How to Create Appetizing Food Content and How to Tell Your Restaurant’s Story to Sell Well
A lot of restaurants tend to think that online marketing through social media means just posting pictures of food and announcing promotions and recommended dishes. However, if you do this, customers will think your page is a regular advertisement page and, of course, nobody really wants to look at advertisement. Today, MHA is going to introduce you to content marketing techniques for restaurants that include storytelling, which will make customers want to follow and visit your restaurant even more.
- Why Do You Need to Tell a Story About Your Restaurant?
- How Do You Start Telling Your Restaurant’s Story?
- What Stories About Your Restaurant Should You Tell and How Should You Tell It to Make People Want to Read It?
Why Do You Need to Tell a Story About Your Restaurant?
- You can make your restaurant really stand out from other restaurants. Although the pictures you take, the color tones you choose and the logo or identity of your restaurant that you include in the pictures you’re promoting on social media already set you apart, telling a good story will give your customers a clear understanding of what sets you apart and get to know your restaurant more.
- Psychologically speaking, people like to talk to other people more than machines or automated systems. By telling a story, it’s like you’re simulating a conversation between your restaurant and your target customer group. It’s the first step toward interacting or creating a good relationship with the customers.
- A good story teller always draws people in to listen to their restaurant’s news and promotions without making the customers feel like a sale is being forced on them. That means your restaurant’s content will become a content that customers will always open, leading to liking and sharing to considerably increase the number of people your content reaches.
How Do You Start Telling Your Restaurant’s Story?
- Characteristics: Try thinking, “If my restaurant was a person, what kind of person would it be?” For example, “Hometown-Loving Som Tam Restaurant”. Build an honest, straightforward character for your restaurant. Creating a character helps you to confidently build the core, mood and style of your storytelling for your restaurant’s image and if the character you’ve created communicates well with the customers, you can use it in your future designs, such as your restaurant’s mascot and logo.
Tip: If you can’t figure out what kind of character you should use, consider using the restaurant owner’s character for the restaurant. Otherwise, you could use certain aspects of the owner’s character or consider using your main customer group for the character.
- Key Message: For each content you create, the message should be in the same main direction. Setting a main direction for all your contents means establishing the restaurant’s key message, for example, a restaurant whose outstanding point is a specific recipe passed down from generation to generation can tell stories about the restaurant and the recipe’s history. Tell stories about the old days or maybe some stories about the present, but you must not go as far as to tell the stories in the modern style like modern restaurants. It would make the character a little off in the eyes of the customers. A good key message, when read, should make you feel:
- That’s right! That’s how this restaurant is.
- That really hit the spot! That’s what customers want from the restaurant.
The key message should be short, concise and to-the-point and it should do a good job at representing the restaurant’s identity.
Tip: If you polish your key message and make it more attractive, you’ll get your restaurant’s slogan, caption and #Hashtag for use in future contents. You can just make it your restaurant’s slogan, killing two birds with one stone.
- Creating the Storytelling Mood and Style: The mood and style will determine the language style used in the storytelling and how the restaurant’s identity is conveyed in its own style. Usually, a fun, warm and casual style is used or some restaurants might have their own style or you could play along with the current popular memes. As a result, each story told is enjoyable and funny with some jokes but is still related to the restaurant.
Tip: Thais love to have fun! Telling a funny story or making readers laugh can reach more readers. However, you don’t always have to make your stories funny. It depends on the story you want to present.
- Creating a Schedule for When You Want to Post What Kind of Content: You could schedule the storytelling for 1-2 stories a week at your convenience. In any case, you can learn more about that in Did You Launch a Restaurant Page but Don’t Know What to Post?
What Stories About Your Restaurant Should You Tell and How Should You Tell Them to Make People Want to Read?
- You can try starting with one of your restaurant’s menu item, especially a signature dish. Try talking about the ingredients, cooking methods and how to eat it to get the best flavor. The more you talk about the attention that goes into this menu item so every customer will get the best food from the restaurant and the more you describe the flavor, the more interesting it makes the story.
Content Format: It should be a photo album or a short video clip of the menu item with a caption of no more than 250 – 300 words.
Storytelling Style: It depends on each restaurant’s storytelling style, but do try to describe things in a way that one can imagine them even if they weren’t presented in the picture such as the flavor, aroma and other senses. Your language could be a little bit overly dramatic to make reading more enjoyable.
Example: (Here examples will be provided in a table about how to create content with descriptions.)
- You Can Tell a Story about How the Restaurant Came to Exist: A lot of people wonder how they can tell a story about a restaurant that doesn’t have a long history or any story at all. Actually, you can create a story from many elements such as what the owner used to do before opening the restaurant and what interests they have that made them open the restaurant as well as what concept they have for running the restaurant. Or, if there’s no history, look ahead and you can use that as the restaurant’s story, for example, the restaurant’s goal or the happiness you want to share with your customers.
Content Format: Pictures of the owner or founder, old pictures of the restaurant, current pictures of the restaurant, the restaurant’s sign and the restaurant’s signature angles can be used to accompany the story, which contains no more than 250 – 300 words, depending on the format.
Storytelling Style: If it’s a restaurant that’s been passed down from generation to generation, use a narrative style mixed with descriptions of how the deliciousness was passed down and mention customers from the past to the present. Or, if it’s a new restaurant, tell a story about the restaurant’s background and the main points that make the restaurant unique.
Example:
- Facts about Food, Especially the Restaurant’s Menu Items: You can tell stories about the benefits of each menu item or ingredients and how the ingredients’ background. This type of storytelling makes readers want to read more about it because they get useful info from your content. In this part, you can tell a long story or make the content short and accompanied by pictures so you can increase the frequency of your posting for each week.
Content Format: Infographics or related-images with a caption of no more than 250 – 300 words. However, if you use infographics, you can reduce the content and link it to the restaurant’s menu.
Storytelling Style: -Did you know? -Things people often misunderstand…. -Benefits from……. This style of storytelling offers useful information with references from reliable sources. However, don’t make it too technical. Use the same kind of mood and style but add a little formality. Don’t forget to add references by adding the links to your information sources.
Example:
It’s probably not too difficult to tell stories about your restaurant and menu. As for the stories in the three major categories we recommended, you can break down the content into chapters or create a lot more related content. Actually, there are a lot of content you can use for your storytelling such as festivals, beliefs and current events. Even anniversaries can be used as a story for your restaurant.
Nonetheless, don’t forget that the purpose of storytelling is to create a form of content marketing with the goal of promoting your restaurant to get it known. Therefore, don’t forget to link the content to your restaurant and menu or you can add food ordering information at the end of the content. You can come back and learn more about online marketing content from MHA in our next article.
Images from: Facebook: อีเหมียวปีนตู้กับข้าว (E Meow Peen Tu Kab Khao, or Cat Climbing on the Pantry