How to use local influencers to drive restaurant bookings

When it comes to your hospitality offering, a key audience is the local foodie scene.
 
If you want people in your restaurant, then there’s no better audience to tap into then those who love food.
 
And, with foodie influencers firmly established on social channels, they offer a great way of getting in front of those audiences.
 
For hotels, a mixed approach to press stays and influencer activity is best. Targeting national press does an excellent job of driving overnight stays, but reaching a local audience is just as crucial.
 
Here’s a quick example of how we went about it for one of our hotel clients recently.
 
Stanwell House in Lymington opened for business in December last year following an extensive refurbishment.
 
We lined up loads of top tier press stays to get the word out there and promote overnight stays, including the likes of The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian and more in the last few months.
 

But with the PR focus on overnight bookings flying, Stanwell asked us to focus more on its F&B offering – looking to attract locals to dine in the restaurant and drink at the bar.
 
To help with this, we turned to local influencers and have worked with several in the last few weeks.

A great way of making things more relevant though is hooking on to awareness days.
 
The other week was Afternoon Tea week, and it gave us the perfect excuse to local influencer, the Farmer’s Wife, to come along.

With 20,000+ followers, her following is relatively small compared to other influencers we engage, but her audience is bang on what we’re after, while she also writes for Hampshire Life – so effectively a double whammy.
 
Having visited over the weekend she posted some lovely content, which supplemented by Stanwell’s own social content, helped to drive traffic and most importantly bookings.
 
With the likes of Harper’s Bazaar and Conde Nast Traveller lined up for future press stays to drive overnight bookings, local influencer collaborations are a great way to target a more localised audience and get people in to enjoy your food and drink.
 
This helps to create a rounded approach to marketing to encourage bookings amongst multiple areas of your hospitality offering.

Want us to do the same for you?
 
Just let us know. We’d love to help.