your opportunity to reduce customer effort and allow people to order directly on the social platform.

This is called social selling, or in restaurant lingo, social ordering. Deliverect Direct is a great example of how social media followers can become customers quickly, simply by having the option to order right there without taking a detour to your site or a food delivery platform.

Remember, simplifying the customer’s journey is one of the best ways to increase your eCommerce conversion rate on any platform, especially if you can keep the user on their preferred platform.

With that in mind, focus on selling directly on these social networks but give your followers an easy, one-click way to reach your site or marketplace. Don’t make the mistake of not tying that click to the items they’re interested in on your menu. 

If you’re posting about a new, mouth-watering sandwich, click leads to that exact item on your site or the food delivery platform. 

Menu Promotion with Restaurant Influencers 

Thanks to food bloggers and foodie influencers, the food industry is booming on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.

Collaborating with various influencers can boost your brand’s presence and visibility. Influencer marketing for restaurants' key focus is exposure to the brand, but it’s also to drive conversions and attention to specific menu items.

Many restaurant owners tend to forget this. Make sure to reach out to influencers who are willing to get very detailed about specific dishes and menu items they like and create entire reels about these highlighted dishes.

As you can imagine, this ties amazingly well with weekly and monthly promotions, seasonal promotions, and other campaigns that focus on different parts of your offering. 

Weekly Spotlights and Menu Highlights

You can't afford to stay stagnant as a restaurant or a virtual food brand trying to drive growth through social media.

While you may have an amazing core offering, and you shouldn’t change it, your promotional strategy must focus on variety. Instead of promoting your menu, you need to promote sections based on upticks and trends in your POS and ERP systems.

In other words, use the data from your sales dashboards to identify popular items and ride that wave by promoting those menu items on social channels. Use the same data to identify less popular but complementary items to create special promotions and combos to bring up those lagging parts of your menu.

Above all, keep switching things up every week with dynamic pricing in mind. 

Don’t allow your menu to become stale. Rather, create menu combinations and highlights each week and incentivize people to buy by always offering some part of your menu. A small discount will go a long way in boosting conversions on social media.

Pools, Contests, and Interactive Content

Interactive content is an important aspect of any social media engagement strategy, and your core offering offers a unique opportunity to spark interaction.

You can make your social strategy more interactive in many ways–through pools, quick surveys, quizzes, calculators, and more.

You can post these questions and pools in your stories, videos, and regular posts and use a CTA to get people to interact with you in the comments. This is when you can follow up with special promos or spark conversation about your brand and the items on your menu.

Additionally, interactive content is more shareable, so this format will help you disseminate your menu across social channels through shares. 

Time to Take Menu Promotion Forward

Social media is the best place to promote and advertise your core offering.

Of course, you can do this with sponsored ads, but you also need to do it through daily organic posting, community management, and monitoring the day-to-day trends in your community. This will allow you to manage your offering smartly and efficiently and capitalize on the trends in your market.

Now that you understand the best ways to promote your menu on your social channels utilize these tips to distinguish your brand and increase on-site and online sales.