Many restaurants don’t have a restaurant website yet. If you are one of them, you may be wondering why you would want the extra expense and hassle of owning one. In reality, it might cost you more not to have one.
Reason 1 – Without a Restaurant Website, You are Losing Out on Customers
Everyone knows advertising is expensive, but necessary. If you don’t advertise, hardly anyone will find your restaurant. This is just like owning a website for your restaurant. If you can’t be found online, many people who would have been your customers will go to your competitors instead.
More and more of your customers expect to find you online today. According to one survey, even before Covid hit the US, more than 70% of restaurant customers were looking online at restaurant websites before deciding to become a patron.
Restaurant Dive
A website can serve many functions. You can think of the front page like a sign, as it welcomes customers and introduces your brand. By collecting and showing customer reviews on your website, you can show that your restaurant is popular and highlight areas you’ve been known to excel at. You can help more customers find your website by creating search engine-friendly content. By adding buttons to your website for emailing or posting links to your website pages, you allow customers to help promote your business when they like what they see.
As you can see, there are many ways your restaurant website can help you advertise online. Having a website allows you to draw in new and old customers in multiple different ways, so you don’t need to worry about missed opportunities.
Reason 2 – Your Restaurant’s Website Will Make Serving Your Customers Easier
One of the easiest ways you can make coming into your restaurant easier for your customers is to have an online menu. With an online menu, you can highlight some of your best-selling dishes, or just showcase the items that don’t frequently change. It’s important to avoid just using a PDF menu on your website, as search engines won’t be able to rank your website based on your menu in that case.
Another easy way to help your customers order from you is to put a contact form or instant chat option on your website. By answering questions up front, you encourage visitors to become paying customers, and it helps you eliminate issues before they occur.
Other ways you can use your website to make your life and your customers’ lives easier is to allow them to reserve a seat or order online. For example, if your restaurant is hard to get into, customers might appreciate being able to specify where they want to sit, in addition to reserving a table, without having to use the phone. On the other hand, if your restaurant offers food to go, you could allow customers to place their to-go orders online before they even come in. You can also offer special discounts to further encourage using the website, which will shorten the time your employees spend helping customers on the phone.
There are so many ways a restaurant website can make your life easier, from online orders, to collecting anonymous satisfaction surveys from your diners.
Reason 3 – A Restaurant Website Helps You Establish Brand Identity
Feelings are important to your customers. What if your restaurant looked and felt just like every other restaurant in town? Would customers remember dining there two, six months later? Maybe not. Your brand helps you to feel different from your competitors, which makes your restaurant more memorable. With a website, you can establish a specific style, showcase your logo, and tell your story, or in other words, present your own unique brand to potential customers.
With social media, your brand is limited to your logo, cover photo, and the content you share. You don’t get to decide what background the social media website uses on your customers’ screens, or even how much of an emphasis the social media website will put on the most important message you ever share with your customers. Instead, you just upload your logo, update your description, and keep adding new posts that align with your brand, hoping customers will notice you among the thousands of other restaurants out there.
While on social media you are much more limited to how you display yourself, on your own website you are free to control much more of what your customers see and experience. Here are some ways you can control your brand on your website:
- Logo Display
- Website Colors
- Font Choices
- Website Layout
- Images and Video
- Website Message or Story
- Use Fun and Engaging Animations
Unlock Future Growth
A website isn’t just one more thing you can do to help your restaurant grow, its a key element to your restaurant’s future growth! Don’t lose customers to other restaurants just because they can’t find you online, and don’t miss out on the opportunity to make your own and customers’ lives easier through careful feature choices on your website. Owning a website isn’t a requirement, its an amazing advantage. Contact me today to launch an amazing website!
