Partnering with Food Bloggers
No matter where you live, every community now seems to contain countless influencers. While these influencers have a strong reach with local audiences, they also can attract travelers to your restaurant. A growing number of people are using platforms like Instagram to help them make travel decisions. Creating partnerships with local and regional food bloggers is a great way to ensure that you are in front of your ideal audience. Here are some tips for working with food bloggers and how to make the most of it!
Invite them to dine with you
You can start by reaching out to food bloggers and offering them a complimentary meal for giving you a visit and dining at your restaurant. This would be an informal arrangement that you would utilize to begin a positive relationship with them. By inviting them in and giving them a chance to speak with you, they are more likely to think of your restaurant favorably.
Host an event or giveaway
If informal isn’t for you, take it up a notch and try a more formal approach. To create engagement around their content and accounts, some food bloggers host events and meetups. Offer the food blogger to have the event hosted at your restaurant. Not only will you generate revenue, but you will likely also get new customers drawn in for the first time.
Another option would be to do a joint giveaway. Influencers love to do giveaways as a way to engage their followers and get more exposure. Create mutually beneficial word of mouth by giving the influencer something to giveaway to a follower. Make sure that the rules of the giveaway are clear, and stipulate that anyone who wants to enter must follow both your page and the influencer’s page!
If you do a giveaway, don’t be afraid to get creative with it. Instead of just offering a gift card, try offering a gift card in a basket with some of your house wine and swag with your logo on it. Think about the message you want to convey on social media. Are you fun and kid friendly? Include a play kit for kids. Pet-friendly? Include a branded dog bowl! Your options are endless.
Sign a contract with a promotional agreement
For those who like formal agreements, you can create a contract for the influencer to sign with an agreement on how many posts and how frequently they will post about you. In doing this, the influencer would send you all content to approve before they post it, and you would pay them or offer dine-in credit for their services. This can be a great option if you are promoting a new feature menu or holiday event at your restaurant that you want more foot traffic for. By getting control of the message, you are able to dictate what the promotions are, and can use that as part of an overall marketing strategy.
Still lost on influencers? We can help! Sherane Chen LLC has a team of marketing experts that can help you create influencers contracts and ideas. Contact us today or call (386) 627-3628 for a consultation!