A strong restaurant reputation is crucial to attracting new customers and building a positive image in your location. A good reputation encourages customers to choose your venue over competitors. This increases revenue and solidifies your brand.
However, maintaining a positive restaurant reputation means more than simply offering the best food and services you can. In this complete guide, we will highlight the importance of restaurant reputation management, and share eight ways you can improve your business’s public image.
Restaurant reputation management is the continual process of maintaining a restaurant’s public perception across online and offline platforms. It involves addressing a restaurant's customer feedback and public opinions, as well as tracking reviews on Google and other social media services.
Managing a restaurant reputation can involve many different tasks, including:
For more information on managing customer perceptions, check out our complete guide to restaurant branding.
A brand’s reputation and image is one of the most important aspects for success. With a strong reputation comes more positive word of mouth, which is a crucial way to get new customers to your business.
In fact, according to ResDiary’s Beyond the Booking industry trend report, 72% of customers discover new restaurants through the recommendations of friends and family in the UK and Ireland. 68% of Australia and New Zealand diners find new restaurants through the recommendations of friends and family.
With a good restaurant reputation, you have a more reliable way to increase your revenue and attract diners. Using restaurant reputation management, you can set up methods to maintain your reputation and correct any issues as they appear.
Here are eight steps for effectively managing your restaurant reputation across multiple platforms:
The most reliable way to maintain a good reputation is to offer the highest quality of food and service you can. Consistently offering a great dining experience will organically generate a positive reputation for your business.
ResDiary has the tools a restaurant needs to optimise its venue operations. This is the key to ensuring staff can offer the best customer service possible.
With ResDiary’s table management software and integrations, you can streamline your business by:
Many potential customers will find your business by searching for local restaurants online. You need to ensure your online presence is completely optimised to showcase the best qualities of your brand. This gives you the highest chance of securing online reservations.
Areas to focus on to optimise your online presence include:
Using ResDiary’s Meta and Google integrations, customers can make reservations through your social media profiles or Search results pages. This makes it easy to convert enquiring customers into diners.
Online reviews define how your customers see your business. They are vital to attracting more diners through your social media platforms. According to our Beyond the Booking report, 42% of diners in the UK and Ireland cite online reviews as an important influence when choosing a restaurant.
Ensure that your venue has a strategy in place to reliably gather customer reviews. This strategy could involve directly asking customers to leave a review, making social media posts and encouraging diners to comment, or offering incentives like gift vouchers.
You can also leave QR codes with review links across your restaurant, or to request that guests scan the code as they pay their bill. With ResDiary’s built-in email marketing features and Silverstreet integration, you can automatically send emails and text messages to customers after they have dined with you. This gives you a chance to request reviews and feedback.
Social media has become a crucial part of defining a restaurant's brand and reputation. According to Beyond the Booking, 28% of diners in the UK and Ireland use social media to find restaurants. In Australia and New Zealand, this figure is 36%. For many users, how you appear on social media is the main image they will have of your business.
To maximise your social media strategy, you need to encourage more engagement with your brand. Posting consistently encourages more diners to engage.
This can also help you show up in more searches or listings, especially if competitors lack an active profile. You can even offer guests incentives like gift vouchers for making social media posts about your business.
Using ResDiary’s Meta integration, you can enable your followers to directly book a reservation from your Instagram and Facebook pages. This lets you take full advantage of an active social media profile and reduces the chance that customers will turn to competitors.
To maintain a strong reputation, your business must address negative reviews quickly. In order to do this effectively, you will need to monitor reviews as often as possible.
Review management helps you understand how your business is perceived. By monitoring your reviews, you gain insights into your guests' experiences. You can also take action against fake reviews you may receive as quickly as possible.
When you respond to positive reviews and mentions, you have an opportunity to showcase your brand as friendly, professional, and personable. This greatly encourages guests to keep engaging with your brand, as they feel rewarded for commenting.
Responding to positive reviews can present opportunities to broadcast key things about your business. For example, if a customer likes a certain drink, you can share that there is an upcoming promotion on the same drink.
Responding to negative reviews publicly shows your brand is acknowledging areas of improvement and taking diner’s experiences seriously. In extreme cases, it also gives you the opportunity to highlight factual inaccuracies within reviews.
Highlighting successes across your brand is crucial for reputation management. In addition to giving attention to negative feedback you receive, you must also showcase what customers love about your business. When highlighting positive feedback, you have the perfect opportunity to bolster your reputation.
Ensure that your successes are well documented and shown across your online platforms, from review sites to social media profiles. Create posts on Instagram, Facebook, and Google highlighting your success.
You should also consider adding positive reviews within your marketing material, such as including quotes in emails or images highlighting awards. You can even create a dedicated page on your website showcasing your most positive feedback.
Establishing roots in your local area can be an important part of restaurant reputation management. Location is a vital part of a restaurant's success. By becoming involved in your community, you can more effectively ensure you have a positive reputation with potential customers.
Becoming involved in your local area could mean offering special deals and discounts for locals. Or, it could involve partnering with local schools or sports clubs and hosting food fairs and charity fundraisers. You could also regularly host community events on your premises, encouraging locals to treat your business as a hub of the area.
According to DesignMyNight’s Bars and Pubs Industry Report for the UK and Ireland, 43% of pubs hosted charity events in the last 12 months. This is an important tactic that your competitors may be using, so it’s time for you to plant some local roots.
Public feedback is great for bolstering your online profile, but it also offers a fantastic opportunity to improve your restaurant. Once you have addressed raised concerns, you can enhance your brand’s reputation by highlighting your ongoing improvements. This communicates the growth of your business to all your customers.
ResDiary can help you use customer feedback to improve your business through:
ResDiary’s quality integrations and services are perfect for managing your business’ reputation. Our quality table management software features the tools and integrations your business needs to streamline your operations. This means your staff will have more time to focus on offering an outstanding customer experience.
ResDiary’s quality integrations with customer relationship management systems Acteol and Nollie helps your business create comprehensive customer profiles. This makes it easy to improve your service standards with added personalisation.
You can also more effectively manage your reputation with integrations for DesignMyNight and Restaurant Hub. These powerful platforms allow you to boost your visibility to millions of monthly users. With complete control over your profile, you can decide how you are perceived.
Improve the reputation of your business by booking a demo with ResDiary today.