Social media has become the new word-of-mouth in the restaurant industry, and it’s 10x louder.
72% of diners use social media to research restaurants. 59% of them use Facebook for research, and 36% say TikTok inspired them to visit a restaurant after seeing its brand presence. That means your restaurant’s digital footprint is now as critical as your menu or service quality. Not showing up on social media can be fatal for first impressions with today’s digitally active diners.
If you’re new and dabbling in it for the first time, you might wonder where to start—or how to manage it all while running daily operations and your restaurant back of house software.
Steps in NOVA – a digital all-in-one POS and restaurant management system that takes away your stress and pushes smart content to your social media without you moving a finger.
Sounds intriguing, right?
Let’s peel back the layers and see how it automates the whole process for you.
The Unique Challenges You Face as a Restaurant Owner
Finding ways to stay effective on social media can be challenging. Here are several bottlenecks that impede the process:
Time Constraints
Running a restaurant is a humongous task. It includes staff management, inventory control, food preparation, customer service, financial management, and ensuring health and safety standards.
This leaves little or no time for marketing initiatives or handling a social media account.
Content Creation Pressure
The online space is saturated with your competitors’ restaurant pages, eyeing the engagement. This means you have to post unique and effective content to entice diners. 88% of patrons trust online reviews more than personal recommendations. Therefore, you need to be highly vigilant about what is posted on your social media.
Ad Spend Efficiency
Targeting the right audience is tricky. Without a clear strategy, even a hefty ad spend might yield poor results. It’s like firing darts in all directions, hoping something sticks. As ad campaigns have a budget, you need to have a clear mindset and roadmap before launching one.
Consistent Branding
With multiple locations and franchises, regional teams may handle your restaurant’s social media. It becomes daunting to create a consistent voice across channels. In case of new hires, it’s hefty to train them on brand voice, making the process tiring as your branding goes haywire.
But fret not – with AI, the pen and paper, spreadsheets, and a lot of manual tasks have been taken care of. Let’s delve into it.
How AI Changes the Game in Restaurants’ Social Media Marketing?
AI has disrupted the market with strategies that drive growth and empower social media posting to foster sales. 61% of Gen Z and 53% of Millennials now favor using AI Search tools instead of traditional search engines.
Here are a few ways AI has leveraged social media to increase restaurants’ footfall:
Automated Content Suggestions
AI analyzes menus, promotions, inventory, events, and suggests automated post ideas. These posts may be about seasonal specials or dishes to clear a produce (fruit, vegetable, or grocery item) that is nearing expiry.
This process of automated marketing for your restaurant speeds up the content creation process and lets you focus on other pivotal tasks.
Smart Scheduling
Scheduling with AI saves time by batch-creating and queuing posts weeks ahead. You don’t need to post manually. By identifying consumers’ highly active time, you can schedule content accordingly to maximize engagement.
Personalization at Scale
55% of diners prefer restaurants using AI for personalized services. You can leverage their personalized data from your POS to create loyalty offers and encourage repeat visits.
Performance Insights
AI-enabled dashboard tracks social media posts in real-time, leading to direct online orders using tracking links or promo codes. These dashboards also estimate store visits from social post interactions (using location data and click-throughs).
NOVA’s AI-Enabled Marketing Suite: Feature Deep-Dive
Social media marketing for restaurants is a hassle. Hiring an outside agency costs a fortune, and doing it yourself is time-consuming. This is where NOVA steps in; designed by restaurant owners and built by technology experts.
NOVA offers inventory management, smart kitchen platform, restaurant scheduling software, back-of-house & front-of-house management, and menu and pricing management, to name a few.
Instead of integrating different modules into one, NOVA is built on a single codebase. These are for payroll, online ordering, website development, employee scheduling, event management, recipe management, and more.
Here are a few features NOVA offers:
Integrated Content Planner
With its integrated content planner, NOVA offers automated marketing for restaurants with a weekly or monthly content calendar. The posts come with an optimized template for social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, whether your restaurant is quick service and full-service, cafe, bar, or food truck.
Automated Post Scheduling & Publishing
NOVA comes as a popular choice to fully outsource your social media initiatives. Just connect to your restaurant profile, and NOVA creates the post and schedules when to post. You can review the posts created, and NOVA queues them accordingly.
AI-Powered Ad Campaign Builder
As an AI-native platform, NOVA identifies high-margin items or slow-moving inventory, enabling you to market them with greater efficiency. It enables you to shape your strategy around signature dishes and specials celebrating your most visited or probable customers.
It also evaluates the performance of past campaigns to allot budgets for upcoming campaigns.
Engagement & Community Management
NOVA flags comments and messages needing urgent replies (like reservations). It creates a two-way conversation, making your followers heard, valued, and connected to your restaurant. This humanizes your brand and garners loyal customers.
Analytics & Attribution
Using NOVA’s analytics, find out conversions, drop-off indicators, and channels of interaction. Its dashboard links social campaigns to on-site orders or reservations to measure which content types drive the highest ROI.
Using NOVA, you can fine-tune operations and track sales by menu/day/time/location to gauge real-time analytics.
Integration with Loyalty & CRM
NOVA helps you launch loyalty programs that are customized point-based reward systems and incentives to increase customer loyalty and drive repeat business. For instance, email your customer with “Thank you for visiting our cafe, here’s a 10% discount on your next visit.”
Its CRM helps you build stronger guest relationships by capturing valuable customer data at every touchpoint. From digital ordering and feedback to loyalty sign-ups, NOVA’s built specifically for restaurants. This makes it easy to track dining behavior, preferences, and visit frequency.
Step-by-Step Guide: Implementing Social Media Marketing for Restaurants with NOVA
Now that you have a hang of NOVA’s features, here’s how it helps you with social media marketing:
Audit & Goal Setting
NOVA lets you gain clarity of your goal before plunging into social media marketing.
It analyzes menu performance, customer behavior, and engagement trends to identify strengths and gaps. This helps you set clear, data-driven goals – whether boosting orders, improving loyalty, or refining branding. It helps every campaign and post align with measurable business outcomes.
Onboarding NOVA’s AI Marketing Suite for Restaurants
NOVA connects all your social accounts and POS/CRM data. It creates a consistent experience across social media handles with a fixed voice tone, logo, and color palette. Whether your goal is to drive footfall, promote a new menu, or boost customer loyalty, NOVA tailors AI-generated content and campaigns to meet your specific objectives.
Content Strategy Blueprint
By looking at your different campaigns’ performance in hindsight, NOVA develops your content strategy. It lets you level up and promote your sales on your best-performing platforms as part of your content strategy. With NOVA, you can also connect with social media influencers for your social media marketing strategy.
Monitoring & Iteration
Administer how your content strategy is performing. Gauge performance with A/B testing and see what the conversion or bounce rate is. In case a strategy isn’t performing, use NOVA’s AI capability to come up with another strategy.
Overcoming Common Concerns with NOVA
While being present on social media handles may seem challenging, here are some common roadblocks NOVA helps with:
Technical Incompetency
Setting up NOVA isn’t complex. Its UI is intuitive, and the AI-guided workflow makes its installation and usage easy.
Cost vs. Benefit
NOVA delivers measurable ROI without investing in multiple tools and rigorous training for your staff. It’s your single source of truth for POS and restaurant management systems.
Data Privacy
NOVA safeguards the customers’ data, keeping it private. Social data is used only for marketing under your control.
Leverage NOVA to Boost Your Social Media Presence
NOVA is an all-in-one POS and restaurant management system. It’s designed to simplify and optimize AI social media marketing for restaurants by automating content creation, scheduling, and personalized ad campaigns.
It addresses common challenges like time constraints, content overload, and inconsistent branding by offering tailored content calendars, performance analytics, and CRM.
NOVA streamlines online ordering by consolidating all platforms into a single dashboard. This resulted in order accuracy and efficiency by 30% for one of its clients. NOVA empowers restaurants to boost engagement, increase footfall, and build strong relationships with its customers.
Let’s get on a demo to know how NOVA can expedite your restaurant!
