Lunch crowd could be bigger? Dinner crowd a little bit thin? How are you engaging with bloggers to make a difference to your numbers?
There are many questions that need to be answered before a restaurant starts to go after bloggers a source of publicity to drive more customers to try out your , a successful event can mean an increase of business while a less than successful review can have a lasting negative impact for the restaurant. There needs to be a managed approach to ensure the best results.
Malaysian’s love to eat but the restaurant industry in Malaysia is a high stakes game. With fewer opportunities for PR placements in traditional media, blogs have emerged as an influential new media outlet for PR stories and product reviews.
Glenreagh recently organised a lifestyle blogger event for a locally owned high-end Japanese restaurant and the results were excellent for a few reasons. Glenreagh has engaged with the media, social media and bloggers have long mostly for their own events but now they are offering this service to restaurants and hotels. Nordin Abdullah the Managing Director in a recent interview explained why it was successful. ‘The Bloggers were happy, they were treated well and managed professionally, the reviews were positive’.
‘We have always had a good relationship with bloggers for our industry and youth events so when we were engaged to raising the profile of a restaurant we were confident of the results, we also had a good helping of the mainstream media join the event’.
There are several reasons why your restaurant needs more blog reviews, to drive traffic to your website or your Facebook page which increase your SEO/ SERP (which means Google sees that you are popular and then sends more traffic to you). From a positioning angle in places your brand as an industry leader and creates a better customer relationship. Imagine more of your customers coming to your restaurant knowing what they want to experience because they heard it from a trusted 3rd party.
‘While we focus on maintaining a good relationship with the bloggers the research is interesting’, according to Research Now, 84% of people have purchased products based on their descriptions in blogs. By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationships without talking to a human, B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those that do not. ‘What we are talking about is high quality leads that are in the buying mood, that is what makes this so interesting’.
This means that your consumers are more likely to do their own research about your restaurant or hotel before your first point of contact with them, the easiest ways for them to learn more about your establishment is through a blog. The question remains how will you engage with bloggers especially when you have a restaurant or a hotel to run?
In Malaysia, blogging is moving from being individual’s hobby to becoming an influential tool for restaurants, it has created an even playing field among the bigger and smaller restaurants, especially those who can’t get access to mainstream media.
Nordin Abdullah is the Managing Director of Glenreagh, as an Australian with over 20 years of experience in Asia his knowledge of the region especially the Malaysian market has made him a valuable resource for business expanding in Asia, he was recently named in the Top 50 Expatriates to know in Malaysia.
Glenreagh can organize a dedicated blogger and lifestyle media event. For more information contact the MGBF team today.
Check out the cluster of media coverage created by the recent event
