Is your restaurant blogging or generating some type of onsite content on a regular basis? If not, it’s time to start! At St. Gregory, we know that content marketing is a bit like flossing—most people know they should be doing it regularly but the benefits aren’t always immediately apparent. Plus, it can be a somewhat painful activity and sometimes weird stuff comes out … especially when you’re trying to come up with restaurant content ideas.
However, while you may not immediately see an increase in restaurant foot traffic from content marketing, it, like flossing, is worth sticking with!
If you’re skeptical about content marketing, like blogging, check out this statistic from HubSpot: “Businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don’t.” Oh, and this one: “70% of people would rather learn about a company through articles rather than advertisements.”
In addition to building awareness, trust, and excitement among potential restaurant goers, restaurant blogging (or content marketing) can help your performance on search engines. It can help both in terms of getting search engines to crawl and index your pages as well as with improving your ranking within the search results. And as they say in real estate, “location, location, location!”
One of the biggest challenges we hear from restaurants considering content marketing is coming up with restaurant content ideas. Many restaurants just don’t think they have anything to talk about. Luckily, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Here are three tips for coming up with restaurant content ideas.
Keep in mind that the specific restaurant content ideas you generate will vary based on the type of restaurant you are. For example, what a fine dining restaurant blogs about will differ from what a family friendly neighborhood pizza joint blogs about. However, regardless of your price point and clientele, you can use these tips to start generating content ideas for your restaurant!
Tip 1: Answer Frequently Asked Questions
When brainstorming restaurant content ideas, think about the questions you and your staff get asked over and over. If customers are asking these questions, potential customers may have the same questions and they may be heading to Google to search for answers.
If nothing is immediately coming to mind, spend some time combing through comments and messages on your social media profiles, local profiles (like Google My Business), and other popular websites like TripAdvisor and Yelp. Often users will post questions on these various platforms and other users will attempt to answer. Look for repeat questions or questions that have been answered incorrectly. These are great starting points for restaurant blogging.
Obviously, questions will vary drastically from restaurant to restaurant but some that might have come up include:
- Does your restaurant do private or corporate events?
- Is your restaurant kid-friendly / does it have a kid’s menu?
- Does your restaurant have gluten-free options?
- Does your restaurant have vegetarian or vegan options?
- Does your restaurant offer takeout or delivery options?
Tip 2: Restaurant Content Ideas Aren’t Just for Blog Posts
When thinking about restaurant content ideas it’s important to remember that “content” doesn’t just mean restaurant blogging in the form of text based articles. While it may not perform as well on search engines, content can include things like:
- Videos
- Infographics
- Images
Restaurants naturally tend to lend themselves to visuals. After all, who doesn’t enjoy seeing pictures of mouth-water food? Lean into that!
Videos may include how-to guides such as how to pair wine with different dishes or how to properly taste wine. Infographics may include fun facts or statistics about food. Images may showcase your new winter menu.
For example, several years ago, we built an infographic that showed the top food related search query for each state for a restaurant client. The added benefit of this restaurant content idea was that it also made for great social media content. (If you’re curious, the top restaurant search in Ohio, according to that infographic, was Buffalo Wild Wings.)
Tip 3: Test and Measure
Look, not all of your restaurant content ideas will be home runs. The important thing is to test and measure different ideas. As long as you have measurement protocols in place, you’ll be able to understand how people are responding to the content and what you should try to repeat versus stay away from in the future. Measurement protocols would include things like:
- Having Google Analytics or some other measurement application in place on your website.
- Using UTM parameters when you post links to your blog on social media or in your newsletter.
- Setting up goals or conversions in Google Analytics to measure valuable actions on the website such as reserving a table, placing an online order, or purchasing gift cards.
- Creating a baseline report that looks at your current levels of website traffic and engagement and possibly even social media engagement. You’ll use this as a comparison once you start creating blog posts or other onsite content.
Bonus: Some of these tips on creating a radio ad for your restaurant may also help you generate compelling content!
Use the three tips in this post to start generating restaurant content ideas that will create awareness and excitement around your food. You can also join our mailing list (sign up below) to get a free list of more specific restaurant blogging and content ideas. For example, one idea is to create content that tells the story behind your most popular menu items—is there a funny story behind the name, how did the chef come up with that inspiration, how many of those dishes do you sell a week?
If you need additional help coming up with restaurant content ideas or even creating the content itself, whether it’s writing blog posts, designing infographics, or creating videos, St. Gregory can help. Our digital marketing team is certified in HubSpot inbound marketing and content marketing, and we have a full service in-house creative team. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.