By Ron Stefanski, Contributor
If you are a restaurant owner looking for the best way to increase sales, you’ve come to the right place.
There are over 3.6 billion daily active social media users in the world, making social media a powerful marketing tool that you can’t afford to ignore.
In fact, the graph below shows Statista’s estimate that there will be over 4.41 billion social network users by 2025.
TikTok, in particular, is a great platform on which to market your restaurant business. It’s one of the world’s fastest-growing social media channels and the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store.
This article looks at some of the best restaurant marketing channels and answers the question of whether or not TikTok is the best social network for bringing more customers to your restaurant.
Is TikTok the Best Social Network for Marketing Your Restaurant?
When it comes to restaurant marketing, there are a lot of social media platforms that you can use to market your business.
Each offers something unique to help you increase restaurant sales, for instance:
YouTube: Perfect for video tutorials and guides.
Facebook: This site has a huge restaurant social media marketing potential.
Twitter: Allows you to easily share information about events in your industry.
Pinterest: Great for sharing visual media from your restaurant with your customers.
Instagram: Ideal for effective food photo promotion.
With any of the platforms mentioned above, businesses can leverage the ever-rising number of users who gather on these networks.
Restaurant owners, both big and small, can use the advertising potential of this electronic media to drive their restaurant online marketing. But, as effective as those platforms are, TikTok has more to offer for those in the restaurant industry.
Here’s a look at some of the more prominent benefits that come with using TikTok to market your restaurant.
Benefits of Using TikTok for Restaurant Marketing
1. Better Engagement of Younger Generations
TikTok and other social networks largely depend on visual content for their impact, making them ideal for advertising a restaurant’s welcoming premises and appealing food. Trendy restaurants and eateries can use this platform to attract the attention of their audience.
TikTok is particularly effective for engaging younger generations, and if your audience consists of Millennials and Gen-Zers, then it’s a great platform for you to use.
To get the most from this channel, simply post relevant videos of things such as:
Your menu
Your venue
Food preparation
Your team
Your brand’s culture
Chalkboard quotes
You can find other ways to show off your restaurant on TikTok, but the main thing to keep in mind is that your visuals should always be short, high-quality, and engaging.
Here’s an example of effective TikTok restaurant marketing from a fast-growing brand, @magsmeals:
The creator, Maggie Johnson, manages to gather an ever-growing legion of followers by creating simple but enticing salads and cheese boards and turning them into an art form.
Your restaurant can do the same, utilizing the power of your chef’s creative plating abilities and personality to show off your standard and special menu items.
2. Steeper App Growth
Yet another reason why TikTok is arguably the best social network for restaurant marketing is that the app continues to grow, particularly when compared to Facebook and Instagram's declining usage in recent years.
In fact, this interview with Zuckerberg shows that the social site's creator knows that they are losing the battle against TikTok with regard to the younger generation. While speaking about quarterly earnings, Zuckerberg explained his app’s declining growth, which is the first-ever occurrence of its kind in the app’s 18-year history!
In contrast, TikTok is experiencing phenomenal growth. The app has millions of users across 150 countries and it's popular with Millennials and Gen-Zers. It's easy to use and makes it simple for restaurant owners to attract and engage with younger audiences.
If your target audience consists of Millennials and Generation-Z patrons, this is the ideal social media platform to market your restaurant, even if you are on a tight budget.
TikTok lets you create and share appealing visual content using special effects, filters, hashtag challenges, etc. The platform is interactive and immediate, giving your brand the opportunity to become a viral sensation with each video you post.
3. Create Engaging Social Media Experiences for Customers
On TikTok, you can upload original video content each day as a way to stay relevant in your customers’ minds. This is a simple, yet incredibly effective tactic used by some of the most successful restaurant brands these days.
Create engaging and unique social media experiences for your restaurant customers by putting together duets with followers and customers (especially when they are at the restaurant), to add social proof, increase brand reach, generate ambassadors for your brand.
Encourage customers to post TikToks of themselves either eating at your restaurant or at home re-creating one of your restaurant’s dishes or drinks. This helps to incentivize them to share your special hashtag and let people know about your restaurant.
This TikTok marketing tactic will work particularly well if your brand identity is more playful and free-spirited than serious.
TikToks can also be easily embedded onto Shopify, WordPress, and many other website builders. This allows you to create engaging content on landing pages and blog articles as part of an omnichannel marketing campaign.
4. Leverage the Platform’s Powerful Social Commerce Functionality
TikTok is a great platform to use for your restaurant's online marketing campaign because it offers a wide range of social commerce functionality that helps you cut variable expenses while building an audience that wants to learn more your restaurant’s culture and newest menu items.
You’ll be able to advertise your food, drinks, services, and specials through the social platform.
All you have to do is create 15-second (or shorter) videos to communicate the vibe and atmosphere of your establishment. You can create these videos directly on the app or upload other content you’ve edited using other video editing software like Movavi.
If you have created longer videos, you can cut them into shorter segments, upload them onto TikTok, and then do the final editing. This means you can generate many pieces of engaging and interactive content instead of relying on one long piece of content that your users might also not have the attention span for.
On TikTok, you can use a wide range of special effects and filters to help jazz up your content so you can attract more customers and leads.
Once you have your content, you can then dive deep and use the platform’s vast commerce functionality to supercharge your marketing strategies for even better results.
You can use features such as:
TikTok Ads
Smart Audience Targeting
Real-Time Monitoring
… and many others.
For example, a business on TikTok has the ability to tag products in organic posts. Users who watch those videos can click on any of the tagged products in the video and be directed to the brand’s store for checkout. You can do this with your restaurant’s online ordering and delivery programs to driver digital business or set it up to take guests to your reservation page.
5. Team Up with Influencers to Expand Your Reach
TikTok makes it easy to create content with the potential to go viral, making it a great platform to grow your venture.
But even more than that, the site offers you the opportunity to expand your brand with influencer marketing, which is among the most cost-effective marketing strategies you can use for your restaurant business.
This is a savvy way to connect with brand new audiences and generate more awareness of your brand.
All you have to do is team up with an influencer in your industry to film short videos where they take part in some sort of activity, such as:
Completing a brand challenge
Sampling one of your new dishes
Re-creating one of your cocktails
Indulging in dessert at your restaurant
…and so on.
What makes this strategy so effective is that those influencers’ followers will likely share this type of content automatically, giving your restaurant more brand exposure.
Dunkin' Donuts is a great example of this. The brand worked with D’Amelio, a popular dancer, to create a TikTok video of her signature drink - a strategy that saw their sales shoot up by 20% the day the video went live.
Smaller restaurants without the purchasing power of a brand like Dunks can still utilize influencer marketing by working with smaller, more local or niche influencers. The general strategy for influencer marketing doesn’t change much from there.
Challenges of Using TikTok for Restaurant Marketing
There's no denying that TikTok offers a wealth of benefits for restaurant marketing. But, this powerful platform also comes with a few drawbacks, meaning that using TikTok as a digital marketing channel may not be ideal for all restaurant business owners.
Here are the challenges:
Limitations of Reaching Older Generations: One of the main reasons why restaurant social media marketing is so effective is that the different social networks are popular among various audience segments. TikTok is more suited for trendy restaurants whose primary target audience is Millennials and Gen-Z patrons, so if your audience is older, this platform may not work for you.
Other Platforms May Offer Higher ROI: While TikTok is great for directly engaging with niche audiences, it may not offer the highest ROI. Using email marketing tools or optimizing blog content for search engines may provide a better return on your investment, especially if you’re trying to reach older consumers.
Significant Learning Curve: Another reason for the popularity of restaurant social marketing on TikTok is that it offers a wide range of opportunities for promoting your business. However, this also means you need time to learn the full functionality of the platform so you can optimize your results.
A Large Number of Competitors on the Platform: Because of its explosive growth, TikTok also has a huge number of competitors, so you may have to work hard to get the attention of your target audience on the platform.
Requires Time to Build a Large Following: Before you can start seeing significant results from your TikTok marketing campaign, you first need to put in the effort and resources to build a following, and this may take time, especially if your restaurant is still new.
Wrap Up
As a business owner, social media should already have a huge role in your marketing strategy. TikTok, in particular, will help you raise brand awareness and build relationships with your customers.
The platform makes it easy for you to create engaging content and boost customer interactions with your brand. The possibilities for marketing your restaurant on TikTok are virtually limitless as long as you can adopt a creative mindset.
Whether you have a restaurant, cafe, or bar, I hope the information in this article has helped you determine if TikTok is the best social network for marketing your business.
Are you convinced that TikTok can help take your restaurant to the next level? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!
About the Author
Ron Stefanski is a digital entrepreneur and marketing professor who has a passion for helping people create and market their own online business. You can learn more from him by visiting OneHourProfessor.com.
