How to market your vegan restaurant

Standing out from the crowd in a particularly saturated market can be a difficult task. You need to ensure that your brand is unique, entices consumers in and leaves you having a fantastic reputation. With the importance of marketing and social media, if you’re not utilising these platforms to create exposure, you’re falling behind the competition. The world of hospitality is moving fast, so thinking ahead is crucial. In order to do this, you’ll need to focus on the marketing of your business and the key strategies you can put in place to grow. The team at VerriBerri PR and marketing have put together their top tips on how you can market your vegan restaurant. Social media In a digital world, social media is a must if you want to get your name out there. Many users look to social media as the first point of contact to see whether they’d be interested in dining at your restaurant. Photo sharing platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have become more business led in recent years and have given you the tools to reach a wider audience. For a restaurant, in particular, Instagram is a must have. You need to create a theme that not only captures your audience’s attention but gets them engaged. Picking a particular colour, shot type or layout will help you stand out. After all, new visitors to your page will judge your restaurant on the first nine images they see, and it’s whether or not you can keep them scrolling. Running social media competitions is also a great way to involve audience members. Offering the chance for them to win a voucher or experience helps spread the word and if they’re liking and commenting on posts, your engagement will grow heavily. As the vegan movement has an ever increasing following, utilising social media influencers is a must. It’s rare to find a company now who aren’t paying influencers to promote their brand, and so if you want to grow, you need to take note. Either by paying influencers to post or perhaps inviting them down for a free meal, with the hopes that they’ll post about your restaurant, it’s all fantastic exposure. Public relations and SEO Press exposure is a must in so many ways for your brand. Not only does it help get your name into both big and industry-specific publications, but it helps with your SEO or Google rankings. With a marketing team pitching engaging and quirky articles to publications, you’ll be able to offer expert opinions for readers to see. As your articles become published, backlinks help improve your SEO. This means, your restaurant begins to move up the Google searches, helping more visitors find your site. After highlighting the keywords and terms that users would search for, i.e. 'Vegan Restaurant in Essex', you can create a list of the top ones. By adding a blog page to your site, you can write engaging content that also highlights and includes these keywords, again helping you move up in the Google rankings system. Running a campaign for the launch of your restaurant or perhaps celebrating a special milestone, allows for the opportunity to invite journalists to cover the opening. This is fantastic for the local press where individuals in the area can become more aware of your brand. Event organisation Much like running a campaign, hosting an event, particularly in the hospitality industry, is a must. A marketing team will be able to reach out to the right contacts both inviting journalists down to cover it, as well as inviting vegan bloggers to report on their experience. Bloggers are a crucial element to event organising as their audience are those interested in the same topics. Another element to add to your event is the use of goody bags. Contacting local brands to ask if they’d like to supply their products to make up small goody bags creates fantastic exposure when your bloggers and influencers are posting about them. Not only does it create a great relationship between you and the local brands, but it helps raise awareness for all. By hospitality marketing experts, VB Hospitality