Marketing & Promotions
Why It's Time to Shift from Restaurant Influencers to Brand Advocates
Katelyn Andrews
5 min read
Sep 19, 2024
Katelyn Andrews
5 min read
Sep 19, 2024
With brands everywhere vying for social capital, many restaurants are investing in influencer marketing. This content-first strategy isn't new, but investing in influencers solely because of a high follower count doesn’t cut it anymore.
To build awareness, restaurants need to be a part of influential conversations that focus on quality over quantity and align with brand values. This requires a new approach to influencer marketing: brand advocacy.
To understand the shift, we spoke with Kayla Bolyai, Marketing Director at Altamarea Group, a global hospitality company and long-time SevenRooms client. With over 20 restaurants worldwide, Altamarea Group is redefining how restaurants should approach influencer marketing.
Recent SevenRooms research shows that 39% of restaurant bookings come from organic social media, compared to 27% from influencer content. This indicates that consumers are increasingly drawn to authentic content from restaurants and fellow diners over paid influencer endorsements.
Kayla believes that people are tired of the term “influencers.” It feels “outdated” to pay someone with high-follower counts to promote content. Instead, she says restaurants should focus on finding brand advocates with influence — people who align with their brand values and engage their followers authentically. High follower counts don't always equate to engagement.
“Engagement is about how active influencers are online, but it’s also about how comfortable diners are online or in their communities talking about the places they want to go with people they see as ‘influential,’” says Kayla.
The best influencers embody a restaurant's values, becoming an extension of the business, and engage audiences looking for authentic experiences.
“There are so many ways [restaurants are] competing for attention. And it’s such an oversaturated market that it’s easy for customers to get diverted from the message we’re trying to send. For us, it’s not just about sharing a photo or product online, but the authentic storytelling of the experience, and how to circulate it on channels that are going to most resonate with the guests that we want in our restaurant.”
For this reason, more and more restaurants are shifting away from the traditional creator economy to working with brand advocates. Influencers share content with their followers, but brand advocates turn a transaction into a connection. This is true influence.
Put simply, a brand advocate elevates your brand through word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that showcase the guest experience and amplify your message. Brand advocates can extend beyond traditional social influencers to guests, partners and employees.
To Kayla, brand advocates are more effective at “connecting the dots” than traditional influencers, building trust, loyalty and reach.
A successful brand advocacy program engages new customers through values-based advocacy campaigns that fit your mission and target audience. While influencers often have a broad reach, advocates connect with more targeted audiences, helping restaurants engage their ideal customer base.
On social media, restaurants commonly share stories and give diners a behind-the-scenes look at their food and beverage offerings, but today’s diners expect more. They want content that helps them build a trustworthy human connection with your teams and local communities.
When building a restaurant brand advocate team, look for individuals who represent your brand authentically.
Our recent data report shows that more than half of consumers across the U.S. and Australia, and 46% across the U.K., try restaurants because of social media. Gen Z and Millennial diners in particular are most influenced by posts from restaurants they follow that highlight their personality.
Brands can elevate their social media engagement by allowing advocates who align with their core values (vision, mission, personality, etc.) to power their marketing.
“We hone in on [advocates who have] value alignment with our restaurants. These people are good at the digital strategy and management, but more than that, the circle of people they have a pulse on are the people we want in our restaurant.”
Sometimes, the best brand advocates are the guests you’ve already won. With a little guidance, your existing customers can become your best foodie influencers.
Empower your local fans to create grassroots user-generated content on their preferred social media platforms. Display QR codes tied to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube on your tables and menus, inviting diners to tag your restaurant in a creative post that showcases their experience. Then, thank participating “food bloggers” with a free dessert or other perks.
Organic influencer marketing can greatly boost your brand awareness because your diners-turned-promoters are more likely to have friends who are local and looking for their next great experience.
Allow your advocates to create content that reflects their personal experience with your restaurant, understanding that well-produced, original content can help move the needle for what users can experience online.
Don’t stifle creativity. Instead, partner with advocates who have a proven track record of creating unique photo, video and written content people respond to. Study your target audience to determine the type of assets that will inspire action in your restaurant. Then, let the advocate take over.
Depending on your customer demographics, your campaign goals and the skill set of your advocate, you might request:
Remember that the main purpose of leveraging brand advocates as a marketing strategy is to reach potential customers in a new way by tapping into the power of word-of-mouth marketing and maximizing your reach using strategies they know work for their followers.
Using software like a restaurant CRM to create detailed guest profiles for brand advocates can help your front-of-house team identify your advocates, personalize interactions and nurture relationships. Create tags like "influencers," "advocates" or “social media,” and use them consistently across your locations.
For example, Kayla’s team uses SevenRooms’ guest profiles feature to tag brand advocates as “bi-coastal” if they have homes in Los Angeles and New York City. This helps her team identify advocates who can promote events in several restaurant locations. With one tag, they can easily add someone to the VIP invite list to promote the grand opening of Marea Beverly Hills, for example, which is slated for November 2024.
“This is where we feel like SevenRooms CRM is so valuable and way better than all other platforms because we can get into the nitty gritty to track details of a conversation that happens on the floor between the staff and brand advocate. That interaction, when logged, can lead to another conversation that happens six months down the line with even higher revenue potential.”
No matter how you decide to report on your advocacy team, it helps to track as much information as possible to help nurture relationships now and in the future. Kayla’s team goes so far as to add links to the advocate’s social media and LinkedIn profiles to their profile to ensure their staff knows who someone is when they walk through the door.
Regularly interact with these advocates online and offline to maintain a strong relationship. Invite them to exclusive events or menu tastings to make them feel valued.
Altamarea Group enters each new advocate into their CRM, so they can track the types of endorsements, advocacy initiatives and social networks the partner is best suited for. By creating a detailed profile, the team can easily re-engage with the brand advocate during key marketing opportunities, such as menu debuts, seasonal changes and upcoming one-off or pop-up events.
Despite the historical popularity of influencer marketing, the industry still lacks standardized solutions for tracking customers that come from specific influencers (and how much sales they drive) — until now.
To better measure the impact of their brand ambassadors, Altamarea Group plans to implement SevenRooms’ Referral program. Here, Kayla’s team would give each advocate a unique referral link, which will help them capture the ROI of the content they share with their audience.
“Having that referral narrative is so important — being able to more tangibly capture that with ‘this is the link, and this is how they ended up booking’ is so valuable in the way the industry is now moving.”
With SevenRooms’ perks program, restaurants can also easily reward their brand partners each time they share their unique referral link with friends, family or fans, who in turn, get a perk when they visit the restaurant. Because you can auto-assign any perk as you see fit based on the number of referrals they send, this measurement strategy allows restaurants reward influencers appropriately, like with a round of drinks or complimentary appetizer.
It’s important to leverage this idea of loyalty according to your desired demographics, Kayla says. When you know who your guests are, you can design better marketing programs that foster meaningful relationships and drive revenue.
“For Marea, Beverly Hills, we might give a referral code to a few influencers that cater to the younger demographic we want to attract and tend to be more digitally engaged. But for our new pizza concepts, we might encourage every single guest to become an influential reference to refer to their friends and come back.”
Kayla ends our chat with an invaluable lesson: “It’s a catch-22. For every new exciting strategy we can add to our repertoire, there are more things we have to measure. But spraying and praying is useless — and taking on more ways to connect with people also means being responsible about how you’re doing it and whether you’re measuring success or not.”
When strategizing how you’ll incorporate brand advocates into your digital marketing strategy, start by finding online personalities that represent your brand best. Then, formulate a way to track, measure and grow.
To learn how SevenRooms can help support and measure the impact of your brand advocacy program, schedule a demo today.
