How to Market a Restaurant Opening in New Orleans

How to Market a Restaurant Opening in New Orleans and Succeed

New Orleans is famous for its dining scene, offering everything from regional cajun cooking to some of the country’s most authentic Vietnamese cuisine, and everything else in between. Over the past year alone, dozens of new restaurants have opened their doors in New Orleans with varying degrees of success. However, due to a consistently rising boom in tourism, paired with a national trend of decreases in restaurant profits, restaurants are finding it more difficult to handle competition, attract new customers, and develop a consistent clientele. In New Orleans, creating and opening a successful restaurant requires more than having a good concept, quality ingredients, exceptional service, and so on. There are many methods for how to market a restaurant opening in New Orleans, but applying an encompassing, multi-tiered marketing strategy is the best means for ensuring a restaurant stand outs and succeeds amid hundreds of well-established peers.

Any successful restaurant opening should include the following marketing and communications strategies and tactics:

Content Marketing 

In today’s culinary climate, successful restaurants are more than good food and service. To attract and retain customers, a restaurant’s content (website, social media, newsletters, videos, photography) must be visually appealing and high quality, intriguing, and motivate observers to become customers. Take the time to get professional photography of pictures, and amazing video of your chef telling the food’s story to create the most engaging content from the start.

Social Media 

Social media is a valuable marketing tool that can be particularly useful in targeting and engaging millennials and young adults. In addition to sharing images and videos of a restaurant’s food, staff, and decor, social media allows restaurants to build meaningful relationships with customers. By posting beautiful images of food & drink, your customers will share the images and do your advertising for you!

Public Relations

No restaurant opening is successful without an extensive public relations strategy. It may seem obvious, but without proper notification and press coverage the public will have no idea that a restaurant is opening or that it even exists. PR agencies are experts at navigating the press environment and targeting and pitching media movers and shakers. Press releases, social media features, blog writing, event listings, and media outreach and coordination are all valuable services that most restaurants simply do not have the time to undertake themselves, but are necessary if you want a successful launch.

Digital Advertising

Excellent content, public relations activities, and quality social media are not the only measures that can help distinguish your restaurant above the rest. Effective Pay-per-click advertising campaigns and

People are frequently searching for new restaurants in the city. Optimized PPC campaigns can get your new restaurant in front of users search for “new restaurants” or “just opened restaurants” right when those users are making their dining decisions.

Search engines aren’t the only places for paid ads. Sponsored, promotional social media posts provide additional targeted exposure for your restaurant. You can use the demographic targeting available on social networks to reach extremely specific audiences. For example:

• Foodies
• Who frequently attend Facebook events
• Of a certain age
• That live in 70130

This kind of micro-targeting provides for results that no other form of advertising even comes close to matching.

Need Help Covering Yourself?

The years of using interns to handle digital marketing are over. In the digital age, a full-scale digital onslaught of restaurant promotion can make the different between closing up shop in your first twelve months, or looking for a second location to open.

Online Optimism’s experienced team has developed and implemented numerous marketing projects for clients, restaurants included, with great success. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can build a comprehensive marketing campaign for your restaurant’s opening and day-to-day business.