Want to drive up sales for your restaurant or cafe? Organic Social could be the answer

What is organic social?

Organic social is how it sounds, natural and free. It refers to the unpaid content that users and businesses post and share on social media platforms. When you make a post to your page, there are different audiences who will see it. This includes your direct followers, your followers’ followers, and other audiences such as those seeing it through hashtags or by chance.

Organic social is vital to ensure that your customers feel a connection with your brand. Establishing this connection allows for your brand’s personality to be realised. You’ll attract and maintain customers who have a shared interest in your brand’s values.

On the other hand, paid social media is essentially advertising. It refers to content that has been paid to be shared. For example sponsored searches on Google are an example of paid social. Paid social can have the same if not more reach that organic social, however it does not utilise the natural connection that organic social does.

Step 1: Ask yourself what you want to say

This is the most important step as it is the base to your marketing strategy. This is about your overall presence and mission as a business.

What are you known for? Remember that you can’t specialise in everything…

Think about this… you are a venue with delicious and high-quality food who’re struggling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You might try asking for your customer base to support local venues by purchasing through you and Mr Yum instead of third party services. The key to coming up with your message is not to overthink it. Feel free to use your personality and say what you need to say. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

Step 2: Who do you want to say it to?

This is about your target market, audience & customers.

What demographic group are you targeting?

These are some examples of ways you can divide demographic groups for you to target. You need to know who you want to target otherwise you won’t know how to appeal to them and make your marketing efforts difficult.

Who are they? As an example, perhaps your target audience are people who are living within a 5km radius, aged 22-37 of any gender, interested in takeaway/delivery food, restaurants, and dine-in. You will know more about who your customers are than we do. Simply think about your customers, and write down their characteristics, the more specific the better!

Step 3: What action do you want them to take?

This is very important to know exactly what you want your customer to do, in order to make all of their actions clear.

How do you want your customers to act?

For example you want them to visit your website? Perhaps you’d like them to see your gallery? Maybe you’d like them to book a ticket for this weekend’s comedy night? Whatever the case may be, make sure YOU

know what you want and make it as easy as possible for your audience to access the information that they’re after.

Step 4: Plan your content

You need to use what you’ve decided on in the previous steps to decide on these 2 things: What are you trying to say and how it is best for you to say it. This will help you decide what your posts will contain & what type of content you post.

1. What is the focus? Choose something from the options below:

2. How do you want to get your message out?

Now that you’ve got these 2 fundamental decisions made the last thing to do is to be consistent! Take photos/videos with your phone, design promotional content with Canva (It’s free!) or reach out to some friends or family with a knack for these things if you aren’t particularly gifted in these fields. Schedule your content to post 1 or 2 times a week (more if you’re really prolific) and you’ve started establishing your digital presence, helping you stay top of mind for customers and therefor driving up sales for your venue. Check out our “Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing” for more advice or our “5 simple things you can do to easily improve your social media game!” for some quick wins you can achieve right now!