Stop Broadcasting Yourself - Move Forward To The New Best Restaurant Marketing Campaigns

At the end of 2024, Likaa interviewed 10 well-known restaurants and experienced F&B insiders in Hong Kong. Wanting to understand how their current strategies were contributing to the best restaurant marketing campaigns, we asked which channels led to the most bookings.

They identified 4 top contenders:

1. Restaurant Listing Apps (Delivery Apps, Chope, etc)

2. Traditional Marketing (Local advertising, events, loyalty program, direct bookings etc. )

3. Online Reviews / Maps (Google Maps, Openrice, etc)

4. Digital Marketing (SEO, IG, FB, KOL, content and email marketing, etc)

   
   

However, they all expressed concerns about existing marketing strategies.The biggest challenge being their established approaches only help recruit new customers but “fail to retain them.” 

The data from our market research showed that 60-80% of an average restaurant's profit comes from their repeat guests (except for those in tourist areas). But as hospitality leaders - if we can increase customer retention by as little as 5% our profits can be boosted by as much as 95% according to global management consulting firm Bain & Company.

In 2025, it's time to remind ourselves that the best marketing campaigns should be effective at helping us to keep customers coming back.

What Are The Right Customer Retention Strategies for Restaurants?

We all know customer retention is a real challenge for busy F&B professionals. 

The travel and F&B industries lose almost 50% of the customers after their first visit, we can't blame it entirely on the quality of our food or service. When you review your restaurant marketing strategy, how much do you allocate to focus on existing customers? In comparison, how much do you put into broader outreach for acquiring new customers?

Retaining customers requires a multifaceted approach, focusing on quality, consistency, engagement, and adaptability. A veteran of the restaurant industry told us that in 2025 they are already planning to restructure their budget to put 60-70% into marketing to existing customers.

Offer discounts?

So far, discounts as incentives have really been one of the most effective ways to keep customers eager to return for another meal.

Maybe you have a big discount or a tactical campaign that hopes to use coupons or special pricing to attract existing customers back, but how do you spread the word? How can guests save and remember your offers? And how will you know if they liked what you presented?

Here are what restaurants are currently doing:

• Using email to talk to guests 

• Posting on social media 

• Paying KOLs

• Advertising on apps

• Hosting events

So why are we still not satisfied with the results? It’s clear that the methods we already have in place are not enough to help us outperform others in this highly competitive F&B industry. 

Something fundamental is still missing. Your genuine relationship with customers is missing. Have you ever considered if your previous diners feel any sense of belonging when they think about your brand or your restaurant?

If you're just unilaterally communicating what you want to communicate, which we call “broadcasting yourself”. And in 2025, you’re going to have to do better. 

Put yourself in your guest’s shoes, imagine how many of these “broadcasts” they receive a day. In fact, consumers have started to move away from this notion of the “broadcasted” self since 2019. 

Today's internet is littered with exaggerated content and inauthentic images, these issues of misinformation, lack of trust, and poor brand engagement have become the biggest threats to restaurant marketing campaigns.

Online Community

Social sharing behavior is declining. Every brand and restaurant does it, but consumers mostly trust recommendations from people they know, like friends and family, or those with whom they have a real connection. Social media-related suggestions and brand-owned recommendations are losing their efficacy.

Building your own community is the next chapter in customer retention strategies for restaurants. It’s also an ideal way to grow a receptive audience that goes beyond just passively absorbing information to actively joining in the conversation. This makes your community a terrific place to conduct a restaurant marketing campaign that encourages brand loyalty. 

The Value of Community

Community professionals typically evaluate the success of an online community in multiple ways. These are the people hired to run and manage community building initiatives and departments for businesses who have already discovered the immense potential that lies in keeping customers close and involved. Retention also ranks first on their list of metrics used to evaluate a community’s business value.

To retain each guest in your community after their first visit, create a welcoming online space filled with engaging topics and enjoyable activities. Focus on building genuine relationships, as trust and connection are crucial in influencing purchasing decisions.

What Is Community Marketing?

The root of community marketing is first building a safe space where groups of people can assemble based on common interests and shared experiences. Gaming enthusiasts get together to play, a group of art collectors might host discussions about their favorite creators, or a singer's fan base could gather to attend a concert - all of these can be interpreted as communities. 

Community marketing is similar to social media in that they both encourage people to socialize. Social media platforms are more geared towards encouraging self-expression and appreciation, but that doesn't always translate into prompting people to take action; whether it's through product recommendations, suggestions, or participation in brand-related activities. 

GWI, a consumer research and audience targeting company, asked users of community and social media sites how they felt about each platform. The chart below shows where community users are ahead of social media users, and 36% of them prefer online communities because they believe they can have more meaningful conversations there.

Community marketing allows your consumer to be a partner in the storytelling, not just a detached listener. Rather than just promoting products directly, community marketing emphasizes relationship-building among customers and potential customers. 

Perhaps, this is a step toward the future of brand engagement online.

How Do Restaurants Build A Community?

All of the motivations and strategies of community marketing revolve around how online community participants can increase their interaction and engagement with your restaurants. 

Remember - a successful community makes it possible and convenient for members to bond with fellow customers and your brand because everyone has aligned values and passions.

Read Building Community : The Future of Business and Branding to hear more about this topic.

Create a welcoming online space where your diners, followers, and anyone interested in your restaurant can connect and engage. This community should be a supportive and enjoyable environment for them to discuss their shared interests in food and life.

As a business, it’s your responsibility to cultivate these connections. When a waiter or restaurant manager notices a happy guest, it’s the perfect opportunity to reach out and invite them to join your online foodie community. By doing so, you not only enhance their experience but also strengthen their relationship with your brand.

Online communities are hugely prominent in most people’s daily lives and play an increasingly important role in both keeping us connected and exploring our personal interests. 

The content, topics, and activities of the community should be pitched in a way that motivates members to feel naturally curious about and excited to participate in. The best way to do this is to create a strategy and topic pillars based on their preferences and your cuisine type or restaurant niche. These could be categories such as a meet & eat event, introducing a new giveaway game, or rallying particular guests around their love of vegan food. Give your community opportunities for different but complimentary roles to emerge, and varying levels of engagement to form, so that everyone has a place where they feel comfortable helping to build the community together.

Mastering Community Marketing 

There are 2 types of programs helping restaurants run a community. 

Synchronous Marketing Tools  

This type of community synchronous marketing tool helps restaurants engage in live chat and stay in touch with customers in real-time. These tools can come in many forms, but the key is that the 2-way conversations take place instantly, including:

1. Live chats and discussions

2. Real-time coupon sending and receiving

3. Gamification

4. Community moderation

With these tools, even after your customers have left the restaurant, you can still interact with them in real time. Members can also socialize and chat with each other about different topics in different chat rooms. Instant feedback helps marketers adjust their messaging on the fly. Plus, the on-the-spot dialogues that pop up during synchronous tools build a sense of urgency and excitement around promotions or product launches.

Asynchronous Marketing Tools 

After building a community and increasing member engagement, restaurants should add asynchronous tools to level-up their marketing strategy. Asynchronous tools involve interactions and communications that do not require participants to be online at the same time, including:

1. Bulletin boards (showcasing coupons, campaigns, and events)

2. Surveys and polls

3. Curating personal collections (saving coupons, photos, and events)

4. Feedback mechanisms

Only 12% of diners are willing to leave a review for your restaurant, but you can keep the conversation going with 100% of them by giving them a place to speak their minds in your community.

With customers' feedback involved, your discounts and campaigns will be more relevant to their needs, and then, a series of content such as coupons, giveaway campaigns and tactical promotions released through asynchronous tools will greatly increase conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Perfectly Synced Community Based Marketing for Restaurants

An example of what synchronous and asynchronous marketing techniques look like when they’re combined is restaurant community builder - Likaa. It's a foodie app making it easy for restaurants and F&B insiders to host chat rooms, share discounts, and get honest feedback from the guests they value and want to welcome back.

Restaurants can easily launch real-time chat rooms with different themes according to your brand and marketing strategy; you can even use Likaa's built-in tool Likaa Coupon to generate all kinds of discount coupons, cash vouchers, and QR codes in seconds. Then text them in-app to your community in bulk or through DMs for your club members to collect and redeem.

Most importantly, Likaa comes with a series of Likaa Bots that can automatically help restaurants manage their community by blocking offensive comments or users, and organizing interactive giveaway campaigns & games that are programmed to announce winners at their conclusion. Restaurants can save big on manpower using Likaa, allowing hospitality professionals to focus on preparing delicious food and serving guests.

Let's Win From The Best Restaurant Marketing Campaigns

During the time we witnessed Reddit, the world's largest community platform, grow and flourish from its launch in 2005 to the present day giant, more and more research firms and business experts are calling out the fact that community marketing is on the rise. It has become the secret weapon behind many leadership teams in other industries, while more and more are scrambling to learn from community building first-movers so they can adopt processes that can help them stand out from the competition.

As we can see from the 2024 CMX Community Industry Trends Report, online communities continue to have a positive impact on organizations, with 83% of respondents agreeing that community is critical to their company's mission.

Community is not just about getting more business and increasing guest retention, but many companies use their online community to conduct customer surveys and get real feedback, which can have a profound impact on the organization.

To share an example of an online community leading to cost savings, Dewalt, a leading power tool manufacturer, built a well-established customer base, which Dewalt calls an “insight online community” where they engage customers to work with them at every stage of the product development cycle. These customer insights have helped improve DeWalt's products while saving the company approximately $6 million in research costs.

About Likaa:

Likaa makes it easy for restaurants and F&B insiders to host chat rooms, share discounts, and get honest feedback from the guests they value and want to welcome back.