How would you go about promoting a restaurant on IG without paying for ads?
Curious to know, thanks for the help!
You check on this article on how to develop marketing strategies with Jarvee: How to Develop Instagram Marketing Strategies to Boost Sales - Jarvee
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Do you own the restaurant? If yes, why not have your friends try out your food and ask them to have it posted on IG? Then, of course have them use a hashtag for your restaurant and tag the resto’s IG account as well.
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I will just invite people to eat at heavy discounts in exchange for sharing a photo + location on their IG profile.
It might boost your followings and authority too.
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Or you can give complementary services or foods in exchange to sharing on their IG and promoting your restaurant
One way or another, the paid advertisement is the best one. I personally the most believe in shoutouts.
- First, make you create a Google place listing.
- Create FB page/Instagram page, invite/follow people from that particular location (you can use Jarvee to automate this process).
- Offer some contest related to your city history or town or country or sports :D.
Get the winner from Random.org and offer him a breakfast/meal.
This will gain more popularity on FB/IG pages and users will interact more too. - Newspaper marketing in the local area.
- Promo codes are the trend and launch promo code with newspaper articles/ classifieds etc.
For eg: get 10% off blah blah.
Or Flat 30% off on all the items from 3 pm to 5 pm…
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I run a cloud kitchen model with my partner (so we only offer pickups)
Here’s a few things that worked for us:
(1) We are super active on IG Stories:
(2) We repost all our customer feedback
(3) We reply to all DMs quickly and fully
(4) We comment on local places, hashtags, and engagers from other local pages (Google or search for Gary Vee’s 1.80$ strategy) <=== this got us a lot of clients.
(5) We share about WHO is behind the business**
(6) The lurkers…
(7) Great pictures
I go over each of these in my thread linked below:
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THIS!
This is what got us a great initial boost and social proof!
there are a lot of ways to do so you can grow the account and make sure you have a good/solid followers list to use stories and DM on, but in this case i would say ads will work much more better for you.
totally agree. ads are much more targeted,faster and easy then organic growth.
Ads may be better for fast results. For long term I would go with mother/child method
We’ve got a local restaurant owner who became one of the most famous in his business in the country. He was filming himself how’s he helping people, giving them meals, meet, etc., and putting that to IG. One time he assembled like 20 taxi drivers, gave them their daily wages so that they would drive people of his town free of charge and of course they’ll mention his name to their customers. That video went viral and many people shared it, so I believe he spent much less to reach the number of potential customers and followers than he would have to do it by paying for ads.
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I’m loving this thread! I help out one of my local cafes so keep the ideas coming 
I know you said not paid advertising, but remember that advertising done right should bring a profit and pay for itself. For example, my client is introducing a click and collect service so we can advertise that at peak hours.
For a business, fewer paying customers beats lots of non-paying IG followers.
yes, mother/child is great but i guess what he want to achieve is pure publicity to get people to know the restaurant the food there so ads will work much better.
So far I’ve been reading this advice and it’s great.
The angle that I’ve taken is to really start creating reels/videos and simply create great entertaining content. From there we’ll get more followers that engage with the page, which makes the page look good and pushes the people within the area to engage even more.
The idea was to rely on hashtags and reels to get our followers but I realize it’s hard to rank for hashtags since the average engagement on one of my clients’ page is pretty low and won’t get much traction in hashtags in my belief.
Is it a good idea to do F/UF? Just so we can boost the engagement on the page.
It’s still one of the basics so I would say yes. In that way, when you follow a user, they would be interested to check your page out and what it’s about… and if they happen to be within your vicinity, they could possibly drop by…
That said, if you use automation, you can use the geolocation sources so you can get users who posted from your place… there’s a chance that they are within the area so they could be potential customers in the future.
By geolocation sources do you mean the following?
- Following people using local hashtags? Who are interacting with restaurants in the city/area.
or
- Engaging with people from a local page? Just follow the people who are following local restaurants already.
Following by geolocation means you follow people who posted from the city where your restaurant is. Example: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/371784931/covent-garden/?hl=en
or you can find some places/local restaurants that are located near your restaurant and use their location URLs as source.
yes, many users still use that method and it does work when using specific sources related to your niches you will get good stuff.