The online space is by no means an easy place to be for restaurants… better yet, for anybody.  If you're a restaurant marketer or operator, chances are you've already taken all the necessary steps to set up your social media profiles, made sure you have interesting content to post regularly, and most importantly have an inventory of high quality photos to represent your restaurant online.

In the restaurant industry, maintaining good customer relationships is just as important as having a functioning kitchen. But between running a restaurant and managing its finances, restaurant management tends to forget to allocate the time to better understand their customers.

This is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can be of use. CRM for restaurants helps operators gain insight into their guests, giving them the ability to create a custom tailored experience for each of their visitors.

No longer will restaurant staff have to keep a manual log of their guests, along with birthdays, contact details, allergies, and preferences, instead all that information and more can be stored in an easily accessible database.

The data generated by a good CRM system is incredibly valuable, and with the right actions can help drive sales and increase diner retention. 

Social media has always been a great way to reach potential diners at your restaurant and Facebook's latest feature takes that process one step further.

Facebook now allows restaurant owners to add a 'Book Now' call to action right on their Facebook page, finally providing business owners with a means of accepting reservations from their restaurant page. 

Restaurant's partnered with a reservation provider can now embed their online booking widget into the new call to action (CTA), allowing customers to book a table within a few clicks. 

Read on to learn how you can add the new 'Book Now' button to your Facebook profile as well as a few secret tips and trips to boost your Facebook page traffic and increase restaurant reservations.

By now, it’s safe to say that Google is the most powerful search engine available. With over 40,000 unique searches made on the platform every second, it is by far the most powerful tool out there for restaurants.

Social media marketing is one of the most overlooked methods of generating restaurant reservations online. Whether you’ve already established a social media presence or not, you can guarantee that your guests are already posting pictures and leaving comments about your restaurant across the web.

In the past, making a reservation at your favorite restaurant meant having to call a reservation hotline, spend time spelling out your name, providing your contact info, and listing out any special requests. We have come a long way since then.

Thanks to the power of the internet, we are now able to make restaurant reservations in a fraction of the time online without having to speak to a single person in the process.

The only problem though is that despite this, some restaurants are still making it just as difficult to reserve a table online as it was in the past by phone.

The food and beverage industry is one of the hardest industries to succeed in right now. With over a million restaurants in America alone, and more opening year after year, competition is at its all-time high, making it harder than ever for restaurants to succeed in an already saturated market.

With over 75 million millennials in the US alone, marketing your restaurant to millennials is without a doubt one of the best things you can do to drive traffic.

Marketing to millennials wasn't always a worthwhile investment, in the past it meant restaurants would be marketing to teenagers. Nowadays, with the average age of a millennial sitting comfortably at 18, you are opening up your restaurant to an entire group of people with new, disposable income.

If you are a restaurant looking to tap into this market, here is what you need to know. 

After months of meticulous planning and countless hours of hard work, your restaurant is finally ready to open. The quickest way to now solidify your presence in the community is by holding a restaurant grand opening event.

Since the advent of the internet, email has found it's way into our lives, becoming one of the most powerful (if not the most) forms of communication. With studies showing that workers spend approximately 28% of their week reading and responding to emails, hence the reason its so important to take the time to master your emails.