Need tips to promote your cloud kitchen services or homemade food startup? This article will help you with marketing ideas for your food delivery business.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, food delivery apps were gaining in popularity as customers saw them as a way to manage their hectic schedules and enjoy different types of cuisines from different neighbouring restaurants.
During the pandemic, the global food ordering and delivery market boomed and is expected to grow further. This has opened up new avenues for local food startups, such as cloud kitchens or homemade food startups that don’t have a store presence.
What is the meaning of cloud kitchen? Also called a virtual restaurant, ghost kitchen, or dark kitchen, the cloud kitchen concept doesn’t require a real restaurant that one can visit.
A cloud kitchen, meaning a place where food is prepared and delivered, only takes orders through the phone, social messaging, or via food ordering apps that deliver the food to customers.
Today, a good home cook can also open their own homemade food startup, food truck, or cloud kitchen from home, as they don’t need a restaurant or cafe to deliver food to their customers.
Cloud kitchen companies and home food startups don’t like to rely on third-party platforms such as food delivery apps as they are too competitive and unprofitable for tiny cloud kitchens. So it is essential for them to promote themselves in the locality where they deliver food to their customers. Here are some step-by-step ideas for digital marketing for food businesses. Implement these ideas and successfully promote your cloud kitchen or homemade food startup.
1. Differentiation
Because food delivery apps have made it impossible to compete on price, it’s very important for local food startups to differentiate themselves from other cloud kitchen businesses or homemade food delivery services.
For instance, millennials are one of the most important demographics for food startups as they spend the highest percentage of their earnings on prepared food.
So if you want to target millennials, you need to know what sort of foods they like, what are the best ways to reach them, and how you can differentiate your food startup from others out there.
The best food startups differentiate themselves from other food businesses, not on price or with deep discounts, but by offering a specific type of cuisine or a way of experiencing their food, which brings us to the next step.
2. Specialization
Top food startups usually specialize in one type of food and try to be the best at it, such as a biryani cloud kitchen, fast-food startup, snack startup, pastry and chocolate startup, healthy food startup, sustainable food startup, or even a pani-puri startup.
This allows them to know the target market of their food business, understand their pain points, and exactly what they’re looking for, so they can offer it to them. Specialization allows you to stand out in an ocean of other food startups by understanding your customer and becoming the best at what you do.
3. High-quality creative
Because ordering food is a very visual experience, you’ll need high-quality creative images and graphics for content marketing for restaurants, cloud kitchens, or any type of food startup.
It’s worth investing in professionals, such as a professional photographer to photograph your food items, and a graphic designer to design your social media and other images, as the look of your marketing creative will impact your food sales.
A local digital marketing agency for restaurants should be able to provide you with the help you need to create attractive, high-quality marketing creative.
4. Excellent reviews
It’s very important to encourage (and incentivize, if required) your customers to send in reviews of your food. Customer reviews will provide social proof and boost sales.
Video reviews are even better, as they can be used in your cloud restaurant video marketing and restaurant advertising campaigns on social media. But don’t wait for your customers to review your food.
Ask them to send you their video reviews and get their permission to share them on social media channels yourself. If possible, offer them a discount coupon on their next order in exchange for their review.
5. Social media branding
Don’t forget to create a social media presence on all the important social media channels. Google and Facebook, in particular, offer many local marketing tools for food startups to create visibility and get reviews.
Encourage your customers to post reviews of your cloud kitchen or homemade food startup on Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, OlaGate and other social networks. Also connect with them on WhatsApp and OGFood
You can even build a cloud kitchen website free of cost with these free website design tools from Google. But keep in mind static pages will just display your menu, while online order processing is an entirely different beast, for that you need a platform like OGFood. Here are some more local restaurant marketing ideas for cloud kitchen restaurants, and local food startups:
- Keep your social channels active by posting high-quality content and videos regularly.
- Post your food images and video reviews on Facebook and Instagram (and TikTok, if you have it).
- Engage with your community online and appreciate their feedback and comments.
- Join local Facebook groups and promote your menu and offers. You can find more tips on Facebook marketing for restaurants here.
- Create a loyalty program and use word-of-mouth marketing by giving your customers a referral code and offering them a discount for referring new customers. OGFood will come in handy for this.
- Set up Google alerts to know when someone mentions your food startup on social media, so you can engage with them.
- Get your food startup featured in local lifestyle, travel, and food blogs, and share your startup story with them.
- Implement influencer marketing for restaurants by contacting a local celebrity and asking them to promote your food startup on their social media channels.
- Download the OGFood app and use the built-in digital marketing tools to post on Facebook and Instagram right from the app.
These local marketing ideas for restaurants are free and will boost your online visibility. Digital marketing for restaurants is not hard, but it’s important to be consistent with your marketing efforts.
If necessary, you can pay a restaurant digital marketing agency that offers online marketing for restaurants and food startups to help you stay consistent with your promotions. Download the OGFood app and get more marketing ideas for food delivery businesses, cloud-based kitchens, and food and beverage startups.
