So far, the days have been steady. You’re getting plenty of inquiries from your social network accounts. In addition, you’ve got plenty of orders queued up. However, you’ve got a prospective F&B marketing firm in mind to help you take your business to the next level of popularity and profitability. Before you finalise choosing who to work with, it’s important to keep track of what’s at stake when you hire a really bad F&B marketer.
It’s possible you’ve found your F&B marketing firm through a quick search engine query. Having read through their portfolio and reviews, you’ve found several companies that can potentially deliver the results you need.
However, we encourage you to take the chance and correspond with them regarding these aspects so you can be sure they will never cause trouble by making you commit money murder with the following badly-executed marketing processes.
They Can’t Design An Exceptional Website
You’ve invested a lot in your fusion-style restaurant interior design. Any restaurant and F&B business will want their restaurant design principles to translate to their website design seamlessly. Before you decide to work with your prospect marketers, make sure they can design a good website.
True enough, a good website design is subjective. For example, an industrial company website design often looks more like a technical brochure with added features where minimalism dominates their web design principles. This case-specific “good” web design won’t always work with F&B businesses that often have their own unique character. Therefore, always work with marketing teams that can bring out your restaurant aesthetic and character through your website in the best way possible.
Criminally-Problematic Colour Schemes
As we’ve mentioned earlier, minimalist principles won’t always work with restaurants that have their own characteristics. In addition, using colour schemes that create a mood different from the restaurant’s branding colours in their logo or interior design is definitely problematic. Trustworthy F&B specialist marketing firms will listen to the brand origin story and inspiration, cultural influences, dish taste and characteristics, and the smallest details of your restaurant’s branding to create an excellent website that reflects your brand accurately.
In addition, colour and food images have a complex relationship. A white-coloured background accompanying images of your restaurant’s food and offerings isn’t exactly appealing because your dishes might have a colourful scheme than most. For example: white backgrounds can work efficiently with barbecue or grill restaurants. However, brown might work better for cultural fusion restaurants. It takes experienced marketing companies with exceptional web designers to deliver excellent colour schemes and aesthetics for your website.
Unclear CTAs and Buttons
Call-to-action (CTA) messages and buttons are greatly important in restaurant website design. Without them, most customers won’t have any idea what to do with the helpful, entertaining, or value-adding information you just shared. All marketing team website developers know very well of its importance. However, professional F&B marketers take care of the smallest nuances that general-purpose marketers fail to consider. This can downplay your CTAs and buttons, which are cornerstones of exceptional conversion rates.
Most web designers use a minimalist approach to web design to focus on the site’s messages and images. However F&B restaurants use websites to entice customers to order food. To achieve this, they have to make their food appealing. Recognising the need for image-centric pages, F&B marketing firm designers can create the best website landing and general page design for you efficiently.
No Web Design Best Practices
The F&B marketing company you’ve decided to work with definitely knows that web 1.0 — also known as the confusing grid-style web design with plenty of clicks — is never the optimal way to create a modern and accessible restaurant website. Customers crave creativity, speedy access, easy navigation, and above all, conveniently the top result in search engine results pages.
Nowadays, you’ve definitely seen many top-performing websites that load fast even with slow or intermittent connections. Thanks to an experienced team’s efficient and proven web design practices, your website can achieve the same performance. However, if you hire an aesthetics and features-only focused designers often accompanying your prospect F&B marketing company, you’ll have an excellent-looking website that fails in the site loading speed, navigation and accessibility department — three important aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO).
From their list of former clients, visit one or two of the websites they’ve made. Then, gauge whether their website’s F&B navigability makes it easy for customers to find the dish they like and pay for it. In addition, check if the site loads fast and if it matches the aesthetic of the F&B brand they’re representing.
If they fall short beneath your expectations, then consider looking for another prospect where you can definitely see finesse and a full mastery of F&B website design.
Tracking? What’s That?
In your restaurant, you assign a point person — often the manager or establishment second-in-command — to track dish sales. In turn, you can easily highlight your establishment best-sellers in your menu or even redesign it to allow less-selling dishes to gain more attention from customers. You can call this point person a tracker.
Digital F&B marketing firm tracking assigns the same responsibility to a tracker. However, instead of a person, it’s a cookie that the website temporarily stores in your customer’s computer browser. This cookie activates each time the customer accesses your website’s pages. Its job is to store data — in the same way as point people did in the earlier paragraph.
The additional advantage of digital tracking is it can keep storing customer information 24/7. Your point person — a reliable marketing expert — can analyse the information it stores. In turn, they can create clear and easy-to-understand reports that help you understand which dishes are selling the most and the demographics of those who purchased the items the most. However, only experienced marketers can interpret this information accurately to your advantage.
Zero Ideas About Your Target Audience
However, an inexperienced F&B marketing firm tha thas zero ideas about your audience’s demographics, income level, eating palate, and other important cultural and population-specific traits will give you a poor interpretation of a tracker’s information. Truth be told, this is the foremost problem first-time marketers and business owners attempting to track their sales often make.
Therefore, make sure to avoid this by reading through your prospect F&B marketer’s case studies. Check and evaluate the methods they’ve used to achieve their results. See if there’s anything involving tracked information that encouraged subtle or drastic design or website re-implementations that worked to their client’s advantage. A lack thereof is a red flag.
Poor Tracker Platform Integration
With so many tracking platforms F&B businesses can use to correlate marketing, inventory, and overall performance data, your marketer must use a single platform and greatly excel in maximising its features and capabilities. In addition, they must explain to you the full tracker integration with your website and how it works.
Skipping this step might leave you clueless about your hired F&B marketing firm’s activities. In this light, it’s possible they may have integrated the tracker erroneously. Imagine months of customer information becoming useless simply because the tracker was collecting the wrong information, was integrated on the wrong page, and other head-scratching consequences. This is time you’ve definitely wasted due to incompetence.
Inaccurate and Bogged Regular Reports
Even with correct and precise tracking, a professional F&B marketer knows how to deliver reports properly. A campaign report must only involve the following:
- The main objective
- Methods used to achieve these objectives
- Efficacy of methods used based on data and empirical evidence
- Interpretations
- Recommended improvements/actions based on data analyses
While inaccurate reports are fairly uncommon, a novice F&B marketing firm tends to exaggerate on successes, data, and details. However, if the report can answer these five even with just one or two sentences, then it’s a clear-cut report. Consistent and proficient report summarisation is a sure sign you’re working with an exceptional F&B company.
Lacklustre Experience In Your Industry
True enough, F&B marketing shares plenty of similarities with general online marketing strategies. However, F&B marketing has many nuances that only those who have owned and successfully marketed a restaurant, virtual kitchen, or other food and beverage businesses can notice.
For example, deliver take-out totals must always include a breakdown of its sub-total, the added taxes, and delivery charges when using the online platform. Furthermore, an experienced F&B marketing company guarantees exceptional product presentation and e-commerce specific web design with complete food and beverage upselling.
Imagine: a customer orders some fries. The system with e-commerce principles auto-recommends a side dish that majority of customers by alongside the chosen product. This F&B specific upselling strategy is sure to increase sales.
Poor Integration of E-Commerce Principles
F&B website design is partly similar to e-commerce website concepts. However, they differ in many ways. For example, instead of a grid-style ordering menu, a specialised and sophisticated F&B website can display an actual menu recreation on their website wherein the menu items take them to the photo and description of the dish with a single click.
Once done, e-commerce design principles come into play with a reliable and safe check-out menu. F&B marketing experts can integrate several well-known and highly reliable payment methods — make sure your marketers are capable of doing this to avoid any fiscal problems!
If they lack knowledge or depend heavily on third-party plug-ins (usually available with WordPress-powered F&B websites, they’re putting your finances and your customer’s information at stake. An in-house programmed check-out feature guarantees the payment platform and the restaurant are the only ones with access to customer information and can access finances.
Next, retargeting is an excellent strategy to increase restaurant and food sales. All F&B marketers with in-depth experience in marketing restaurants know the more-enticing approach of retargeting ads that include the items the customer viewed from your website.
Low Probability of Scalability
A starting F&B business can do so much for starting restaurants. With their affordable fees and a forgiving learning environment between restaurant and marketer, they mutually improve the quality of each other’s business and performance.
However, businesses that plan on scaling to the next level must find F&B marketers with in-depth experience and years of successful projects when it comes to giving them the results they need. More exposure, accurate audience targeting, and other next-level marketing strategies can only come from truly capable marketers.
When you work with marketers who have little experience in working with giants your industry, they will surely have zero to minimal ideas on expanding your business to new audiences. Your expansion investments and plans may fail. Therefore, minimise any risk by working with F&B companies that have vast knowledge and experience when it comes to taking your business to the next stage.
Make it a Point to Work With Greatly Experienced and Efficient F&B Marketers
F&B marketing is a powerful practice that helps elevate your brand’s value and recall to customers. To avoid all these problems, make sure you’re working with a food and beverage marketing agency with years of experience and recognition for their contribution in the industry.
PS: Excellent F&B marketers also know a reliable online delivery management system that frees their clients from one of their biggest problems: third-party online delivery systems. If you’re interested, drop us a line at sales@ninjaos.com.
