Let’s Get Visual: Five Tips to Visually Market Your Restaurant

In today’s world, it’s all about the visuals.

In restaurants especially, visual marketing is crucial in growing and maintaining a customer base, and keeping them hungry for more. How can you make the most of your restaurant’s visual presence? 

Create #Food 

As of the time of this writing, there are well over 170 million posts on Instagram under #food, and over 75 million posts to #foodporn. And that number will only continue to grow. People are increasingly choosing restaurants to visit based on their social media presence, and just as many are taking pics of the food they order and posting it online. The way your food looks online is incredibly important.

Choose a selection of your top dishes, and hire a professional food photographer to take the shots, and share them on your website and social media platforms. Sharing photos on social media can be a great way to advertise new dishes, drink or food specials, upcoming events and more. 

Maximize Your Space

If your walls could talk, what would they say? The interior and exterior of your restaurant space is filled with opportunities for further cementing your brand and engaging customers. Get creative with your space: hire an artist to paint a visually stunning mural, hang chalkboards on the walls or use erasable decals to list daily specials or list your social media hashtags on the front of your menus. Try floor decals pointing customers towards the restrooms, artistic window signage that advertises happy hour specials or badges and customized t-shirts for staff to wear that support your brand.

Brand Your Vehicle

If you have a delivery vehicle, or even if it’s your own personal vehicle, don’t miss this opportunity to take your restaurant’s message on the road with you. Use bumper stickers or decals to advertise your restaurant’s name, number and website, or hire an artist to create an image that will make an impact on people on the street. 

Give Them a Little Something

Offering customers mints with the bill is a standard nicety for restaurants, but offering specialized branded swag to customers is another way to make them feel valued and increase your brand presence.

Making stickers of your company logo available to customers can be an incredibly effective marketing tool – it doesn’t cost much, they will remember it as a unique gift, and will likely either share the stickers with friends, or slap them on a space where others will see, such as bumpers, walls, cellphones, laptops and bags. The Canadian store Smoke’s Poutinerie ran a guerrilla marketing campaign using stickers and social media to build a veritable poutine empire throughout the city for minimal cost.

Dress Up the To-Go Box

Many restaurants offer standard white styrofoam boxes and plastic or paper bags for delivery and to-go items. But these are a chance to surprise your customers with creatively-designed packaging that shows you pay attention to the details. Set yourself apart from the competition with branded boxes and bags that are visually pleasing, as well as useful. These are a great place to put your restaurant’s website, social media hashtags, or any other information you want your customers to take with them.