Restaurant Instagram Marketing Ideas That Will Help You Increase Sales

Did you know that 38% of Instagram users look at food content and 27% share food content? Moreover, 80% of users follow at least one business and the interaction rate is quite high, at 2.2% per follower.

Knowing the most effective restaurant Instagram marketing techniques can help your business reach new customers and sell more food.

Without further ado, let’s see how you can take advantage of these numbers and get started with restaurant Instagram marketing.

What is Instagram Marketing?

Instagram marketing is a type of social media marketing involving promoting your brand on Instagram, via posts, stories, reels, and more. The goal of Instagram marketing is to connect brands with a larger audience and ultimately increase sales.

The Benefits of Instagram for Restaurants

The smartphones that companies manufactured a decade ago took decent pictures. Today’s devices, however, come with such advanced technology that several directors have used smartphones to shoot movies.

Better cameras have also influenced the way that people share information on social media. Posting a picture or short video often takes less time than typing a text. Images can say so much more. It’s just like the old saying: a picture is worth a thousand words.

Statistics prove it:

• Foodies get on Instagram about 18 times a day (Source). It’s clear that food on Instagram is highly popular and restaurants can work that to their advantage.
• According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of teenagers use Instagram. Teens seem to like Instagram’s focus on visual communication. They’re more interested in sharing pictures and videos than lengthy, text-based posts.
• Videos may just be the future of marketing. Recent video marketing statisticsreveal that as we speak, more than 85% of American internet users watch videos online. Besides, 3 in 4 customers say that video has convinced them to either buy or download an app or software. So, videos hold vast potential for your business.

Instead of describing your daily special, you can take a picture of it and post it to Instagram. The sight of well-plated food will tempt more customers to order from your restaurant.

Other benefits of Instagram for restaurants include:

• Restaurant Instagram captions can help you add precious information to the pictures and persuade followers to become clients;
• Instagram stories for restaurants make your business more personable and allow you to build engagement for the brand;
• The opportunity to respond to customer posts and share Instagram restaurant reviews will increase your restaurant’s reputation;
• Access to features that help you market your restaurant in creative ways that will outshine the competition;

Read more: How to Get More Restaurant Reviews with Instagram

The more you think about restaurant Instagram marketing, the more reasons you’ll find to use the platform for business purposes.

Restaurant Instagram Marketing Tips

Even if you have a lot of creative ideas, you’ll face a lot of competition from other restaurants that use Instagram well.

Fortunately, you can rely on this article to answer the question “how to promote my restaurant on Instagram?”. Bellow, you will find a variety of useful tips that you can implement in no time and will have a positive impact on your sales.

Write a Persuasive Restaurant Instagram Bio

Writing an Instagram bio for a restaurant should be your first endeavor as it is the first thing clients see when they access your profile. You can use it to offer followers more information about your business. Here are a few tips:

• Keep it short: a few words should suffice because Instagram is a visual platform and people don’t usually spend time reading large blocks of texts;
• Use your Unique Selling proposition: to attract customers and highlight why your restaurant is the best food option;
• Link to your menu or website: to allow hungry clients to order in just a few clicks, directly from your Instagram account. To get a direct link to your online menu, use the online ordering system from GloriaFood and notice how your sales increase. The link was designed for Facebook, but works on every social media platform if you add it in bio because it redirects to your online menu.

Get Inspired by the Most Popular Restaurants on Instagram

Since you’re just getting started, you should learn about restaurant marketing ideas and trends by following successful businesses. Study the best restaurant Instagram accounts and notice the type of content they post, what captions they use and how they interact with their customers.

Some of the most popular restaurants on Instagram are:

• Sweet Green
• The Meatball Shop
• California Donuts
• Pizza Loves Emily
• Piada Italian Street Food
• The Shed BBQ
• Fox in the Snow Cafe

Read more: 10 Instagram Food Trends Your Restaurant Must Follow in 2024 to Attract More Clients

Here’s what all these restaurants teach you about Instagram marketing:

Show Off Your Most Popular (and Delicious) Menu Items

Post mouthwatering pictures of your best, most popular, or new-coming menu items. For a more substantial impact, add a caption to the photo. It can include anything from:

• emojis
• fun facts
• idyllic captions
• funny text

Sweet Green writes excellent food captions for Instagram that highlight the best part of what you see.

Here’s how they do it on the Piada Italian Street Food Instagram account:

You might also like: Why Food Photography Is Important for Your Restaurant Website and Menu

Use Restaurant Instagram Hashtags

Instagram is all about hashtags. However, not all hashtags are created equal. Some work better than others for restaurants. Here is a list of hashtags you can use on your posts to gain more engagement:

• #foodporn
• #foodie
• #food
• #foodstagram
• #instafood
• #foodlover
• #foodphotography
• #yummy
• #happyhour
• #hungry

If you’re feeling uninspired, use a tool like Instavast to generate specific hashtags for the photo you want to upload. Just upload the photo into the website first and it will provide some relevant hashtags for you to use.

Pizza Loves Emily gives us a great example of pizzeria-specific hashtags you can use.

Another inspiring example of how to use food hashtags on Instagram comes from The Meatball Shop. They use #NationalMeatballDay to celebrate their restaurant’s cuisine.

Show Customers Your Priorities: i.e., emphasize the quality of your ingredients

Does your restaurant focus on something special such as getting ingredients from your own farm or sourcing vegetables from local farmers?

Show customers your priorities so they will understand your brand better. For example, you could post dessert captions for Instagram that contain a tag of the dairy farm where you get your milk. You could also highlight the importance of getting dairy from a cruelty-free source. Emerging food trends focus on local sourcing, fresh produce, healthy eating, and an emphasis on authentic items. (Source)

Here’s how Sweet Green welcomed spring and showed how their ingredients are organically sourced.

Post Enticing Videos

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is definitely worth a million. On Instagram, there is such a thing as #foodporn. Use it to post videos of a steaming plate of pasta or a spoon digging into a mouthwatering lava cake.

Customers also love behind-the-scenes looks at the brands they love, so consider posting clips of your chef cooking a popular dish or your staff handling everything smoothly in the kitchen.

California Donuts posted a video of an employee flipping donuts calling the treat “essential for the soul.” If that doesn’t get you craving donuts, we don’t know what will.

Respond to Your Customers

When someone posts a picture of your restaurant or food, always engage fast and respond with a quick note.

Something along the lines of “Thanks for sharing, [first name]! Looks awesome!” has a personal touch and will make your customers feel like they are part of a community.

Here’s how Piada does it:

Ask Customers Questions

A great way to get more engagement on your posts is to ask a question. The go-to topic can be a “this vs. that” featuring two of your dishes.

Advertise Table Reservations

If you offer the option to book a table at your restaurant, let your Instagram followers know. You can post a link to the table booking widget in your bio, for instance, since Instagram doesn’t allow links in posts.

Read more: How To Take Table Reservations The Easy [& Profitable] Way?

Advertise Food Pre-Orders

Here’s California Donuts acing the V-Day game with a cute post featuring an informative caption.

Oh, and if you’re interested in creating consistent branding across your Instagram profile, then it’s worth checking out this free library of ready-to-publish Instagram templates.

Instagram Story Ideas for Restaurants

Instagram stories have slowly but surely gained traction. Now, a lot of people scroll through them, some even more than they would scroll through their feed. What that means for you is you have to be present in stories as well. Here’s how!

Include Customers in Your Instagram Stories

Fox in the Snow Cafe, as well as the rest of the restaurants listed above, share Instagram stories that feature customers. The customers always look excited and happy. These pictures are ones of the best and most authentic Instagram restaurant reviews that you can get. Plus, they will make other people want to visit your location so they can have fun, too!

Start by asking your customers to follow you on Instagram and tag them in your pictures. Make sure to add a few restaurant Instagram hashtags as well. There’s nothing that says “friends and family” more than this.

Read more: How to Encourage & Employ User-Generated Content for Restaurants

Do Polls

You shouldn’t use Instagram stories just to feature customers. You can also use them to engage customers by asking them to vote on things like their favorite dish at your restaurant or what they would like to see you add to your menu. That way, you don’t just get engagement, but you also get direct feedback that you can use to see what dishes work and perfect your menu.

Feature a Promotion That Redirects Customers to Your Page

Instagram pages that don’t have over 10,000 followers can’t use the “Swipe up” feature that allows them to send visitors to a desired destination. To be able to still advertise discounts and promotions on stories and give users something to click on, we have a hack for you: use the mention feature.

Here’s how we did it:

• First, we created a nice image featuring our Instagram restaurant promotion and an arrow pointing to a yet unoccupied space in the photo. You can create one yourself in Canva or Envato Elements by using the Instagram stories template and choosing from a library of elements. It’s really easy!
• Then, we uploaded the image to our stories and added a mention of our page so that the arrow points to it.
• We made the mention as visible and clickable as possible and we posted the story, giving users a chance to click on it to be redirected to our page where they can see the “Order online” link.

Instagram Promotion Ideas for Restaurants

To master restaurant Instagram marketing, you must include some promotions in your advertising strategies. Promotions, offers and deals help you reach a bigger audience and increase your conversion rate.

Organize Giveaways and Instagram Contests for Restaurants

This is especially profitable during major holidays or to advertise a special event. You can organize a contest or a giveaway exclusive to Instagram to get more traffic and followers to your page.

For example:

• Come Christmastime, do a giveaway for a generous gift card that can be redeemed at your restaurant in the month of December. To enter, people have to follow your page.
• Celebrating the Super Bowl? Hold a contest where people have to tag your restaurant in an Instagram post in which they share their favorite thing about the Super Bowl, using the hashtag #[restaurantname]superbowl. The user that gets the most likes on his post wins all you can eat chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday.

Read more: 20 Restaurant Contest Ideas That Will Delight Your Customers

Partner up with Influencers

Restaurant influencer marketing is one of the best ways to promote your business on social media. While influencers can be found on any platform, Instagram is the place to be when it comes to food influencers. They can promote your dishes and expose them to their following. To find influencers in your area, you can use Socialbaker’s influencer search tool.

Instagram Action Button Alternative

Selling food on Instagram can be tough if you are not listed on any food ordering portal like Uber Eats or GrubHub. However, if you want customers to be able to access your online ordering page directly from Instagram, there’s a workaround for the Instagram action button, and that’s promoting a post with a button linking to your website.

Let’s go through setting up a promotion step-by-step:

Step 1: Upload and post the photo you want to promote. Don’t forget to add a catchy caption.

Step 2: Tap the “Professional dashboard” button on your Instagram restaurant profile.

Step 3: Tap on “Ad tools”

Step 4: Tap the arrow next to your current post or choose a different one to promote.

Step 5: Choose “Visit your website” to direct customers to your online ordering page. Tap “edit” to change the label of the action button and the URL (if needed).

Step 6: You can select “Feed”, “Stories”, “Explore”, and “Reels” to preview your ad.

Step 7: Here is an example of how it would look on people’s feed.

Step 8: Choose the audience you want to reach, you can even customize it.

Step 9: Choose the budget and duration for you ad.

That’s it, confirm that you want to place the add and sit back and monitor the results.

Advertise Restaurant Promotions

Even if you won’t be able to promote all your posts, you can still showcase your promotions on your feed and invite people to order from your website.

To easily set up promotions in your online menu in seconds, you can use the Promotions menu embedded in our online ordering system. You will get access to a variety of tried-and-tested offers that your customers won’t be able to resist.

Watch this quick, yet thorough tutorial:

What’s the Best Time to Post on Instagram for Restaurants?

It’s not hard to guess: the best time to post on Instagram as a restaurant is when people are hungry. At 9 AM, between noon and 1 PM, and at 8 PM, people are likely looking at photos on their phones trying to decide what to eat.

This is your chance to attract customers with a delicious looking meal that they can order at home or at the office, or invite them to stop by to try it.

Final words

You can be one of those restaurants using social media successfully if you implement these restaurant Instagram marketing ideas in your social media strategy. They will definitely help you build a fabulous social presence, so give them a try ASAP.

Do you have any other restaurant Instagram marketing tips to suggest? Get in touch!

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