Catering Marketing: 7 Must-Try Catering Marketing Ideas

Catering businesses are unique in the food service industry. They’re one of the few forms of service that doesn’t need a permanent business location, and they can set up shop in virtually any venue. That’s why online catering marketing offers so much value and potential to your business.

If you’re looking to learn how to market your catering business with online channels, like social media, keep reading! This article shares the seven most effective catering marketing ideas, plus provides tips for building a catering marketing strategy that grows your business.

For professional help with catering marketing, contact WebFX. With our custom catering marketing plans, plus our client-focused approach, we can help your business attract more clients and bookings. Give us a ring at 888-601-5359 or contact us online to receive a one-on-one consultation and proposal!

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7 catering marketing ideas for growing your business

It doesn’t matter whether your catering company is just starting or if you’ve established yourself as a popular local business — you can benefit from these seven catering marketing ideas:

1. Make a good website

Offer your potential customers an attractive, informative, and well-designed website. People seeking catering services will compare you to your competition for sure, and they know what they want.

If you’re not sure what to add to your catering website, start by looking at your competitors’ sites. You’ll probably see a bit of everything, including pricing packages, sample menus, decoration options, staff information, company history, and more. The only limitations you have on your website are the time and energy you can devote to it.

And when you make your website for marketing your catering business, make sure that it’s responsive. A non-responsive website won’t show up correctly for mobile users, and since everyone has a smartphone these days, you need your website to show up correctly.

2. Practice search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for any website, and that includes creating different pages based around keywords that are relevant to your services and the catering industry.

You can research these keywords based on the terms that your users include in search queries to find you online, or you can answer frequent questions you get from potential clients.

Once you have that on your website, people looking for catering services will have a reason to go to your website, and you can build a relationship with them right away.

This catering marketing strategy can take several months to work, so keep this fact in mind when investing in SEO. SEO does, however, deliver long-term results, which makes it so valuable to catering marketing.

3. Use PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns advertise different pages on your website based on certain keywords. PPC is a wonderful way to maximize your online marketing budget, especially if you’ve already invested in discovering the best keywords for your business.

With Google Ads and other platforms, you can set how much you’re willing to spend for a customer using a certain keyword to click on your ad. If the customer clicks your ad, then you pay Google the determined amount. If the customer doesn’t click your ad, then you don’t pay anything.

PPC is a great way for companies with new websites since you can immediately reach out to potential customers without the need for working on SEO. And when you use SEO and PPC together in your catering marketing plan, you can show up in more searches so that more people see you, inquire about your services, and become paying customers.

4. Target customers with landing pages

Landing pages are similar to what we discussed a little ago: Whole pages on your website that are dedicated to answering certain questions or offering free information for your site’s visitors. The page you’re reading is actually a landing page, since we discovered that lots of caterers want to know how to market a catering business better.

The key to writing strong landing pages is providing good information that shows authority and knowledge. Topics like “how to choose the best catering company,” “the 5 questions everyone has about caterers,” and more are all great starts for creating landing pages as a part of your catering marketing strategy.

These pages can then rank in searches for those topics on Google, and you can even use them in your PPC campaign. When you use landing pages, you expand your potential audience by dozens of customers with every new addition — and these pages will stay on your site until you take them down!

5. Get on social media

Use social media often. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest aren’t just websites to keep people in touch — they’re strong platforms for catering marketing.

Your catering company can create successful social media presences with photos of their events, staff, and equipment to show that you’re experienced, professional, and dependable. Every catered event offers plenty of picture-perfect moments, and all of those moments can turn into great attention-grabbers online.

But don’t underestimate your food. Even the most basic foods can resonate with potential customers. With how many people post photos of food to social media, you’re sure to catch someone’s eye with your appetizer salads or mouthwatering entrées.

6. Start and maintain a blog

Start a blog and consistently update it. Your blog can cover a lot of ground, including telling the story of your catering business, answering questions, revealing “how to” recipes, talking about recent events, and more.

Not only is this catering marketing strategy a perfect venue for you to add fresh content to your site (which helps SEO), but it also shows your customers that you’re an authority in your field. Every time you add another blog post, you give both search engines and readers a reason to check out your website, and both of those factors can make your website stronger.

7. Get links to your site

Whenever you get a link to your website from another source, you essentially increase the traffic to your own website, and search engines read that link as someone else endorsing your business. By collecting these links (called “backlinks”), you become a more reputable source online. It takes time, but it’s a worthwhile catering marketing strategy.

However, it’s important to know that you should never pay for links to your website. This constitutes a link scheme, which can result in a Google penalty that severely hurts your business’s website. If you want your site to stick around and draw customers, you have to build it gradually, steadily, and honestly.

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“WebFX did amazing work creating a new website for us on a tight schedule. They have taken the time to learn about our business and give us ideas of how to make our digital marketing better. We still have work to do with WebFX but overall very pleased.”

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Grow your business with catering marketing services

At WebFX, we’ve worked with caterers and other food service providers to get them the business they need to grow, and we’ll do the same for you. Our expert team of Internet marketers knows how to get the right traffic to your site, so you can start booking events and filling up your week. And the more customers you get, the more money goes to your pocket!

Do you want your business to grow? Contact us today to receive a free digital marketing proposal and one-on-one consultation with a seasoned strategist.