Background
One of my clients runs a small high end restaurant. They serve a tasting menu with a selection of dishes that changes every few weeks, a bit like what you’d expect in fancy high end restaurants with Michelin stars. They’re based in the countryside around 50 kilometres away from the city, so it’s quite a commitment for people to go and visit.
Now, their food is just amazing, so they were obviously getting some custom through word-of-mouth as their popularity grew. However, it was mainly just people talking to their friends within the same city.
So, while they were getting some customers through word-of-mouth publicity, they were looking to grow their customer base through more publicity online, without having to spend oodles of money on advertising.
The booking process was manual, and it took up a lot of effort and time to coordinate with customers over WhatsApp and phone, to try and work out availability, confirm bookings and so on.
Another issue they faced is that going so far just for a meal isn’t something people do very regularly, so they’d often get cancellations for bookings that were made over the phone.Since seats are very limited, every cancellation resulted in significant loss of revenue.
Who could possibly resist such divine looking food?
Solution
We created a business Google business profile and a profile on TripAdvisor for my client. They started asking their customers to put up reviews on Google and/or TripAdvisor.
On the web site, we uploaded plenty of videos of real, delighted customers speaking about their experience. Once there were enough reviews online, we also embedded Google and TripAdvisor reviews on the web site.
We also made the booking process much easier; it was made completely online so that customers could look at available slots and make bookings themselves.
Result
As a result of our campaign, the business is already ranked at number 15 out of 496 restaurants in the city.
Getting reviews on Google and TripAdvisor means many new potential customers, both from within the city and visitors who are visiting for a few days find the restaurant organically when looking for nice places to eat in the city.
The customer base is now growing organically at a good clip, without spending a single penny on advertising.
Having testimonial videos from customers online means that new potential customers who find out about the restaurant can see for themselves what other customers have to say about the food and experience, which helps bring in more bookings.