Radyes

Business

The New Normal For Restaurants

The COVID 19 pandemic might be temporary; however, it is causing a permanent impact on the restaurant industry world over.

We are already witnessing a significant change in the customer – restaurant relationship and the restaurant – aggregator relationship. While the first warrants a massive revision in the safety and sanitation expectation by the customers from a restaurant, the later is under severe scrutiny over the ownership, dependency, and commissions issue.

With precious learnings from the crisis embedded into both the consumer and restaurant psyche, the changes will be massive and long-lasting. Needless say, the post-COVID 19 restaurant business will be different in many aspects.

  1. Business Model
  2. Customer Data
  3. Direct Ordering
  4. Restaurant’s USP
  5. Customer Expectations
  6. Paid Digital Marketing

1. Business Model

With the dining capacity unlikely to come back to full occupancy any time soon, restaurants are focusing on infusing profits back into the system through food delivery and takeout services.

In the food delivery space, restaurants are further trying to reduce their dependence on food aggregators – inching towards building a system that grants them greater ownership of the ordering and delivery process and better profits. With delivery ecosystems like Radyes, gaining traction amongst restaurateurs in the middle east, the shift is likely to cause a more significant rift in the restaurant – aggregator equation.

Other than this, online ordering platforms, digital menu builders, app, and website builders are already witnessing a surge in demand as merchants gravitate towards single-brand focused solutions.

More and more restaurants today are investing in building their ordering capability and fleet of drivers to get direct orders without compromising on data and commissions. The trend will expand further in the post-COVID phase.

2. Customer Data

The lack of customer data handicaps the possibility of retargeting the customers, promoting brand loyalty, and drawing critical insights to make the product and marketing campaigns better. It ensures that the restaurant remains dependent on the platform to drive order volumes and keeps investing money for customer acquisition. The amalgamation of this data at the aggregator’s end makes it a double-edged sword. It can provide critical business insights to help your competition scale up for a higher price/package.

Restaurants have now realized the importance of owning their customer’s database for both – refining their marketing activities and ensuring repeat orders. Hence, orders coming through the restaurant app, website, social media handles are likely to become far more critical for the restaurateur, as it will provide data that is pivotal for new customer acquisition and retention. With an intent to capitalize on this demand, there are new aggregators in the market with a plan to modify the existing aggregator model by sharing the customer data with the restaurants that opt-in.

While the ownership of data is an issue that will definitely gain prominence, it will also be a welcome change for restaurant owners.

3. Direct Ordering

Commission-free direct orders delivered to the customer’s house is the golden goose category that restaurants will want to focus upon. Multiple solution providers are helping restaurants become more active online to achieve this. With a focus of putting the restaurant first, Radyes is leading the bandwagon with an end to end solution that is fully loaded with features and pre-integrated 3rd party tie-ups. It provides an ecosystem that helps restaurateurs acquire, engage, and convert customers without charging any commissions.
While there is minimal focus on customer retention and repeat orders in aggregator apps, with the Radyes loyalty program the customer is hooked and coming back for more.

4. Restaurant’s USP

A greater focus on enhancing the restaurant’s unique selling point will be witnessed. To stand out from the crowd for the limited demand in the market, restaurants will focus on sanitation, innovation, and creative ideas to get through to the customer. Now is the time for restaurants to popularize their strength and uniqueness. With direct orders taking center stage, greater advocacy and word of mouth will help drive direct orders, and that’s the goal every restaurant will be aiming for.

5. Customer Expectations

The customer’s expectation from the restaurant has already undergone a massive change with sanitation, food quality, and sourcing of raw material, becoming the primary reasons for evaluating a restaurant. Quality control and sanitation inspections will be taken far more seriously, and visuals of staff wearing masks and gloves will become a standard feature to convince potential business customers.

With COVID 19 hitting the economy world over and many people losing jobs, customers will place greater importance on discounts to get maximum value for money spent as compared to before.

Sparsely populated restaurants, with a focus on sanitation, discounts and deliveries, will incur more operational costs than they were undertaking before the COVID 19 phase.

6. Paid Digital Marketing

The F&B industry has largely underutilized social media platforms until 6 months ago. Merchants are beginning to discover the massive scope of social media platforms. What started as a pure customer engagement platform has now evolved into customer acquisition, conversion, and retargeting platform for restaurants.

With geo targeted posts, boosted within the delivery circumference, merchants can redirect customers to their ordering platform with one click.

However, with organic reach on the platform going down year on year, paid campaigns will be required to reach a bigger audience and encourage conversions with CTA buttons like see menu/shop now.

Paid campaigns on the google search engine and other marketing platforms with a direct link to the landing page to place an order are going to be a common feature. While this will ensure direct traffic every time a potential customer looks up a restaurant online, it will bring back control and ownership back in the hands of the restaurant owner.

COVID 19 has fast-tracked some of the impending problems that restaurants were facing already. The situation has yet again underlined the need for a long term perspective on making businesses more profitable. A holistic merchant-focused solution is the need of the hour, and Radyes provides you just that. Schedule a demo with our team to better understand how can Radyes equip you to adapt to the changes mentioned above.

5 Ways Social Media Can Benefit Your Restaurant Business

If you are only using social media to post pictures of your restaurant, it’s time to up the ante.

As a restaurant owner, you already know that Instagram and Facebook are powerful tools to increase your client base. The ‘click it before you eat it’ phenomenon can help you accomplish this in multiple ways.

To help you maximize your benefits from these platforms, our experts dug deep to list 5 can-do (must-do) goals along with easy ways to achieve them. After reading this blog post, you will know how to achieve the following through social media marketing for your restaurant.

  1. Increase Your Client Base
  2. Sell More And Sell Better
  3. Augment Your Restaurant Branding
  4. Humanize
  5. Address Feedback

1. Increase Your Client Base

Invest in paid social media campaigns to promote yourself to newer audiences and increase your restaurant’s sales. 60% of Instagram users use the platform to discover new brands. By making a strong visual identity, you can generate interest amongst a new audience set on the platform itself.

Devote time to do hashtag research. List down the hashtags by popularity and relevance and use them to be discoverable. A study by TrackMaven suggests that posts using 9 hashtags get the most likes. We suggest, start big and let analytics on your business account dashboard guide you towards which hashtags work best for you.

Replicate the broad persona of your existing customers who visit your restaurant or your competition to create audience sets on Facebook. Promote your ads and posts amongst these groups to reach out to a larger audience that shares similar interests.

Through geo-targeting and hyper-local ads, target only those people who can order with you. Reaching people who can like but not order is good to grow popularity but bad for return on ad spend.

So don’t just be liked; be discovered and experienced by a whole new set of customers through Instagram and Facebook.

2. Sell More And Sell Better

At the time of writing this article, there were 366 Million #food pictures on Instagram. While Instagram has started shoppable ads in some regions, it is largely underutilized by the FnB industry.

Use Radyes to convert your customers on social media platforms itself. Radyes boosts your posts hyper-locally and enables your customers to order with you on Instagram and Facebook. You also save the amount you pay by way of commissions to aggregators when you generate orders from your own social media accounts.

Alternatively, you can also include a link to your own order management system or your phone number in your bio or contact button. Your audience can order with you directly if they like your feed.

3. Augment Your Restaurant Branding

Make your brand easily identifiable by maintaining a similar look and feel of your brand, both online and offline.

Define your restaurant’s tone of voice and personality characteristics, this flows into every communication between your restaurant and your customer including your menu, online posts, customer interaction, etc.

Display your uniqueness in full visual splendor on social media platforms. Let your customers know how your food and people are different from others in the same industry. This goes a long way in building brand recall.

4. Humanize

Give a consistent voice to your restaurant. Let your customers interact with a personality and not a place. This boosts brand loyalty and increases customer retention and repeat orders.

The most followed restaurants on social media platforms don’t just talk about their food but also about the people and experiences, their food brings to the table. Sweet Green Restaurant (@sweetgreen) is one of the most followed restaurant accounts on Instagram, it focusses its Instagram activity on building communities through healthy food.

So, define the difference your food is making in the lives of the people who work there as well as those that dine there. Periodically sharing stories of your customers and employees goes a long way in giving a human touch to your restaurant.

5. Address Feedback

Social media platforms are a great place to understand what your audience expects from you. These platforms provide a positive and personal way to address negative feedback about your restaurant. Direct messages and responsive comments show your receptive attitude towards your customers.

Of all social media channels, Instagram gets the highest engagement. Hence, it plays a vital role in connecting you to your existing and potential customers. Proper utilization of the channel ensures your customer generation and retention efforts pay off magnificently. Schedule a demo with Radyes to understand how you can do all of the above in the simplest and most cost-effective manner.

Use tools like Social Bakers and Social Searcher to monitor brand mentions. You can draw precious insights about your strengths and improvement areas with these tools. Also, use the medium to collect positive mentions about your brand and share it with your audience.

Go ahead and multiply your followers and orders by simply optimizing your social media pages.

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