To successfully market your restaurant in today's world, it's crucial to meet consumers where they spend their time—their phones. This means enhancing your mobile marketing strategies to make discovering and ordering from your restaurant a breeze.

Below, you'll find practical advice and tools designed to kick-start this process and boost your digital presence, ensuring your eatery stands out in a mobile-centric world.

What does mobile marketing mean?

It's all about reaching your audience through their most personal devices—smartphones, tablets, and beyond. Imagine your restaurant popping up via websites that look great on any screen, through timely text messages, engaging social media posts, and instant push notifications.

The Importance for Restaurants: Think about it; mobile devices are like extensions of ourselves these days. With a staggering 81% of diners searching for eateries on these devices and 75% making choices based on what they find, not being visible on mobile means missing a huge slice of the pie.

Starting Point: Reflect on your own mobile usage—browsing, app checking, texting. This personal insight is golden for shaping a mobile marketing approach that resonates with your audience.

Let’s dive into three of the best tactics for making your restaurant's presence felt in the mobile world, right where your customers are:

1. Make Your Restaurant Website Mobile-Friendly

Studies show that the majority of web traffic on restaurant websites comes from mobile users, underscoring the importance of a mobile-friendly site experience. 48% of users reported getting annoyed or frustrated when restaurants don’t have mobile-friendly sites, causing them to leave the site for another. It might sound intimidating, but with the right tools, making a mobile-friendly site can be simple. For example, restaurants can get a premium website built by the experts at our official partner, ChowNow, complete with full ordering optimization as part of ChowNow Pro.

Make sure it’s responsive

A responsive website can recognize what type of device is being used and automatically adjust to its size, so the content is easy to view on any phone, tablet, or desktop. It can also help boost your search rankings, as Google and other search engines favor mobile-friendly sites over others.

Not sure which website-building platform to start with? Squarespace, BentoBox, Wix and Duda are just a few great options to look into.

Optimize for speed

Mobile users are typically less patient than those on a desktop device. A delay of just a few seconds can lead to potential customers abandoning your site for good. To make your site faster, compress images, avoid videos with large file sizes, and leverage browser caching.

Google has a free tool called PageSpeed that can identify parts of your site that make it slow. You can also use a free tool like Tinify to compress your larger images and videos.

Streamline navigation and content

Think of this as an extension of speed. Users don’t want to waste time navigating your site to find what they’re looking for. Thinking minimally can really help your design and speed up the time it takes for diners to order. Large buttons that standout and a simple website menu that’s easy to find can help boost orders and ticket sizes.

Not sure where to start? Our friends at ChowNow can help restaurants optimize their sites with order buttons, imagery, and more. Learn more here!

2. Create Your Own Ordering App

Developing a custom ordering app isn't reserved for the big players alone. In fact, numerous small and independent eateries are jumping on the app bandwagon, enjoying double the order volumes as a result (you read that right, restaurants with their own branded apps see a 2x increase in orders!).

It might seem daunting, but there are services tailored to streamline this process, offering to build and launch your branded iOS and Android apps using just your basic restaurant details. Our friends at ChowNow need nothing more than the basics (i.e. your menu, logo, pricing, hours, etc.) to create your own custom branded iOS and/or Android app. Once your app is live, strategic marketing can encourage your customers to start placing orders through it.

Link to your restaurant app everywhere

Update your social media bios to include a link to your app. Send out emails that tell diners about your app and encourage them to download. You can also create flyers and posters to hang up inside your dining room, so customers know that your app is the best way to order while they’re on the go. Basically whenever you mention online ordering, drive diners to your app.

If you don’t want to do it all yourself, ChowNow can do it for you. Mobile apps, automated emails, and print marketing are all included in the ChowNow Pro suite.

Send push notifications to diners

Once diners download your app, you can use push notifications to boost orders and increase ticket sizes. Create a calendar of events or important days for your restaurant, and send notifications to drive orders on those days. You can also send offers and deals, promote new menu items and specials, or just keep diners updated on hours, delivery options, and more. Think of it as your restaurant’s very own marketing channel.

ChowNow can create push campaigns just for your restaurant, so you can drive more orders without lifting a finger.

3. Start a Restaurant Text Marketing Campaign

Texting is the most used form of communication for people under 50. Virtually all text messages are seen and read within minutes. As such, it’s an easy channel for restaurants to grab the attention of hungry diners. But first, you need a group of people that you can text. Here’s how to get started.

Harvest your diner data

When you process orders, your system captures data about your customers. This can include their names, order history, emails, and phone numbers. You can use the data to build a contact list to start your text marketing campaigns. Here are good places to start:

Point-of-sale: Most restaurants have no idea how valuable all their POS data can be. It’s the first place you should check when harvesting data.

Online ordering platform: Unlike dine-in orders, every online order you process captures important information about your diners. Don’t forget to check there.

Leveraging the data stored in your Point of Sale and Online Ordering platforms to start a text club has never been easier than it is with the Boostly X ChowNow integration. This seamless integration allows restaurateurs to automatically collect the needed info, send text messages, and measure the impact to orders without lifting a finger!

Optimize your restaurant website for data

Your website is also a great place to capture customer data. A simple way to get data is to create a popup window that collects customer information and drives diners to opt into text messages. Many website builders like Squarespace allow you to build your own popups. However, we've created a popup specifically for restaurants Boostly has a special tool that helps restaurants build and optimize popups, too.

Launch multiple diner campaigns

Once you’ve captured your data, it’s time to build your campaigns. Here are some simple ideas to increase reviews, drive orders, and boost revenue:

Order campaigns: Text marketing is a great way to drive diners to order more food more often. For example, you can offer customers a discount on larger orders to increase average order size. You can send out offers during typically slow times to bring in more traffic. If there’s a big game coming up, you can reach out ahead of time so diners can get their party favors from you. Like your push notifications, create a calendar of important dates and build text campaigns around them. The opportunities are endless.

Review campaigns: We all know that good reviews are essential for restaurants. With text marketing, you can reach out to diners who recently ordered and ask them to give you a review. Plus, it’s a great way to stay connected to customers and manage feedback that can improve your business.

Informational campaigns: Don’t forget to update customers on any changes to your business. If your hours have changed or there’s a new dish on your menu, send a text to let customers know. That way, you can stay top-of-mind next time they’re hungry.

Nobody does restaurant text marketing than Boostly. This is what we were built for! One of our specialties is building custom text campaigns that help restaurants drive more orders, reach new diners, and boost revenue. Just take a look at how Renegade Burrito increased their average orders by 167% with Boostly and ChowNow.

4. LEVERAGE QR CODES FOR YOUR RESTAURANT WEBSITE OR APP

QR codes make it easy to open links on phones. Customers simply point their camera at the QR code, and they can get a link to your website or app. You can put QR codes anywhere. Make a poster with a QR code and place it in high-traffic areas, so customers can get the link as they walk by. Send out flyers with a QR code to tell locals where to find you online. You can even put one on your receipts, so every diner can get a link to your mobile ordering option!

Our friends at ChowNow can even help you create restaurant marketing materials with QR codes that are proven to drive more orders. Additionally, you can also get free QR codes from Canva and many other online resources.

Get ready for mobile orders

When it comes to mobile marketing for restaurants, the opportunities are endless. With the right tools, you can optimize your channels for diners on the go and drive countless mobile orders. Keep it simple, get creative, and try different campaigns to find what works. If you need any help, book a demo below and one of our restaurant marketing specialists will show you how to driving more orders and revenue is just a step away!