How to promote your restaurant delivery & takeaway
Our beloved hospitality industry of pubs, hotels and restaurants have entered un-chartered territory and leveraging digital marketing has never been so important to promote takeaway services to survive and thrive post COVID-19.
As our clients, and the broader industry, grapples with the ‘new normal’, we have put together a guide of how to leverage the channels you already have and the new opportunities to promote your business that have sprung up in recent weeks.
What’s the plan going forward:
- Social Media – How to change your approach
- Where to list your takeaway
- Local Facebook Groups
- Online ordering
Use your existing Facebook and Instagram channels to run sponsored ads in the delivery or pick up area of your venue. Our top tips for running these ads are:
- Take some photos of your takeaway on your iPhone and set up a carousel ad to showcase different menu dishes in an appetising way.
- Distribute these through remarketing audiences – that is your existing customers. You can upload your customer database, target people who’ve engaged with your posts in the last 90 days or people who’ve visited the menu page of your website (if you have a pixel installed)
- Geo-target the ad to within 3km (or more or less) with geo-fencing to ensure you are reaching people within your target area
Photography from The Oaks Chicken Shop Takeaway shoot
#2. Where to list your takeaway
The COVID-19 crisis has seen a surge of savvy media, entrepreneurs and good people try to help venues to promote their takeaway offerings. There are new PR opportunities across Sydney to help get broad exposure for your takeaway. These include:
- Saving Plates, founded by Sydney-based food writer Tristen Lutze, is a new site to list delivery specials; takeaway offers and any existing delivery partnerships with Uber Eats or Deliveroo. Papaya is excited to be supporting this fantastic initiative through leveraging the team’s skills in website and graphic design to help continue the great work of this project.
- Popular online publications such as Broadsheet, Urban List, Concrete Playground, TimeOut, Delicious and Eat Drink Play are responding positively to this pandemic, regularly sharing information around local businesses and new food and delivery offers across the country. The contact details of each publication are on the website
- TimeOut has rebranded to TimeIn and are proactively looking for experiences that people can do at home.
When thinking about your takeaway or delivery concept, think of the ‘hook’ that makes it different. For example, Papaya’s client The Oaks Neutral Bay is launching a pop-up butcher with cuts of meat at local butcher prices allowing locals to ‘avoid the supermarket queues’. This has since been featured in a raft of online trend media outlets.
#3. Local Facebook Groups
If you’ve never been active in your suburb’s local community Facebook group now’s the time. Facebook Groups have a way more favourable algorithm when it comes to showing content than a business page, so your posts will be seen by more people for free.
These are groups run by members of that community on a volunteer basis. Top tips for posting include the following:
- Tell your story – people want to help local businesses they care about so tell your genuine story to the group and ask for their support
- Read the rules – Ensure that you read the group rules (usually pinned to the top of the page) before posting
- Get your friends, staff and family to like or comment on the post. The more people engage with the post the more people within the group will see it
FYI – posting in groups is free – yay!
#4. Online Ordering
To facilitate online ordering, think about an ecommerce plug in to support take away options on your existing website. If you’re on a WordPress site, you have a whole raft of options open to you including WooCommerce which has plugins available such as WooFood and WooRrestaurant, both designed for the hospitality sector and at a very low cost.
SquareSpace is also an easy to build website platform requiring little technical knowledge with a good looking interface, so if you need to start from scratch because of your current website limitations, you could do so fairly easily with this platform.
The next few months are about ‘getting through’, and while there’s so much going on operationally, beware of neglecting marketing. If you leave that to lull, your takeaway initiative may fall flat and you may reopen to tumbleweeds rather than crowds on the other side.
For more information on hospitality marketing services for the hotels industry please visit or reach out to us to chat.