Dealing with New Trends of Social Media Marketing

In the business ecosystem it is important to run businesses on partnerships be it restaurants own employee or partnering with a third-party, collaboration is important part of running a restaurant.  With this, the concept of restaurant influencer marketing has emerged as the easier way of attracting and engaging with customers. Many restaurants have started to actively engage with micro influencers such as food bloggers and restaurant reviewers. It is cheaper as compared to the traditional forms of marketing, targets the right customer base, and is high on results. Here are key pointers on how social media influencers are playing a very vital role in today’s time when it comes to marketing.

The Changing Face of Marketing:  Marketing a restaurant has changed quite a bit when we talk about pre-social media era and now social media era. It has become little more affordable to move away from conventional advertising. However, going forward partnering or using bloggers gives you that instant reach which initially was missing. “A restaurant really didn’t know how it is going to penetrate with conventional advertising earlier. However, some brands or outlets are positioned in a way where you need to reach out to specific audience that’s where the bloggers come in and really help you out,” said Kushagra Nagrath, Senior VP, Lite Bite Foods.

Product is the Key: One very important thing is that if you want to send a particular message as a product or your restaurant wants to reach to very specific audience. That’s something that social media influencers can really help you with. “As a marketer I would never ever discount what the product is because marketing is just a channel to reach out to people to tell them that the product exists. But at the same time when people start coming into a restaurant, they start tasting the food and they will come back only for food because the ambience you can see once and absorb it but if you have to go back to a place it’s because of the food, the experience, the drinks etc. The way of communicating has evolved much more,” shared Vineet Arora, Head Marketing, First Fiddle Restaurants.

Engaging with Community: “I think today consumers are short on time and they are overwhelmed with the information. So, just me or the brand coming up with a communication is not enough,” pointed Moksh Chopra, CMO, KFC India. People are seeking shortcuts on information if that’s worth a while and that’s where the influencers have kicked in and people have micro passions now. “We engage with them on the forefront. We called it FACE. F is for food; we work with them if we want to launch some new products or want to show people how KFC kitchen operates. We invite influencers to come into our kitchen, walk in, they see the experiences themselves and they discover that how the KFC food, processes are so stringent and rigorous that anything that we hear from a brand perspective is actually false. A is about activation and we do lots of program around consumer passion. So, last month we launched a merchandise range so we did merchandise instead of advertising for the same. We partnered with fashion bloggers to come and talk about it. FACE for us is food, activation, community and engagement,” he added.