6 Reasons Why Your Restaurant Needs Landing Pages
On the back of QR codes comes the newest technological development for restaurants: landing pages. Clunky, multi-page websites, with tiny links and dozens of images, are becoming a thing of the past, replaced by their stripped down, mobile-friendly counterpart in landing pages.
Driven by overwhelming mobile usage, restaurants are turning to landing pages, a simpler solution to streamline the digital experience for their customers who want fast, easy results with their contactless menus.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a website that has been simplified down to its core components for ease of use, both on the part of customers and restaurants. Most landing pages follow a similar structure, but also allow for individual customization and branding so you can stand out from the crowd and make yours unique.
Benefits to landing pages over full-blown websites
- Lower Cost
After a tough and tumultuous year, scaling back on tech represents a great way for restaurants to save more than a few extra dollars. Bulky websites are a great place to start, especially because restaurants have cheaper options available in landing pages.
With landing pages, restaurants don’t have to pay for hosting or a web developer to build and maintain the site. And with less moving parts, outages and crashes pose far less of a threat for business disruptions and lost revenue.
- Customer Facing
Whereas websites can be clunky and difficult to navigate, especially on a small phone screen, landing pages put all the most important links right in front of the consumer for a better, customer-facing user experience.
Landing pages are designed to fit in the palm of your hand. All the information you need can be taken in at a glance. This technology is more accessible for the less tech-inclined among your customers because the links are big and easy to read.
Landing pages put all the most important links right in front of the customer. They prioritize the most important things like digital menus, online ordering and contact information.
- Designed for Mobile
Landing pages provide the best mobile experience by stripping your website down to its essentials. Your customers can find what they’re looking for at a glance. No more squinting at their phone trying to find the tiny link to an outdated menu.
Since COVID-19 changed the industry forever, contactless dining has become the new norm. Landing pages represent the latest step in this technological revolution for restaurants. They take all the tools restaurants and their customers have adopted over the past year — tools like QR codes, online menus, online ordering and cashless payments — and put them in one place for the easiest contactless dining experience possible.
- Matches today’s multi-vendor world
Today’s restaurants have to deal with a vast number of technologies: online menus, ordering, reservations, reviews, marketing, surveys, contact collection, and social media. With landing pages, restaurants can plug-and-play whatever solution they need when they need.
This gives restaurants much greater flexibility with how they implement their tech services. They no longer have to be married to one vendor. They can pick and choose what features they want to include on the landing page based around what their customers are actually looking for and clicking on.
- Keeping it Fresh
Perhaps the biggest benefit to the restaurant -- landing pages are dynamic and can be easily edited and rearranged. Rather than having to pay your web developer to come in and redo your website, you have complete control over what links you display and in what order.
You can drop links or add new ones; link to news articles or press videos; swap out menus or include new ones; drop customers right into your online ordering system; send them to your Google Reviews or Yelp page. The possibilities are truly endless, and you have complete creative control over them.
Here are examples of timely links that landing pages make easy to put in front of your customers:
- Promotional flyers (“Burgers ½ off with this promo code!”)
- Limited-time offers (“Save 10% this week!”)
- Holiday announcements (“Enjoy St. Paddy’s Day at So and So Bar!”
- Calendar updates (“We’re closed March 8 for remodeling”)
- New safety policies (“Now doing 50% indoor dining!”)
- Prompts feedback + reviews
Reviews help bolster your restaurant’s online reputation and boost your SEO for localized searches. With landing pages, you can encourage more customers to leave reviews by making the process as easy as possible for them.
Rather than asking them to find your Google or Yelp page and then enter a review, you can link right to it from your landing page. Not only does it remove extra steps, but it prompts customers and reminds them. This works especially well if you also have cashless payment options on your landing page.
About the Author:
Mark Plumlee is a a copywriter who has helped restaurants and small businesses grow and define their brands.