By Ivan Andrianko, Contributor
Including videos as part of your restaurant marketing strategy is an excellent way to get more guests through your doors.
Videos are a great way to showcase your restaurant's food and atmosphere. This can help inspire people to visit your restaurant and see for themselves the delicious food that you serve. Beyond this, even allocating a small part of your marketing budget to video production can have a big impact on your restaurant's online presence.
However, creating a video is an expensive and time consuming process. It's important to properly execute your video marketing strategy to get a positive ROI.
In this blog post, we'll show you the key steps to do just that.
From brainstorming and research to production and distribution, we'll go over all the most important points you need to cover to get the most out of a restaurant marketing video.
1. Dive Deep into Understanding Your Restaurant’s Guests
The first thing to consider when making a video for your restaurant marketing is who your target customer is. You likely already have a gut feeling about who's coming into your restaurant, but it pays off to dig deeper into your clientele. With this understanding in hand, you can start creating videos that will resonate with them and get them excited about your restaurant.
For that, you need to build customer personas. A customer persona (also called a buyer persona) is a tool for understanding who your guests are and why they do what they do.
Start with just the basics. Basic demographic and behavioral data can give you an idea of the types of videos that will resonate with your clientele.
Generational humor is a thing restaurants should consider when creating their marketing strategy.
For example, using the dank memes that Gen Z loves will probably be alienating if you're targeting an older audience. There's a lot of data that you can look at, and the relevant information can vary depending on your own specific context. Age, socio-economic status, and geographic location can all be good places to start building your audience profile.
Next, try to understand why they come to your restaurant. This could be very basic, but it can also run deeper. Often, people will eat at places that help them build a certain type of identity. The customer that keeps coming back to get a quick salad for lunch probably isn't only there because the salad is healthy and convenient. She is likely telling herself that she is a health-conscious human, or maybe that she's a rushed business professional.
The final step is to use all this information to figure out your clientele's hopes and aspirations. The best marketing videos and campaigns usually play off these desires at their cores.
Using the previous example, you can picture that our health-conscious businesswoman likely imagines herself leading meetings and making decisions, answering important emails and phone calls all day, and finally ending her day with some relaxing yoga. Whether or not she actually does these things is beside the point: What you want to show is that your clientele lives this lifestyle, and that by eating at your restaurant your yuppie businesswoman can live it too.
Audience research tip: Don't just use cold hard data to develop your customer profile. Go out and talk to them! Conversations with real people can give you insights that no amount of research will uncover.
2. Look at Where Your Guests Spend Their Time
Next, you'll want to use this data to identify where your target audience spends their time. This will help you determine the style and type of video that will best resonate with your potential customers.
First, look at where and how they consume their media content, and especially their video content. This can range anywhere from watching TikToks and Reels from their smartphones, all the way to the (now) old school watching cable TV.
It's also possible they directly consume little or no video content. For example, if your guests are mostly academics, they're probably spending most of their time online reading academic studies and reading new website publications. It will be hard to reach them through video marketing, no matter how well your video would resonate with them.
You'll also want to look at where they spend their time offline. Not all videos are viewed directly through personal phones, computers, or TVs. Your clients might be spending time in physical spaces where they're also exposed to marketing videos. This could be at the mall, at trade shows and conferences, or high traffic spaces in their community (e.g. the gym, or the college's reception space).
Wherever there are TVs or digital signage, there are opportunities to use video to market your restaurant.
3. Brainstorm Ideas for Your Restaurant’s Marketing Video
Once you have determined who your target clientele is, you can start brainstorming ideas for restaurant videos. You've probably already come up with ideas along the way (hopefully you wrote them down), but there are various tactics you can use to generate ideas.
One great way to come up with ideas is to look into the type of video content that your target customer is already consuming.
For example, if you know that your audience likes watching cooking tutorials on YouTube, you could make a restaurant video where one of your chefs demonstrates how to make one of your signature dishes. Or maybe you could do a tour of your restaurant, showing off your open kitchen so that potential guests know they can watch how their food is created.
Another option is to use Google Trends and social media platforms like Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn Groups to get ideas for content related to your restaurant's industry or target market. You can use this information to create video content that is fresh and engaging.
There are a huge number of other brainstorming techniques, so we won't make an exhaustive list of them. Just try to keep in mind the type of video content that your restaurant can produce. Not all restaurants have the resources to create high-quality videos, but even a simple smartphone video can be engaging if you put some thought into it.
4. Produce the Video
Now that you have some ideas for your restaurant's marketing video, you need to produce it! You have two options at this point: Produce it in-house, or hire a professional agency to make it for you. Done well, both options can be used to make high impact videos.
The major benefit of producing it in-house is that it's much cheaper. Although it won't be as high quality, it can still be used to make an engaging video. We won't go in-depth here on how to create your own video, but we will highlight two major points.
First, using your smartphone to film the video is going to lead to a somewhat unpolished final product. Use this to your advantage. Focus on creating a feeling of authenticity and connection with your customers. Try showing off the genuine experiences your guests have at your restaurant, or some of your team members' personal stories.
Second, your smartphone's camera alone is probably not good enough to fully capture the ambience and atmosphere of your restaurant. If you're looking to create a more professional-looking production, you'll need to have the right filming equipment and editing software. If you don't own any, many camera supply stores allow you to rent cameras, lights, and other equipment.
Hiring a professional agency is your other option. Although it's more expensive, this generally leads to a better final product. Not only will the agency have the talent and expertise to create the video you want, they'll be able to help develop ideas for the video and provide feedback on any ideas you've come up with.
5. Distribute Your Video
Finally, it's time to distribute your video content. It can be difficult to decide on the best channel(s) to use. TikTok, Youtube, Instagram reels, even TV ads are all potential options.
How do you get your video in front of the eyeballs that might actually show up at your restaurant?
The first step in making this decision is to go back to the audience research you did. You should have already developed a pretty good idea of where your actual clients are already spending their time, so you can be pretty confident your potential customers are consuming content the same way.
At this point, it may be a simple matter of sending the video to the media company that will be displaying your video. However, you're likely going to share it on social media as well. This can be a bit more complicated.
Platforms like Facebook and Youtube allow you to target ads based on very specific criteria. These are great for reaching a large audience quickly and easily, however, it can be challenging to know where to begin.
Again, start with the audience research you've already done to determine the basic demographic features you want to target. After this, try to identify other specific criteria to narrow down your audience even more. The possibilities are endless, but a good place to look is data on people that are following or engaging with your competitors' brands.
Video distribution tip: Don't forget about your current customers! Watching your marketing videos reminds them of the experiences they've had at your restaurant and can give them social proof that they've made the right decision to eat there.
About the Author
Based out of San Francisco, Ivan Andrianko is the owner of Rocketwheel. He's been living and breathing all things video since 2007. When he's not fine-tuning the team's latest production, you can find him in his woodshop perfecting his craft, or out exploring in the Santa Cruz mountains.