Dive Brief:
- TripAdvisor released its first-ever "Restaurant Marketing Study," covering trends in restaurant marketing throughout the U.S., U.K., Spain, France and Italy based on responses from its over four million restaurant partners. Its U.S. partners reported a lack of emphasis on marketing, with 85% saying they should be doing more to promote their business and reporting spending less than 10% of their time on marketing activities.
- Even though U.S. restaurateurs don’t have an interest in marketing their businesses, they do care about brand management, with 94% reporting monitoring the reputation of their business.
- Of the marketing U.S. restaurateurs do engage in, the three top channels in spending include social media (82%), print advertising (68%), and online listing services (56%).
Dive Insight:
Social media taking the top spot in the TripAdvisor report for marketing shouldn’t be too surprising. Last month Facebook released its own research that found one-third of restaurant and bar patrons use Facebook or Instagram while in the establishment and more than 50% reported trying a drink that friends and family posted about on Facebook.
Some interesting takeaways from the report include that print advertising is not among the top three most effective channels named by restaurateurs yet it is one of the top three channels where they are investing their marketing spend. Additionally, online voucher/coupon services were reported to be least effective. The most effective channels named by respondents are social media followed by online listing services and search engine marketing (SEM) tactics.
One potential reason for the challenges restaurants are facing in marketing could be that just 17% of U.S. respondents have hired a dedicated marketing employee and just 1% are using an outside marketing consultant.
The findings suggest restaurants could be doing more to take advantage of digital to boost their marketing, including using location-based offers that target nearby consumers on their phones at times when they may be looking for a place eat, such as around lunch and dinner time or by offering digital ordering. For example, a Verve Mobile study found that quick-service restaurants which incorporate a location component into their mobile advertising double the effectiveness of their ads.
In terms of digital ordering, TripAdvisor partnered with GrubHub in June to integrate GrubHub’s delivery network into TripAdvisor’s desktop web, mobile web and mobile app experiences.