A handy feature for restaurants that provide dine-in to their customer. With this feature, your customer will be able to book a table directly from the google search results page. This feature is also part of Google My Business. It’s easy for Google users to check availability & follow the table reservation steps without navigating elsewhere. Restaurants can track bookings in their reservation dashboard in Foodship portal.
How to Improve Your Restaurant Online Presence?
Make most of your online presence
In this article, we are not talking about why you need an online presence, that we have already covered here in detail here. This article is covering how to make most of your online presence once you have it.
Most restaurant owners tend to get a website for their business. Still, they don’t update it or improve their restaurant online presence, e.g. never having a table reservation system or the restaurant ordering system connected to it.
Restaurateur often asks these questions, why do we need our own food ordering system? When we have Ubereats, MenuLog, Doordash services, & does it make sense to have both private & 3rd party systems?
Well, the answer is simply “Yes”. It would help if you used Menulog & Ubereats because these 3rd party companies bring customers & sometimes new customers too.
The primary business model of corporate food ordering companies like Ubereats & Doordash is to use their big marketing budget to get your local customers & then resell it back to you & charge big fat commission. The sad part is the customer still belongs to them even though you do the sales manage your menu
Promote your restaurant:
There are several ideas to improve online presence of your restaurant:
- Optimise your website by doing its SEO as this can impact your ranking in google search results.
- Social media marketing on Facebook, Instagram, etc.
- Restaurant listing on online Restaurant Directory Listings websites
- Build customer relationships by asking your customers to leave reviews on GMB and responding to those reviews.
- Email marketing for offering gift vouchers
- Offer discount on table reservation online
- Publish your menu online.
The next big question is how to convert these newly acquired customers to use your portal?
Well, there are many ways to achieve it. Still, one of the most effective ways is to have a polite but honest approach with the customer, don’t be shy of sharing with them that you have a website & food ordering system, also there is very little or no margin in using these 3rd party portal.
Invite them to use your ordering system for even better deals & experience. There are some more creative ways to improve your restaurant online presence which we will share in our future blogs.
Cautious of strategy backfire
The idea is to get new customers from Ubereats, Doordash type companies, not to lose existing ones. So if you have a good number of take-away & phone orders already coming in, just use a commission-free online food ordering system & enhance your customer’s experience.
So they spread the word, & you get new customers. Big companies often keep an eye on restaurants that have a good rating & online clientele & try to overpower them with excessive promotions. Once your customer sees that they get the same food for less price by ordering through these companies, they will move on from your portal & start using them.