Note: 2020Media.com’s online ordering service is a free and easy way for UK restaurants to add online takeaway ordering. With a branded online menu, restaurants receive orders via the free order management app. It does not interfere or overlap with existing delivery-based apps. Customers pay on collection of their order.
In this post you can read about:
- How to set up a restaurant website that helps you sell
- How to get started with social media for your restaurant
- How to get ready for online ordering
The Perfect Restaurant Website
Before you start building a restaurant website, aiming to increase sales, it is good to mention that online orders occur only as a result of visitors converting on your website. Obviously, you might say. But it’s actually common that in the process of building the website, people defocus from these two main objectives:
- Converting visits to orders and table bookings: Always keep in mind how inpatient your visitors are and how quickly one can leave your online restaurant. Thus, a good website design is about serving your clients fast and offering a nice experience.
- Getting new potential clients from the search engines: Just like in the offline world, you need visibility, you need to be noticed. Online, the busiest street is the first page of the search result. You can get your website listed there with proper SEO.
Visitors can forgive you for an old or less polished design, but not for missing essential information. There is a set of things that one expects to find on your website.
The essentials of your restaurant website
Since you are building your website to promote your business, make sure people can reach out to you. So have:
- Contact details: Phone numbers, email address and opening hours. Keep all of these in plain sight, for example in one of the top corners or bottom page.
- Location: You need at least a picture of a map with your location. The proper way though is to have a dynamic map snippet, so that customers can pinpoint your location faster.
- Eat-in Gallery: If you also put pictures with the location in your website, make sure they are vivid – pictured with the restaurant team or with customers ordering and/or eating-in. Pictures with the empty space after closure may be good if you want to rent-out the space but not so good for promoting your restaurant dine-in experience.
- Social buttons: Let your customers now that you are present on the social networks. Not only is this another marketing channel you should not ignore, but it’s also a recommended SEO practice.
Next, your business:
- Menu extras: Your food is your main attraction, so make sure the best dishes of your menu are easy to find on the website with nice highlight pictures and good promo deals around. This also means staying away from pdf files. Use your best dish photos to tease visitor and make them visit your online ordering food menu.
- Special offers: If you have some special offers or seasonal promotions, then make them stand out on your website. Customers love deals and discounts.
- Online ordering: If you are offering ordering (pickup, delivery or simply ordering ahead), make this available online as well. Read more about it in advantages of online food ordering.
- Table Reservations Online: If you have tables to book then allow people to also book a table online, this will give them more reasons to visit your website more often and will also help you solve table booking requests accurate and faster.
- Delivery areas: In case you are doing delivery, make sure your clients would notice the areas in which you operate and any delivery fees.
2020Media’s plans include the option for us to build you a complete restaurant website that does all the above and more!
Get started with your restaurant Facebook page
If you’re in the food delivery business, then you know by now that success is not only based on the premium quality of your products and services, but also on knowing your customers well and developing a close relationship with them. While creating a page for your restaurant is easy, creating engagement and advertising your business requires some more sustained effort.
Complete the About page
It is good to mention that a Facebook business page for a restaurant is a different type of page than your personal profile. To publish our ordering button you need to have administration rights on the Facebook page of that restaurant.
If you don’t even have a page, start by creating one. While logged in to your account, click on Create Page and start filling in your restaurant profile.
The about page is indexed by Google, so take the time to fill in your profile completely. Be very descriptive and keyword-rich (example: Indian restaurant downtown, pizza place with fast delivery etc). Also, don’t forget to link your website.
Add the online ordering app
Once you get to online ordering, don’t forget to add the ordering app from 2020Media!
Facebook provides a main call to action button (the blue one) which you can add to your restaurant profile to point to your online ordering page. You can use the smart link we provide so when people click on the ‘Start Order’ button, it opens up your online menu in a new tab.
How to get ready for online ordering
Some restaurant owners are reluctant to get started with online food ordering. It can seem like a costly, complex and time-consuming process to put in place or difficult to maintain.
So they either give up or completely outsource this part. But then the entire setups becomes inflexible or too expensive. Other solutions are less reliable or miss too many features. Maybe it feels like there is no easy way.
So we at 2020Media.com took it upon ourselves to talk with restaurant owners like you and see what they needed. How does online food ordering system work in their favour? The rules of the game were simple common sense:
- It shouldn’t eat away the restaurant’s profits;
- It needs to be set up easily, by non-technical people who cook yummy dishes, not software programs;
- It should be low-maintenance;
- Most of all, it should work for business owners and food lovers alike and make the latter come back soon.
And that’s exactly what we did and more. In fact, we understood that restaurants needed something reliable that will help them grow. And we made it so affordable that it’s actually free, which means it costs you a lot more not to use it.
And by free we don’t mean taking commissions or displaying ads for you or your customers, we hate those too 🙂
How does online food ordering system work?
- Your customer places a food order on your website or Facebook page.
- The order is instantly pushed to your smartphone or tablet where you can review it via the free order taking app we provide.
- You decide the pickup time/delivery time and your answer is pushed right away, which makes the entire process short and effective.
- You start cooking and can come back to the order taking app anytime to see past or any pending orders.
The best part about it is that it’s as custom as you need it to be and takes the shape of the business using it.
Sounds good, what do I need to set it up?
Visit our Online Order page for Takeaways and read about our plans (they start from Free!). You can start the process online but you are welcome to call or email us.