How to create an influencer marketing campaign for your restaurant

Influencer marketing can be a powerful tool for any business but that value is amplified in a competitive market like the restaurant industry.

Skip the article and turn takeaways into action by scheduling a call with our team.

The awareness dilemma

As a restaurant owner, you’ve likely kissed hundreds of babies and shaken thousands of hands, but for the most part, your restaurant still has an awareness issue. So, what’s the best way for a restaurant to become influential? To borrow influence.

In this guide, we’re going to focus on helping you recruit brand ambassadors with massive networks that will gladly share your restaurant with their audience. We’ll be building an influencer marketing campaign for your restaurant, a strategy you can use to:

• Determine who already has access to your future customers
• Recruit brand ambassadors
• Massively scale awareness for your restaurant

In today’s market, your potential guests are drowning in Facebook ads and there are new restaurants opening every single week. But by the end of this post, you’ll have the 4 tools needed to build awareness in your community by leveraging the networks of the people and businesses around you.

Marketing, at its core, is building relationships. And an essential element of any successful relationship is trust. And building trust takes time. And time is money. The solution is finding and recruiting brand advocates, but there are many pitfalls to this strategy.

3 big mistakes to avoid when working with brand advocates:

1. Focusing on influencers outside of their own community
2. Trying to buy influence instead of building partnerships
3. Not controlling the conversation influencers are having with our potential customers

Making these mistakes will cost you your most valuable asset: time. One thing that unites all restaurant owners and operators is that we are all in a constant state of improvement. Focusing our attention on improving the things that create the greatest impact in our businesses gets us further faster. When looking to scale influence within our communities, there are four simple steps to follow.

The 4 keys to establishing influence

Identify True Influencers

• Who are your regulars? The people that support you weekly can easily influence their friends, family and colleagues to bring you more business.
• Then look to your vendors. Liquor companies, vendors and local farms all have employees and most have a loyal following on social media.
• Look to other chefs and beverage directors in your community. Who could you collab with to access their audience?
• What about retail stores in the neighborhood?
• What about every office building around your restaurant?
• How many apartment complexes are within 2 miles of your restaurant?
• How many hotels are there?

Use the template below to make a list of the top candidates in each category and reach out directly to them.

Show, Not Tell

Once you find a point of contact, it’s not about going to them to make your case, it’s about having them come to you so that you can share the experience of your restaurant with them. Have them bring a friend. Comp everything. Make sure they have the time of their life. Now you don’t need to pay for access to their audience, you’ve already won their trust.

Work Together to Come Up with a Lure

They know their people better than we ever could so having them help craft the promotion or event is vital.

Provide Them with the Tools

We need to provide our brand ambassadors with the verbiage and the marketing materials they need to help sell our restaurant to their audience. This includes things like social media posts, flyers, and email templates. By equipping them with the right tools, they can easily share information about our restaurant with their network, which in turn helps to drive awareness and revenue for our business.

Look at this as an extension of the table touches you’re doing already. Building relationships with brand ambassadors is a powerful way to scale awareness and drive revenue for your restaurant. Using the template below, you can identify the true influencers in your community, build relationships with them, collaborate to create promotions and events that resonate with their audience, and empower them with the tools they need to effectively share information about your restaurant with their network. With the right approach, you can attract dozens of local brand ambassadors who will talk to hundreds of people per week about your restaurant, ultimately driving top-line revenue for your business.

Want a simple way to level up your restaurant operations? Yelp Guest Manager, a software solution that allows customers to check themselves in, handles waitlists and reservations, and much more.

Restaurants that start using Yelp Guest Manager experience up to twice the traffic on their Yelp Business Page.* Get a demo today!

Fill out the form to get Josh’s influencer marketing campaign template