Editor’s Note: The following post is a guest post from Colm Barry of TrakAx.com. He discusses how video can enhance your restaurant marketing efforts by giving potential diners a visual of your food, location and even your chef skills. Contact Colm Barry at colm@trakax.com. We’ll feature part of this post this week and conclude next week. This week we’ll cover video tours of your restaurant, your food and your unique selling points. Next week, we’ll dive into more detail on cooking lessons and location features, plus quick tips for great videos.
Why Video?
The restaurant industry is one of the most competitive and diverse industries. Whether your restaurant is in a major city or a small rural village, how are you going to let potential diners know about your business, style of food and location? Adding a video to your website, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and Google Maps can provide potential customers with an insight to your restaurant, the type of food on the menu, local produce used, unique selling points and of course, your location. In the videos below, we examine how some restaurants and chefs that have used videos to highlight their business, skills, food and, more importantly, to entice diners to their restaurants.
Tour of your Restaurant
RESTAURANT GUY SAVOY from Jesse Salto on Vimeo.
Creating an overall video tour of your restaurant will give your patrons an excellent understanding of your business, the style of food, the surroundings, as well as the staff who help make the restaurant work. Here we see a video created for the Guy Savoy restaurant in Paris. In this video, even though it is professionally made, there are a lot of great ideas you can use in your video production. There are no great tricks or illusions in this video. It is simply well made.
First, we see the ingredients being selected en in the market, followed by the cleaning and preparation of the food. Then, the doors open, patrons arrive and the action begins. We see the beautiful shots of the dishes which are the star of the show and finally we see the dedicated team that made it happen. This video highlights that a clean and simple style (both the food and video production) is always the best.
What you’ll need:
- A Microphone to record sounds of the restaurant.
- A tripod – see here for a selection of affordable tripods
- A Camcorder – Flip Camcorders and Kodak Zi8 camcorders are available from $120
- Video editing software – suchas trakAxPC - available for $24.95
Tour of Food
Bao Nodles from lasolas on Vimeo.
Creating a video highlighting your dishes can be great for any restaurant, but it can be especially useful for restaurants which offer speciality foods or ethnic dishes that may be uncommon in your area. In this example, we see a food and drink tour of Bao Noodles Vietnamese restaurant located in Manhattan, NY. By allowing us to view some of their mouth-watering dishes and cocktails, the potential diner can almost smell and taste the food.
Unique Selling Points
Bao Nodles from lasolas on Vimeo.
What makes you different? What makes your restaurant stand out from the rest? Why not make a video about it? Here we see how two chefs promote their restaurants by highlighting their unique selling points. In the first video, we see Head Chef Ryan Tate of the Savoy restaurant create a beautiful duck dish, which uses fresh ducks from his local producer, John Fazio. The chef also explains the process of cooking duck properly and why their restaurant believes in working with small farmers.
Chef’s Table – Turnberry Resort from Ruben Gabino on Vimeo.
In the second video, we see something completely different. The Turnberry Resort in Scotland promotes their restaurant by highlighting their unique selling point “the Chef’s Table.” This fun and well-made video emphasizes the delicious food, the private service and the experience offered by this “Chef’s Table.”
About TrakAxPC
TrakAxPC is a video editing software capable of helping you create excellent videos for your restaurant. Check out their special pricing here.
