How to Build a Virtual Restaurant Brand With a Strong Identity

Traditionally, restaurateurs are more concerned with the food, service, and decor than a restaurant’s marketing. Virtual brand building and digital marketing are their new challenges, especially as more restaurants experiment with concepts like ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants to reach new customers.

But without a physical space and front-of-house team providing a warm welcome and great hospitality, you may worry about how customers will find you, how you will differentiate from the competition, and how you will keep customers coming back. 

Here we’ll attempt to put your mind at ease. Providing excellent hospitality and a great customer experience with a virtual restaurant brand is undoubtedly possible. You have to get creative.

First, let’s define what we mean by virtual restaurant. Then, we’ll get practical tips and strategies for building and marketing a virtual restaurant brand.

What is a Virtual Restaurant?

A virtual restaurant has menus, chefs, and a kitchen but no physical dining room. Meals are prepared for delivery – or pick-up – and customers place orders online on the restaurant’s website or app or from a third-party delivery or ordering service.

Because there is no physical space to hook the restaurant’s identity, the branding of a virtual restaurant is everything. The restaurant’s identity must come through in the branding, messaging, online menus, and packaging, as that is all the customer sees.

7 Steps to Build a Successful Virtual Restaurant Brand

1. Analyze Your Goals & Existing Business

The first step in creating your virtual restaurant brand is to figure out what you want to achieve. You might have a vital mission in mind already, or you might be searching for the big idea. Either way, you need to drill down into the nitty-gritty of what the essence of your brand will be. 

You may want to serve a specific community with the food you love and know well. You might have an end goal in mind already, or you may have noticed a market gap and made it your goal to fill it.

Often, a restaurant will take the opportunity to add a virtual brand to their existing business to use the kitchen more efficiently. If you can see how your existing resources could be leveraged at a quieter time, this could be the inspiration for your virtual brand. For example, offering a breakfast menu using many of the same ingredients as your dinner menu. 

Whatever your goals are, digging deep into your motivations and examining your existing resources is crucial to help you choose the right concept.

2. Choose Your Concept

Many restaurant owners considering moving into the virtual restaurant world are racking their brains, thinking: “How do you create a new brand out of nothing?”

Ask yourself the following questions to boost clarity: 

• What problem are you solving? 

• What makes your offering unique and exciting? 

• Are you filling a gap in the market you know about? Or are you offering a new concept to maximize your kitchen space and resources?

• Are you set on the location of your dark kitchen – or are you searching for the right place for your concept?

Answering these questions will involve thoroughly researching the delivery area of your site, the local competition, and the demographics of the people you’ll be marketing your business to. This will help you determine the right messaging and branding for your virtual restaurant.

3. Name Your Brand

There’s always a heated debate at restaurant industry conferences surrounding the importance of a restaurant brand’s name. 

On one hand, a catchy name can catapult a brand to viral success. Mother Clucker was an instant hit as a virtual brand, for example, while unfortunately, My Dung restaurant in California has permanently closed.

On the other hand, numerous examples of seemingly dull or meaningless names have seen enormous success because the people just loved the food! 

With a virtual brand, though, the name of your restaurant is the first impression you’re giving the customer, and it’s one of the only ways to differentiate your brand from competitors on a delivery app’s feed or in search results. 

Whether you choose a trendy-sounding name or go for a cheesy pun – Frying Nemo is an excellent example for a fish and chip shop – your brand’s reputation should reflect the values and branding of your restaurant. 

This might be overt, like Joe’s Family Pizza Joint, or more subtle – for example, The Manor House for a fine-dining restaurant brand. This is where your goals and mission statement will help you create a name that gives the right impression to those online scrollers looking for a bite.

4. Build Your Brand Identity

Now that you have nailed your values, mission, concept, and name, you can build the rest of your branding, including your custom logo design, brand colors, and tagline. Menu design and photography are also important but often overlooked parts of this package.

Your menu is one of the key differentiators and is especially important for an online-only restaurant. After your name, it is the first contact point a customer has with your brand. It should give them all the information they need to make a purchase decision, including clear descriptions of what is in each dish, an idea of how much to order for a good feed, and enticing photos to capture attention and drive sales.

The style of your photos can become a crucial part of your brand identity. Do you prefer top-down images or side-on? Simple or funky backgrounds? Colorful dishes with many elements or pared-back plating? 

All the personality and flair that goes into your dishes should be on display for your customers to see on your online menu.

5. Invest in the Right Tech 

A virtual restaurant relies on a technology stack for its essential functions; every step of the process has a tech component, from the ordering system to the kitchen organization to delivery management. 

That makes getting the right tech in place from the start vital. To gain the confidence a reliable tech partner provides for long-term success, ensure you have the tech in place for online ordering, kitchen organization, delivery logistics, and menu management – a less obvious but vital component for an efficient virtual restaurant.

Key considerations include: 

• Will you use delivery partners or take delivery in-house? Or a combination of the two? 

• Will you use an ordering marketplace or your site or app?

• Do your tech systems talk to each other and share data across the system?

• Can you get reliable insights from your customer data?

• Is your tech scalable across multiple locations?

Whichever options you choose, getting the right tech in place is vital to manage your delivery operations seamlessly. More on that below.

6. Drive Traffic to Your Virtual Restaurant

One of the most prominent concerns restaurateurs have when jumping into the virtual restaurant world is how to drive traffic to an invisible restaurant. The good news is that it’s not as complicated as it sounds. There are many ways to build an audience online and drive traffic to your ordering site or platform.

Get to Grips With Digital Marketing

With innovative new restaurant business models come new ways of marketing. Nowadays, brands routinely use automated email marketing, online ads, and search ads to drive traffic to ordering websites. 

Many modern delivery tech platforms have built-in tools to help you get to grips with marketing your restaurant online. Or they will integrate with tech platforms that specialize in marketing. Mailchimp, for example, for email marketing campaigns.

However, if you’re new to digital marketing, you might consider getting the help of an agency. 

Social Media Presence

Social media is a crucial part of your marketing strategy online. Restaurants are getting extraordinary results by creating content on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to build an audience. Then, leveraging your loyal fans and turn them into paying customers. This approach will take longer, but the benefits of an activated audience are huge in the longer term.

Don’t Neglect Traditional Methods

With all these new and exciting forms of marketing, it can be easy to forget the basics. Successful methods of marketing, like posting menus through doors in your delivery area, TV and radio advertising, and good old word-of-mouth, can still have a considerable impact. It might be just what you need, depending on your target audience. 

Leverage Your Existing Customer Base (If You Have One)

Suppose you already run a restaurant brand and are creating a virtual restaurant to complement your existing business. In that case, you can bring your existing customer base to your new brand. Although you don’t want to cannibalize your loyal following, a measured approach to re-marketing to your current customers could give you a solid support base for your new virtual brand.

7. How to Keep Customers Coming Back

Once your brand is up and running and your marketing efforts are driving traffic to your ordering site, it’s job done, right? Wrong! Now is the crucial step of building loyalty in your customer base. 

Social media and other marketing tools will help, but there is more you can put in place to ensure customers keep coming back for more rather than choosing your competition.

Loyalty programs are one of the most effective ways to boost repeat business. This could be email campaigns with special offers or a full-on loyalty scheme where you offer customers rewards for repeat purchases.

Monitoring and responding to reviews online is crucial to getting a 40,000-foot view of your customer satisfaction levels. Your customers will tell you exactly what they think of your food and service, giving you invaluable information on what to improve to get them to come back. Responding to positive and negative reviews and dealing with issues before they blow into a digital storm is also essential.

One of the more subtle ways to boost repeat business is to analyze your data. Business intelligence can help you keep speed and quality high, giving customers a better experience and encouraging repeat business. 

You can also analyze who is purchasing your food, at what times, and how weather, pricing, and other factors affect this. Then, you can feed this information back into your business to make improvements and boost customer loyalty constantly.

Whatever Brand You Create, Keep it Visible with The Best Technology. y

Whether you want to add a virtual brand to your existing dine-in offering or create a new virtual restaurant business, Deliverect is the ideal tech platform for managing a virtual restaurant or an entire dark kitchen. 

Built to optimize every aspect of online ordering and delivery management, Deliverect helps virtual restaurants accept orders from multiple delivery partners and their ordering apps. They are automatically routed to your POS and your kitchen display system. 

Deliverect also has delivery dispatch tools and business intelligence insights gathered from the streamlined tech system you have in place. The Deliverect Analytics feature gives you accurate, timely insights. You need to know your best customers and how to keep them engaged and coming back for more.

As you worry about how to keep your brand relevant and visible, at least you won’t have to worry about the efficiency of your delivery operations.

To get a clearer idea of how Deliverect can help you as you build your virtual restaurant brand, request a demo today.