Great content is essential for increased visibility and can impact your food business performance. Do you manage a restaurant, own a food blog, or share food content but need more content ideas? You’ve come to the right place! In this article, we go through some unique content ideas for your food business.
15 Content Ideas For Restaurants and Food Businesses
Whether it’s for your Instagram page, website, or Facebook account, the following content ideas are a great way to promote your food business:
1: Pictures of Food
This doesn’t have to be said, but good-looking food will always catch your audience’s attention. Take different pictures of your meals and share them as content for your followers. The photos could be you showcasing your specials, promoting a new dish on the menu, or highlighting the ingredients in your best-selling meal. A great tip is to always take great, professional-looking, high-quality pictures for your social media pages.
2. Restaurant Interior
If you need more content marketing ideas for restaurants, consider showcasing your restaurant’s interior and decor. This is especially a great idea if you have incredible scenery, as it gives your restaurant a sense of ambiance. You can also take pictures of other things in your restaurant, like the menu, the artwork, and the scenic views. Another great content idea is touring your restaurant on a live video with your followers.
3. Brand Story
Your audience loves food, but that isn’t the only reason they will stick to your page. One of the best content ideas for restaurants is sharing the origin of your business. Were you inspired by a grandmother’s recipe or a food you tried while in another city? Why did you choose a particular name or logo for your restaurant? Is there a meaning behind it? Let your audience know about it.
You can also share similar stories like the difficulty in starting your business, your plans for the restaurant, or the reason you decided to stick to a location. Short clips, videos, carousels, and live are great ways to tell your brand story.
4. Share Reviews
One of the most effective content marketing ideas for restaurants and other businesses is sharing reviews. It works every time because it increases the likelihood of your audience buying from you!
If you make a post telling your audience that your jollof rice is delicious, they will be like, ‘yea, okay.’ But if one of your customers writes a comment saying they agree with you and your jollof rice is indeed great, you will be able to spark interest in your followers.
So, always encourage your customers to drop reviews and try to distribute the reviews so that it reaches a broader audience. Share the reviews on your website, Instagram story, blog, or packaging materials.
5. Highlight Your Vendors
A great way to bring attention to your suppliers and, by extension, your brand is by highlighting them on your page. Is there a farmer you source ingredients from or poultry you get your protein? Why not shout out to them? You can explain why you chose them, how you met them and why you love their supplies.
Shouting out your vendors is one of the most underrated content marketing ideas for small businesses. First, you get to show people what goes into their plate and where it comes from. Also, your vendor (if they have an online presence) will probably repost your content which will get to the front of their audience.
6. Showcase Employees
People love faces. Your followers would love to see the faces behind your business, and a great way to do this is by showcasing your employees as often as possible. You can share pictures or videos of them busy at work or get one of your employees to share an honest testimonial or experience working at the restaurant.
7. Highlight Special Holidays
New Year, Christmas, and Eid ul Fitri are all possible festivals your followers will celebrate. A great social media content idea for restaurants is celebrating with your followers during these special holidays. Consider offering a promotion or discount, like a 10% discount on items purchased that day or a free drink on all purchases.
8. Share User Generated Content
User Generated Content (UGC) describes content created by your customers to shout out your brand. One of the best content ideas for food brands is UGC, as it adds credibility to your brand. UGC also reduces the effort of creating content from scratch, as you just need to reshare what your customers have already posted. A good UGC hack is to monitor social mentions of your brand so that you know when someone tags you or shares content about your brand.
Note: It’s best to ask permission from the original poster before resharing it on your platform. You can do this by leaving a comment or sending a direct message.
9. Hold a Contest
Freebies and giveaways are a great way to get more audience and encourage your followers to engage more with your content. You can give away a discount on their next food order, movie tickets, a meal planner, or anything you think would interest your followers.
A great strategy to attract more audience through contests is asking your followers to tag their friends, comment, or like your posts.
10. GIF Drop
A fun and relatable content idea for food brands is hosting a GIF drop by creating simple prompts like ‘describe your current mood with a GIF’ or ‘post a GIF that explains how your Monday is going.’ A GIF drop is a great way to engage your customers and get them to participate on your posts.
11. Promote Offers and Deals
Are you running discounts on your dishes or giving out free drinks for Christmas? Post about you so your followers will be aware of the promotion. You can create a graphic design with details of the offer written in bold to get readers’ attention.
12. XX Ways to Cook a Type of Food
One of the most popular content ideas for food bloggers is sharing cooking tutorials. You can share a video of you making a meal while highlighting the steps or ingredients used. Also, you can share some tips, hacks, or ingredients for a great meal experience. This type of content works best on Youtube, but there are techniques to make short comprehensive videos that can work on Instagram and TikTok.
13: Ask me Anything Session
One of the best Instagram content ideas for restaurants is using the ‘Ask Me Anything’ feature. This new Instagram feature lets customers and followers ask you questions while you reply to them. You can reply to them through text or consider doing a live video to make it even more elaborate.
14. Upcoming Events
Are you hosting an event, celebrating a milestone, or serving food at a hangout? You should update your followers about those events to keep them interested in your brand. Tell them when your business is one year of age, and thank them once you get 3k followers.
You can also consider highlighting your customers’ events if you have a walk-in restaurant. People visit restaurants every time to celebrate special events like birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, promotions, etc.
Why not take pictures of these special moments (with permission, of course) and share them with your followers? You can also do this with your staff, your friends and yourself.
15: Behind the Scenes
Another content marketing idea for restaurants is showing followers what goes on behind the scenes. This could be a minute video of your head chef busy at work, your barista mixing drinks, suppliers delivering the ingredients, or the hygiene measures you’ve put in place in your restaurant.
Tips to Improve Your Food Content Creation
Now that you are familiar with content ideas you can use for your food business, let’s take a look at some tips to boost your content creation strategy.
1: Use Hashtags
A hashtag is a great way to get your posts to a wide audience within your industry. A good hashtag strategy is to use those relevant to your industry. You can also look for current trending hashtags to promote your posts.
Another idea is to create a custom hashtag specific to your brand. This will make it easy for people to reference your brands and encourage them to use them in their posts.
2. Reply to Comments
While this isn’t a form of content for food businesses, it is a great strategy to increase engagement and improve your reputation. When you make a post asking a question, you can expect some of your followers’ comments. It’s a good idea to respond to those comments, even if it’s just with an emoji.
Also, you should be on the lookout for negative comments and find a way to address the issue while defending yourself. For instance, if a customer complains about the cost of your food. You can apologize and then explain that the food is expensive because you strive to use the highest quality materials.
3. Post Videos
One of the best social media content ideas for restaurants is posting a lot of videos.
Video content outperforms other types of content by far, and the great news is that there are many ways you can incorporate videos into your content. You can use Instagram Reels, Stories, Live, or even organize a takeover with an influencer. However you decide to do it, ensure you use a lot of videos to promote your food business.
4. Involve Your Customers
A good marketing strategy to improve customer relationships and retention is to involve them in certain decisions for your company. Involving your customers or seeking their opinions will make them feel valued and increase their level of engagement.
Are you trying to add a new dish to the menu? Want to open a new branch? Not sure what meals to offer a discount? Why not create a poll to ask your customers?
Bottom Line:
Creating content can be tedious and time-consuming, but it’s an excellent investment for your food business. The content ideas for food business discussed in this article should help you up your content marketing game. Mix up different content types and post consistently for the best results from your marketing efforts.
Also, in case you handle your content yourself, consider outsourcing your content needs. This will help you focus more on other aspects of your food business.