10 Tips for Marketing Your Dark Kitchen Online (2024)

Digital marketing is crucial to the success of any restaurant, but it’s especially crucial for dark kitchens that lack footfall or a storefront to attract diners.

Your online presence is everything when running a delivery-only restaurant, a.k.a dark kitchen.

It’s your only means of communicating with your customers and building a loyal base. But if you’re used to traditional restaurant marketing, you may not be familiar with numerous social media platforms, delivery apps, novel advertising methods, and more.

That’s why we’ve distilled the information into ten actionable tips to get you on the track to success with your online orders. Once the foundations are in place and you start seeing results, you can examine what works best and what is less effective and hone your digital marketing strategy from there.

10 tips for marketing your ghost kitchen online

1. Own your social media presence

You want to be active on as many platforms as possible. But if you have limited resources, pick the most relevant platforms for your business and concentrate your efforts on those. Here are the biggest channels to focus on.

Instagram

The perfect channel to showcase visual content and tease customers into trying out your food. Your Instagram content can create a stronger connection between your brand and customers. 

You can include product photos, playful videos, and behind-the-scenes photos. 

Remember to interact with your customers directly in the comments.

Keep it dynamic: share content from your loyal customers and highlight news and special features in your stories.

Facebook 

With its huge audience of almost 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook lets you pull customers in by informing them of certain promotions or special offers. Make it possible for them to order your food or download content or discount codes with one click. Make sure that your posts engage people by adding calls to action. Learning how to schedule a post on Facebook will save you time and enable you to build a regular posting schedule.

Now you can sell food on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram with Deliverect Social Media Ordering —Learn more

X (Formerly Twitter)

X, another huge social media platform with approximately 330 million active users, is an excellent medium for engaging with your customers. Retweet customer accounts that mention your brand or build brand identity by tweeting your point of view. 

For example, if you own a vegan restaurant brand, you could write about your commitment to decreasing pollution by supporting a charity or highlighting your use of reusable packaging.

TikTok

One of the fastest-growing social platforms, with an almost 1 billion user base, TikTok is hot right now. More and more restaurants are waking up to its potential. 

If you’re targeting a younger audience, adding videos to TikTok is a great way to reach them. Showcase a new dish with a short video, show how you implement safety measures, or create a video with an element of comedy if it suits your brand. 

2. Take advantage of digital customer retention

Once you’ve convinced a customer to buy a dish once, you want them to come back again and again. It’s much cheaper to retain a customer who has already shown interest than to pursue a new one.

In the digital world, you need digital solutions. You can offer many incentives to make sure you get a repeat purchase, like loyalty rewards, a discount on their next order, or a special offer when they buy a meal for a friend.

When you own a business, your aim is to build a strong relationship with your customers. This is called customer relationship management. When a customer orders their first meal, you can use their email address or phone number to retarget them.

"When using emails, pay close attention to DMARC reports to ensure your emails are being authenticated and safe."

You can use these channels to let your customers know you have a new menu or a special holiday offer, which can encourage repeat purchases.

 3. Encourage online referrals 

Try to create as many positive referrals as possible on different platforms. This will help your business get found more quickly online. 

Encourage your best customers to leave reviews on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and other social channels, as well as on dedicated review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp. These sites are important as they often appear at the top of search results. They all help get your brand out there.

You can even incentivize customers to leave a positive review by offering discounts or other rewards. But something as simple as a note in each takeaway bag asking for a review can quickly have a big impact.

4. Consider online advertising

Online advertising is an excellent way to build traffic to your website when you’ve just set up your company. Sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Google offer paid advertisements, which you pay for every customer who clicks on the ad. That means you only pay when a customer shows interest.

Paying for advertising is an excellent way to boost traffic. You can monitor the effectiveness of your ads and adjust your ad spend based on their performance.

5. Managing reviews 

Repeat after us: reviews are the way to go! Keeping your customers happy is essential; reviews can give you immediate feedback. 

Some of your reviews will be immediately actionable: if a customer is unhappy because the food arrived cold, you might want to change your packaging. If someone comments that the salad had too much dressing, you might want to consider putting your condiments in a separate container.

What your customers say about you online matters to potential customers. Therefore, it’s important to reply to your reviews—especially the negative ones. Answering the customer and explaining what went wrong or letting them know you’ll do better next time shows them that you care and want to make amends.

6. Use email marketing to send out a regular newsletter

For digital marketers, email lists are like gold dust. Email marketing is one of your most effective tools, generating up to 360% return on investment, according to the digital marketing experts at HubSpot.

Once you’ve obtained your customers' email addresses, you can email them weekly or monthly to keep them updated on new offers or meals on your menu. This can help remind them to order again or get them engaged with a special offer, to name just a few of the possibilities.

Once customers get used to receiving your regular offers and updates by email, they will look forward to the newsletter. This can be a powerful tool to foster loyalty and repeat business.

7. Lay the foundations with an attractive website

Your website is your ghost kitchen’s home online. It gives your potential customers an overall picture of your brand and acts as a hub where they can find links to your social media channels, view your menus, and even place an order. 

Use appealing visuals of your dishes to entice customers to place an order and high-quality images or videos showcasing your brand’s character. Since you don’t have a physical dining room, this is the palace to showcase your restaurant’s ambiance in the real world. This will help to draw more customers in.

Try to keep it simple so as not to overwhelm visitors. To encourage customers to take action, you should include your restaurant’s story, links to menus and social media channels, and buttons such as ‘Order Now’ or ‘Get 10% Off Your First Order’.

Investing in a good website is crucial to your online success—visuals, page loading time, quality content, and mobile device friendliness are important to monitor. We recommend hiring a professional to set up and maintain your website. It’s your online sales window, so it should be impeccable!

Visuals, page loading time, quality content, and mobile device friendliness are important to monitor.

8. Get on the food delivery apps

You can either build your own food-ordering app or set up an account on delivery platforms such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats, or Takeaway.com. The advantage of using a third-party app is that you get access to its large customer base and consistent supply of delivery drivers. 

These days, most customers order on mobile devices rather than desktops. Make sure your app is available on the Apple and Android app stores and has a dynamic design so it displays correctly on all devices. 

One problem with using multiple delivery partners is that it can be difficult to control orders as they come in. Juggling tablets and re-punching orders is becoming a problem of the past, though, as order aggregation and management systems like Deliverect help virtual restaurants take control of their orders by pushing orders from multiple delivery partners straight into the POS.

9. Get on top of menu management

Keep your menu attractive with pictures, accurate product descriptions, and unique names for meals or combo deals. Consider which dishes travel best and are the most efficient to produce. In a ghost kitchen, every second counts, and it is vital that food arrives in good condition.

Apart from the visual aspect, aligning your menus on your website and other platforms is essential. Make sure the branding and design are the same across platforms and that menus are consistent, too. 

This can be a considerable challenge when using multiple third-party delivery platforms. Deliverect can help you easily manage your menus on all different platforms from one place.

10. Analyze your online traffic

Moving forward with your business is about getting to know your customers. What’s your customer’s average age, and what are they interested in? Are there different preferences in different areas? 

Once you know who your customers are, you can target them with the right information through the right communication channel. This will help you retain existing customers and engage with new ones.

Getting your brand out there is very important. You can have the best food in the world – but if nobody knows about it, you’re toast. Ensure you consider all of these aspects when setting up your dark kitchen.

Set your ghost kitchen up for online success

If you can implement these 10 foundational digital marketing steps, you’ll already be streaking ahead of the competition. Consistency in branding, photos, and communication style is the key to unlocking the potential of your ghost kitchen. 

When you control how your brand is perceived online and are active across the relevant platforms, you can move customers between channels seamlessly and maximize your kitchen's potential.

This is called the omnichannel approach, and it’s vital to know when marketing a ghost kitchen in the modern restaurant market. 

By following these foundational digital marketing tips, your ghost kitchen can have an effective online presence, and you can stay ahead of the competition.

Find out more about the modern omnichannel restaurant here to boost your chances of success and market your ghost kitchen the right way.