Hospitality: Bringing an Italian restaurant to life on social media

The brief

A quick overview on the business: It’s a local Italian restaurant, serving authentic Italian treats – pizzas, meat platters, tiramisu, and the like.

Let me tell you, the pizzas are unreal. And as for the Tiramisu… delightful.

But nobody knew about this little gem, and that the pizzas that were as good as the ones in Naples*.

So that was where I came in.

I took on the complete management of the restaurant’s Facebook and Instagram pages, with a mission to give them a presence that reflected their offering; and to tell the local community about the little slice of Italy that is on their doorstep.

*I’ve never been to Naples, but I have a pizza-loving friend who has, and he rated these pizzas very highly.

The work

This restaurant was like many small businesses who operate with limited numbers of staff. There’s certainly no social media specialist in-house!

The people who are there are focused on their job – so it’s no surprise that their social channels were sitting stale, despite the fire roaring inside the pizza oven.

My first task was getting a deeper understanding of the business, the people behind the pizzas, and what made them so special.

Then it was all about the target audience, who they were, where they hung out on social, the customer journey; and what messaging, content and tactics would get people through the door, bum on seat, with a menu in hand.

The focus was then on delivering just that, with:

• Strategy
• Content creation
• Images and videos
• Day-to-day management
• Proactive community outreach
• Comment and inbox management
• Monthly analysis

Social with personality

This is an Italian restaurant, serving Italian treats, homemade by a chef from Italy. I mean, come on! It’s the perfect story.

I set a core tone of voice with some suave Italian style, established evergreen key messaging for the business in line with their personality, and took that to social media.

Consistently.

I went as far as owning emojis – using the same icons in our messaging 🫶🇮🇹

It all sounds simple, but it gives your business its own personality, a distinct style, and that becomes familiar to people on social media.

Then, when they see your posts, they’ll know it’s you, they’ll feel an affiliation and you’re then set in their minds.

So, when they think of food, or fancy a pizza specifically, they’ll think of you.

↳ The result: A consistent posting schedule of on-brand messages, one-to-one conversations with customers, which supported a 50% increase in followers across Facebook and Instagram.

Scroll-stopping content

If you have a product that looks good, feels good, tastes good… show exactly that on social media.

That’s what I did for this client.

Camera in-hand, I visited the restaurant over a series of weeks to design a library of scroll-stopping visual content. And then edited that for social media use.

Carousels, Stories, on-trend Reels; the pizza oven, the plates, the people; the dough being flung, the table being set, the wine being poured; and, of course, I was treated to few samples!

↳ The result: 200+ assets created and edited, engagements grew to ~1,000 per month on Facebook, while our Instagram Reels notched 10,000+ views.

Meet your audience

This is an important one for Facebook, in particular: Don’t wait for people to come to you because they won’t – your content will get lost.

You need to proactively meet your target audience where they are on social media.

Local groups, influencers, customer advocates, community pages – get creative when it comes to meeting your key audiences.

And then provide those people with content they want to see. For this business, it was the menus, special offers, the food, the chef preparing it, what customers see when they come in, who they’ll be greeted by and where they’ll sit.

The only thing left for them to do was send a DM to book a table, then come and experience it.

↳ The result: The restaurant’s social media post impressions went from 0 to an average of 90,000 per month, of relevant people from the local community.

Is your Facebook business page sat dormant or picking up just the odd like here and there from your close friends and family members?

It doesn’t have to be that way ➞ Facebook is alive and well.

You can achieve results without spending £££ on ads – make an enquiry with me to discuss how.