The idea of creating videos to market your business has been around for a while. What has changed is the importance of incorporating videos to your social strategy and what platforms you share them on. Video marketing is the use of videos to promote your restaurant and services, reach a wide audience, and boost engagement on your social media channels. It’s also a cost-effective way to reach customers and stay ahead of competitors.
If you think a video marketing strategy isn’t right for your restaurant, research shows you should think again.
- Up to 73% of visitors who watch a video on an eCommerce site are more likely to make a purchase.
- Four in five consumers believe videos are helpful.
- Using video on landing pages could potentially increase conversion by up to 86%.
- How many videos are watched online per day? More than 500 million hours.
Still not convinced about video marketing’s benefits? Let’s explore why your restaurant, bakery, cafe, or coffee shop should use restaurant videography to its advantage. We will also cover what to invest in and how to create restaurant promotional videos that leave viewers craving your specialties.
The Importance of Restaurant Video Marketing
Restaurant video production is a dynamic way to showcase your eatery in a new light.
Branded videos can highlight the ins-and-outs of your operations, from favorite dishes to customer spotlights to video event marketing. Consider the core benefits of video marketing that you can begin harnessing in your restaurant:
- Promote the menu: There are few better ways to show off the delicious food and drink on your menu than through video. With video, customers can see what menu items look like and envision tasting the tantalizing dishes. You can share videos showcasing new menu items to generate excitement and bring customers to your restaurant.
- Display the restaurant: Use video to promote the actual space where your restaurant resides. Perhaps you’re located in a historical part of your city, or your building holds a quirky history that would entertain and engage restaurant guests. Be sure to share those stories if applicable, because the more storied the content, the better.
- Generate awareness: Facebook videos alone generate an astronomically larger reach than photos or static posts. That reach translates into increased brand awareness, with your restaurant harnessing the ripple effects of its boosted digital following and increased name recognition.
- Increase foot traffic: Restaurant videos ultimately aim to drive foot traffic — that is, to convert your audience from passive viewers to visiting customers. With its high engagement, search volume, and recall rates, video marketing makes the perfect platform to help increase restaurant foot traffic, and table turns.
What to Showcase in Your Restaurant’s Videos
A video marketing strategy is one of the most leverageable growth opportunities for restaurants today because the food industry lends so well to video content. Restaurants are brimming with stories and material that customers are hungry to discover.
Creating enticing and eye-catching videos placed on social media doesn’t have be a major production for your restaurant. You can easily make quality videos through your phone.
Here are engaging subjects to feature in your videos, from mouthwatering menu items to helpful customer reviews.
1. The Menu
Many customers look at your menu before heading to your restaurant to eat –– if they like what they see. You can show a video of menu items to strongly appeal to customers’ senses and influence their dining decisions.
Use video to promote any of the following:
- Seasonal menu items
- Specialty drinks
- Dishes as they’re being prepared
- Employees’ favorite dishes
2. The Restaurant Location and Layout
Few guests know the story of your restaurant’s location and layout. Many more may not know the culture and history of the neighborhood your restaurant contributes to, as well as how your restaurant honors that heritage.
By taking guests on a video tour of your restaurant, you can make them feel excited to experience the atmosphere firsthand. If your restaurant is located within a historical building, locals will likely appreciate discovering the history of your restaurant. They may feel compelled to support your restaurant once they see the value it adds to the community.
Use restaurant video marketing to showcase your establishment’s:
- Building and neighborhood history
- Indoor seating
- Outdoor patio or balcony dining
- Rooftop lounges or bars
- Recent restaurant updates
- Upcoming renovations
3. Your Staff
Your restaurant’s staff are an indispensable part of what makes it tick. However, guests rarely, if ever, get to know the people who prepare their delicious meals, wait on their table, or greet them as they arrive.
Customers want and expect exceptional customer service when they go to a restaurant. By watching videos, customers can learn about staff and how they feel about their jobs. If your employees are happy and enjoy their jobs, customers will be more likely to trust that they will have positive interaction with your staff. They will look forward to being served by engaging employees who are passionate about quality food and service.
Restaurant videography provides a platform to show off your staff’s personalities, including their:
- Career history
- Favorite cuisines and dishes
- Culinary inspirations
- Foodie tips and secrets
4. Your Customers
What is a restaurant without its customers?
Guests enter your establishment with a hungry appetite and high expectations. They’re looking for a solid plate of food and memorable experiences. Customers want to dine at a restaurant whose ambiance, service, and overall experience make a personal connection consistently.
Your restaurant can use video marketing to connect with customers and forge a lasting impression by showcasing:
- Customer reviews of their meals
- Live customer samplings of new dishes and drinks
- Promoting in-restaurant events
- Recounting memorable experiences at your establishment
5. Recipe Videos
Recipe videos are some of the most popular on the internet today, with particularly high search volumes amongst millennials. Restaurants incorporating an informed video marketing strategy have a better chance of reaching a wider audience base online as well as establishing a relationship with that audience, which translates into profit.
Google and other search engines reward websites that create engaging, trustworthy, and informative content for its targeted audience. Video is a perfect means to do so. Recipe videos, cooking demonstrations, and kitchen walkthroughs create educational content for viewers. Creating diverse video content can help brand you as an industry leader, just as you’re assisting viewers to become more knowledgeable about food.
Without giving away any of your restaurant’s secrets, you can create recipe videos inspired by:
- Twists on a staple menu item
- Your restaurant’s take on a classic or revered dish
- Spins on local cuisine
- Seasonal recipe tutorials
- How-to instructions on handy kitchen utensils, gadgets, and more
Why Use Restaurant Video Marketing
There are significant advantages to your restaurant investing in and producing promotional videos that make a lasting impact. By regularly sharing quality, engaging videos with your audience, you’ll build trust and credibility, which will keep customers coming back. Here are more benefits to implementing an effective video marketing strategy.
1. Cultivate Name-Brand Awareness
Video content can be educational and inspirational, creative and quirky, promotional, and instructive. Sometimes it’s two or more of these things at once. Regardless of its tone, restaurant video production creates a strategic marketing pipeline that, when done well, generates the kind of name recognition traditionally reserved for chains.
Developing a marketing plan should be the first steps you should take. Set your marketing goals around what you think is best for your restaurant. Do want to gain new customers, or retain and target your loyal base of patrons?
2. Increase Active Engagement
A third of all consumer internet activity is spent watching videos. What’s more, video content achieves far greater performance and engagement across a buffet of impressive marketing metrics. Take a look for yourself:
- People are more likely to engage with video than any other kind of content across all social media platforms — including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
- Websites with video enjoy more web traffic, and emails with video enjoy higher click-through rates.
- People are 12 times more likely to share a video than any other type of post.
- Marketing videos increase brand engagement and customer purchases. Approximately 85% of millennials have purchased after viewing a marketing video, and 53% of all adults have engaged with a brand after doing the same.
- People spend five times longer staring at videos than photos or other static images.
3. Content Today’s Users Find Most Engaging
As many as 96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service and 88% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
These numbers mean videos are not just the cherries on top of your restaurant’s marketing and advertising strategy — they should be the center of it.
The importance of video marketing is especially pressing when aiming to reach millennial diners. While 85% of total U.S. adults say they watch video content online, it’s millennials who take the video-streaming cake. Over 70% of millennials watch videos on social media at least once per day, according to research from Nielsen.
4. Boost Your Omnichannel Presence
When it comes to social media, restaurants benefit from quality over quantity. Sure, managing Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Messenger, Snapchat, and more profiles may position your establishment as a thought leader in restaurant social media usage. But if you’re not delivering engaging, consistent content on all of them, then you’re not leveraging these platforms to their true business purpose.
Restaurant videos allow you to streamline content offerings while maximizing appeal and engagement. Experts suggest selecting two to three social media platforms, then publishing your restaurant videography consistently across them, plus on your own restaurant’s website.
5. Upgrade Your SEO Game
Search engine optimization (SEO) improves your website’s ranking on organic search queries. The better your ranking, the more likely you’ll pop up on the first page of search results after someone enters keywords into a search engine. For example, if someone types the keywords “unique pizza recipes” into a Google search box, your restaurant’s website can show up on the first page of search results if your restaurant has a high SEO ranking. Creating helpful videos that incorporate the keywords “unique pizza recipes,” for example, can help improve your SEO ranking.
In general, adding videos to your site can help it rank from an SEO perspective. That’s because videos are a popular and powerful content type that search engines such as Google reward companies for highlighting on their websites.
Still not convinced about the connection between restaurant video production and SEO? Consider these industry statistics:
- Earn more social shares: Videos average more shares on social media than text or even image-based posts. In fact, mobile viewers in particular (92%) will share video content they’ve watched with others.
- Earn more likes and comments: Videos recorded to display in square formats rather than wide-angle or rectangular, cinema-style will receive 275% more views, 482% more shares, almost 350% more reactions, and nearly 523% more viewer comments.
- Educate viewers: As many as 96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand or learn about a product or service. 84% of people say that watching online videos of brands has convinced them to buy a product or service.
Tips for Restaurants When Creating Promotional Videos
High-quality restaurant videos will impress viewers before they ever step foot inside your establishment — and keep on impressing them well after.
Want to know how to create professional-level restaurant videos without the professional studio price tag? You’re in luck. These tips for restaurant videography are convenient and cost-effective. When practiced, they’ll boost the performance of your marketing videos as well, compounding their return on investments.
1. Keep It Short
A general rule of thumb is to keep all your restaurant’s marketing videos under two minutes.
For videos that are platform exclusive, the ideal length will vary:
- Instagram: 30 seconds
- Twitter: 45 seconds
- Facebook: 60 seconds
- YouTube: 2 minutes
Do bear in mind these consumer parameters. According to marketers the top three most important factors for creating effective video content are capturing viewers’ attention in the first few seconds (36%), effectively promoting videos (36%), and keeping videos concise (33%).
2. Quality Over Quantity
You’ll also want to limit the number of videos you post according to the hosted platforms recommendations. Customers don’t respond well to brands that “blitz” their home feeds. In fact, a video marketing strategy should tailor the number of times you post each day to be platform-specific. You want to post videos only when the content is relevant to that platform’s audience, and best represents the personality of your restaurant.
Aim for these general posting recommendations for your omnichannel video marketing strategy:
- Facebook: One post a day; 1-2 videos a week
- Twitter: 2-5 posts a day; 2-4 videos a week
- Instagram: 1-2 a day; 1 video a week
- YouTube: 1-2 a week; can serve as your restaurant’s complete video repository
3. Invest in Professional Equipment
Whether you decide to produce videos entirely in-house or choose to hire a video production company, it pays to have a few pieces of professional equipment on-hand.
Start with the basics — a DSLR camera, a microphone, a stabilizing tripod, an external flash drive, and an SD card with a minimum of 64GB. Together, these pieces of equipment cover your restaurant videography basics:
- Video quality: For sharp and clear videos, aim for resolutions no lower than 4K at 24 fps — though 30+ fps is better. Anything in 1080p range or lower may prove too amateur-looking to be taken seriously.
- Sound quality: Common microphone types include lavalier, shotgun or condenser microphones, each available for reasonable prices and suitable for specific sound applications. Also, consider sound amplifiers to pick up subtle noises as well as a windscreen if you are filming outside.
- Editing software: There are dozens of video editing software packages on the market today — make sure to do your research and read through online reviews and select one within your price range and skill level.
For the record, smartphones can work to shoot your restaurant promotional videos. But getting 4K video and crisp sound quality will still require additional professional equipment, particularly lighting, special sound apps, and editing software.
4. Be Personable
Tailor your video marketing content to match the tone and personality of your restaurant. Is your restaurant a quirky, upbeat neighborhood joint? A trendy farm-to-table cafe? An upscale, dinner-only establishment in the heart of downtown? Use your brand to inspire your videos and target your ideal audience, and your videos will gain more traction.
5. End With a Call to Action (CTA)
Calls to action provide a natural yet business-savvy ending to your promotional videos. Nearly half (45%) of video respondents and over half (57%) of millennials say they find video CTAs instructional, redirecting them to helpful places on your website. In addition, 52% of Gen Xers and 41% of baby boomers said video was most helpful when making a purchase decision online.
Direct links in video CTAs will also help drive four in ten millennials and just under a third of other adult consumers to your restaurant website.
