The current crisis has posed significant stress and challenges, especially to F&B business operations. In Singapore, the government has imposed a circuit breaker to reduce the spread of COVID-19. This has resulted in many cafes, restaurants and food outlets having to cease dine-in operations, and change, at least temporarily, to do takeaways or delivery.
However, delivery platforms take a substantial cut in the form of delivery fees, which may range from 28% to 30%, and businesses may have to lower prices of their takeaway menus to remain competitive.
Eu Gene Ang, Lead Trainer at ClickAcademy Asia, shares 3 ideas you can apply to tide you through these challenging times.
Here are three ideas that employ the power of social media and digital marketing to increase your cash flow during this time:
1. Look at your existing loyal customer base.
Create attractive long term deals or gift vouchers that your loyal customers will appreciate and purchase. The advantage of this is that you can increase your cash flow during this period for your business operations and your customers get a value that can be utilised over time.
To assist small businesses to tide through the COVID-19 situation, ChopeAndSave introduced a gift card initiative that offers online gift cards for customers to purchase. This website provides a wide range of choices such as food and beverages, health and beauty to home and living too.
You can also target customers that are similar to your loyal customers by using the power of Facebook's lookalike audience or Google's similar audience to find customers that are similar to your current loyal customer base so that you can offer the promotion to a wider range of customers.
2. Use location-based marketing
Radius-based targeting can be done on Facebook and Google, which allows you to select your advertisements to be shown to audiences only in a radius within walking around your outlet so that potential customers can easily pick up their orders.
While you have to set aside a small budget to do this, it also minimises the dependence on delivery platforms with higher fees per order.
Song Fa Bak Kut Teh, a restaurant selling pork bone soup, offers a discount for walk-in takeaways.
3. Strengthen your content for social media and digital marketing
Great images, great copywriting can get your customer's attention and make them feel that their takeaway meals are of the same quality as they would have in a dine-in experience.
A hotpot restaurant offering a delivery package of a variety of ingredients needed for a hotpot meal, just as customers would have in their restaurants.
Boost your digital marketing with ClickAcademy Asia's Professional Certificate in F&B Lead Generation which covers digital marketing strategies to capture more sales amidst the crisis period, with live social media campaigns to immediately generate more leads and sales, as well as content production tools (worth more than $500) to create more social media content in the future.
On top of that, get personalised coaching for your company to guide you through the process.
The programme is supported by Enterprise Singapore. Participating businesses enjoy 95% course fee funding and only pay $400 (excl. GST). Upon successful launch of your advertising campaign, get a launch bonus of $500.
Find out more here: https://events.clickacademyasia.com/clickacademy-asia-raft-programme/