Article By Rachel Green, Director of Brand Strategy & Communications at Carbonate
As the New Year approaches, it’s the ideal time to take stock of your business’s marketing strategies, and assess where opportunities lie.
From ensuring you’re fully leveraging all digital channels, to exploring brand collaborations, and investing in visual assets, we outline 9 recommendations to help boost your brand’s visibility and appeal—ensuring you stand out in an increasingly competitive landscape.
1. Be A Guest in Your Own Brand
When you are immersed in your business every day, it’s easy to overlook small details that can greatly impact how your guests experience your brand.
Step back and “discover” your brand from the perspective of a brand new guest.
Take a fresh look at assets such as your website, social media profiles, menus and newsletters.
A key thing to note is whether your brand identity is uniform across all channels.
This includes using the same logos, colors, tone, and messaging so that customers have a consistent experience whether they see an ad on Facebook, receive an email, or visit your restaurant.
A unified and seamless experience for guests across the physical and digital worlds is essential.
People interact with your brand at various touch points along the customer journey, and ensuring that each interaction—from discovery, to dining, and post-dining experience—tells a cohesive story, will serve to effectively engage your target audience, enhance brand recognition, and strengthen customer loyalty.
2. Conduct A Website Check-Up
Your website is one of the most important marketing tools for your business.
With so many options available to guests these days, any friction in navigating your site, finding the desired information, or getting a clear visual sense of what you offer, could be the difference between you securing or losing a booking.
When assessing your current website, take a step back and think like a guest—what if I knew nothing about what you are offering?
What information is most important? Does the imagery entice me to visit?
Seemingly simple steps like ensuring your menu, location, contact information, and online reservation system (if applicable) are easy to find is crucial.
Keep your menus up- to-date, and remove any old information.
Pull up your site on your phone and ensure it’s as easy to navigate on a mobile device as a desktop.
Make sure the photography accurately reflects your current offerings.
Is your site ADA compliant, in line with the most current WCAG guidelines?
The first quarter of the year is the perfect time to go through this checklist and make any necessary updates.
3. Have a Photography Strategy
High quality photos that showcase your offerings in a visually appealing way are one of the most important marketing investments you can make.
This doesn’t have to mean thousands of dollars—working with a qualified agency to provide content planning and art direction can help stretch a budget and ensure that images are captured in ways that allow for use in multiple channels or campaigns.
With skilled art direction, it’s also possible to find high quality photographers or content creators willing to work with smaller budgets, and photographers will often build in discounts if you agree to use them for multiple shoots.
We often recommend smaller, well-planned quarterly shoots over larger, less frequent sessions.
One key advantage to this is as you build a relationship with a photographer, they will get to know you and your brand’s style, which makes shoots more efficient, and creates consistency in your imagery.
4. Take Full Advantage of all Digital Channels
Business listing sites like Google Business Page, review sites like Yelp, and reservation platforms like OpenTable/Resy/Tock, etc. are continuously adding tools that allow you to better market your business, and optimize it for search.
In addition to ensuring you have fully completed profiles with up-to-date information, many of these platforms allow you to add details about upcoming specials and events—Google has even begun populating a calendar of events listed on Business Pages directly into search results.
It’s also important to ensure you’re tagging your business with as many applicable keywords and available services as possible, which will also help ensure you’re appearing in guest searches.
5. Provide Outstanding [Digital] Customer Service
Social media channels have become one of the primary ways many guests interact with your brand.
Your Facebook and Instagram pages are no longer purely informational—they are two-way communication channels where many leave comments, ask questions, and expect to receive replies.
Ensuring someone on your team is responding to all messages received on digital platforms in a timely manner is crucial to establishing brand trust and loyalty, and retaining business.
Equally as important is that they’re using the right tone and language that accurately represents who you are as a brand.
A niche sparkling beverage company might use more lighthearted and playful language, while a fine dining restaurant may want to adopt a more sophisticated, professional tone.
Knowing who you are as a brand, and how you want to live in the hearts and minds of your guests, is key to cultivating your voice.
6. Assess Brand Collaborations
Partnering with another brand to create a unique product or experience can serve to expand your business’s reach by exposing it to new audiences, and giving your current fans a reason to revisit.
As creative collaborations become increasingly commonplace—including stunt flavors, food and fashion partnerships, gaming integrations, and celebrity endorsements—it’s important to assess your budget and goals when deciding who to approach for a partnership.
- What do you want to be known for and does the partner brand align with this?
- If working with a smaller budget, what else are you bringing to the table?
- Are you most interested in raising brand awareness, or driving immediate revenue?
- Is securing media coverage an important goal?
All of these factors should be considered when evaluating potential collaborations.
7. Develop A Paid Social Media Plan
If you aren’t running paid social media campaigns, you are missing an important part of your social media program.
Social media advertising is not only for big brands; a post boosting strategy and/or a small awareness campaign can greatly benefit businesses of all sizes.
Putting dollars behind your content allows you to increase its reach beyond just your followers, engaging specific target audiences.
You can begin with a budget as small as a few hundred dollars a month, and optimize your spend, your content, and your targeting based upon the results.
Testing out post boosting and ad campaigns can be a relatively low cost, low risk way to level up your marketing.
8. Leverage UGC
User-generated content (UGC) is particularly meaningful for Gen Z, who often promote brands they love, and look to other consumers for honest reviews.
As the demand for UGC has risen significantly, creators specifically dedicated to producing UGC for brands have become their own niche.
With an increasing number of consumers seeking authenticity in marketing, leveraging Instagram and TikTok content from users who are willing to share feedback on your services or products is a great way to increase trust among your target audience, develop community, and increase brand visibility.
9. Budget for Influencers
According to Statista, the global influencer marketing market value stood at $21.1 billion U.S. dollars as of 2023, having more than tripled since 2019.
The days of influencers posting in exchange for only products or services are waning.
Influencers now charge a premium for their highly engaged audiences, further defining the differences between influencers, content creators, and UGC creators.
To remain competitive, influencers are spending more time creating high-quality, customized content—including photos and videos—often across multiple platforms.
In turn, brands need to prepare to spend more of their marketing budget on these partnerships.
ABOUT CARBONATE
Carbonate is a brand communications and creative services agency specializing in food, beverage, restaurants, hotels, and hospitality tech/startups.
Carbonate builds, reinvigorates, and grows existing brands and hospitality concepts—taking an integrated approach to brand development and marketing, with services including strategy, design, public relations, and social media.
Now in its 16th edition, the agency’s annual Hospitality Trends Report has become an anticipated resource for industry professionals planning for the year ahead. Follow along @carbonategroup.
