How Restaurants Are Marketing Themselves During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Like many businesses and industries, restaurants are finding it necessary to improvise, adapt, and overcome in order to stay in business during the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes changing up their marketing strategies. What are some different things restaurants are doing to market themselves during the pandemic?

Sharing Expertise

Many restaurants are reaching out to customers and sharing their expertise with consumers. Some are posting cooking tips and recipes on blogs. Other tactics include offering cooking classes and how-to videos on their sites. This helps generate web traffic and cultivates interest in the business and its products and brand. Even typically successful businesses such as Disney have done this. Disney has shared recipes such as their dole whip, churro bites, three cheese grilled sandwich, and tonga toast recipes. If you're concerned about how this will impact the demand for your products, you probably don't need to worry much. Convenience is one of the reasons people like to eat out, and they won't get that if they have to do it themselves at home.

Communicating Dining Options

If consumers aren't aware of what dining options are available at a restaurant, they won't be able to take advantage of them. This is part of why open communication with your customers is so important. Signs, notices on websites, and notifications in emails and apps can help accomplish this. Many restaurants have expanded the dining options they offer to patrons, offering curbside pickup, online ordering, and delivery options where previously dine-in and takeout may have been the only ones to choose from. Restaurants may have been limited to serving customers outside of their restaurant, but that's slowly changing, provided they follow capacity and distancing restrictions. Restaurants offering dine-in services are using different methods that promote social distancing. This helps keep everyone safe and allows restaurants to continue to offer dine-in service as an option.

Bolstering Health-Conscious Practices

In addition to communicating dining options as they expand, restaurants are also marketing their efforts to protect the health of their employees and customers. This includes notifying consumers of social distancing expectations and policies, as well as steps that are being taken to improve cleanliness and sanitation procedures. By letting consumers know what you're doing to protect their health and safety, you're also letting them know that you're aware of current circumstances and care about them.

Restaurants have been adjusting their practices to market themselves into better positions during the pandemic. They are sharing their expertise, expanding service options, and placing greater priority on health-conscious practices. By marketing themselves in these ways they improve their appeal to consumers, which can result in more business as well as repeat business.

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