Words have a great chance of misinterpretation, while photos require no language to convey their message. This is why it’s a great way to engage consumers with your marketing campaigns by using restaurant photography.
The quality of a good photo shoot tells a story far better than words in a customer-focused industry like hospitality and restaurants. Using visual marketing creates an everlasting impression on the customer and helps capture their attention faster.
Although the industry remains highly competitive, during a pandemic outbreak, restaurants sought to raise the competition online. Not only are we talking about their services, but we’re also talking about their marketing and promotion initiatives.
Considering using high-quality photos and videos is now a popular move with marketers. Not only is this a cost-effective way to gain brand awareness, but it also cultivates brand retention to customers.
Do you have to hire a professional photographer to handle the visual marketing of your restaurant? You might think that it’s unnecessary to invest in this investment since most modern smartphones come equipped with high-resolution cameras. But that’s not the case.
A professional photographer can bring so much to the table, and they’re called professionals in their field because they offer so much more than your staff. They see things from various angles and they know which one will work best.
To learn more about photography in restaurants, we encourage you to read through this article. It aims to supply the basic knowledge every restaurant owner, like you, should know about the art in photography and how you can integrate it into your business.
Photography in Restaurants – What You Need To Know
In an article for visual content marketing, marketers claimed that sixty-five percent of their audience remembers a piece of information if it’s partnered by a relevant image. It’s a great number compared to the ten percent that can remember something through reading or hearing.
With marketing being implemented digitally, it’s a must that you understand how important visual marketing is. We’re now in a society where everything and everyone functions fast-paced, most of the time consumers don’t have time to read every bit of your content.
This is how the concept of Instagram, one of the most popular social media platforms, works. This photo-sharing platform allows everyone to share or convey a story through their photos with a limit on their caption. People are just not that interested in reading lengthy materials.
Even with the concept of blogging, incorporating relevant images helps you to increase engagement on your blogs. Consumers won’t feel it dragging reading a 4000 character piece if they’re being entertained by relevant photos and infographics.
For this reason, forty-nine percent of marketers rate visual marketing as one of the most important aspects of their strategy. As a result, they can maximize their budget, or even their character limit, while keeping their message intact.
How Does It Work For Your Restaurant?
Globalization is shrinking the world every day. However, leisure travel will be back in vogue sooner or later, even if it seems like a hassle right now. You plan to serve foreign customers that don’t speak your local language, how do you plan to do so?
Using pictures is the best answer.
It will make customers feel more confident ordering from you when you have pictures showing exactly what they can expect. In addition, you will see repeat business if you exceed the expectations of your clients.
Restaurant food photography driven by professionals can also boost sales. The next time someone lands on your website and sees you have what they want, making it appear that you have exactly what they are looking for, they are probably ready to drop by your restaurant.
Most likely, you know how vital your menu is to your business. You’ve studied it carefully. It has been designed strategically by you. The focus you’ve placed on the right items will boost your kitchen profitability and efficiency.
Moreover, no description could ever capture the beauty and appetizing quality of the dishes – especially if your chefs work very hard to create every dish to look as good as possible. You have to demonstrate to your customers what you are preparing them for.
Here’s how photography helps with brand awareness, retention, and shortly, loyalty.
Benefits of Hiring A Professional Photographer for Your Restaurant
Producing high-quality photos is not something you can easily do, especially if you don’t have enough training and the right set of equipment for it. Although your camera phone produces great shots, it’s nothing compared to what a professional photographer can provide your restaurant.
Especially if you’re considering utilizing those photos not only on your menu but also across your social media profiles and even billboards as well. Generating timeless photos is what these professionals are known for. It might appear like a huge investment for now, but it’ll soon pay its worth.
By doing this job yourself, you are wasting the efforts of your whole team. Your kitchen team and your chefs work hard to produce a plate that’s also visually appetizing. Having professionals take care of their plates is a great way to show how you value their work.
These professionals apply their extensive knowledge and training to every shot that they take. They have the eye and talent to see what best accentuates your dishes, and they have the right tools to implement it.
But you still have to be mindful of who to hire. While all professional photographers have the right skills and equipment, you still have to check out if their specialization is the one that will work for your business theme and concept.
Keep in mind that these professionals have different strong points. Make the most out of this investment by hiring the ones whose forte is aligned with what you have in mind. You must establish clear communication to prevent misconceptions of your message.
Here are the main benefits on why professional photographers should be one of your must-haves on your restaurant marketing initiatives.
They are very detail-oriented.
No details come to waste in the eyes of a professional photographer. Your chef puts an intricate amount of details on a single plate, and they will still understand how it works for the other element.
It takes one to know one. An artist, even if they come from different fields, understands the complexities of another artist. They understand the flow and the purpose of every element of a plate. They know what can be taken away or what are elements that they can add to it.
They can even make non-physical factors such as aesthetics, lighting, and the use of colors work for them. Their background, knowledge, experience, and training helps them to stay in control of their art.
They know when to take the shot.
Not every food item is shot similarly. A steak may lose its glorious appearance after a few minutes, and a cappuccino will not look the same after a few seconds as well.
This is how the skill of knowing when to capture a shot is beneficial. This increases the efficiency and productivity of your shoot. There’s no need to ask your staff to remake every dish because the photographer is capable of maximizing every opportunity to take the shot.
They are resourceful.
Professional photographers know what ingredients can be substituted to enhance the quality of a photo. Now, this is not false marketing, rather this is a great way to highlight your dish.
Equipment and tools aside, they also make use of every material available for them. A single cloth is a valuable element for them. They can use it as a backdrop, a cover, a mat, and so on. Their imaginative minds help them to maximize the potential of every material given to them.
They have technical knowledge.
This is something that you can’t have your staff cover for you. You may have an artistically skilled staff that covers the first three reasons, but the knowledge that came from experience and training is not something that they can learn overnight.
Most people have little understanding of how products work, but professionals know them inside out. To communicate the beauty of your food item through a photograph, they know how to balance out every internal and external element of the shoot.
How Does Your Restaurant Benefit From Photography?
If you’re still not leveraging images for your restaurant operations, then you may already have an idea on what are the advantages it brings for you. Here are the most common ways this art can benefit your restaurant and its other business-related initiatives.
It helps improve your appeal.
A huge percent of modern diners conduct the majority of their research online before they set foot in a restaurant. When people visit your website, do you think they will be enticed to order from you if they see an average-looking dish? Most likely not.
Modern diners are smart diners. They engage less if they see that a business is not exerting adequate effort to appeal to them. What makes you think that they will trust a brand that provides a dimmed or blurred photo of their dish?
Just like every element that builds the success of your restaurant, providing high-quality and well-lit photos is a great way to attract your customers. If they see that you’ve sufficiently invested to provide them high-quality images, they’re most likely to feel valued, thus leading them to engage in your brand more.
It provides a complete restaurant promotion package.
As mentioned earlier, the chances of your audience engaging with your website pages and blog posts featuring relevant photographs are higher. The pairing of written content with visual content is a prevalent practice because it ensures people retain information for longer.
It’s the logical choice when it comes to food marketing. You may not get an as strong response if you print on the sign that you sell burgers that are grilled, as opposed to including a picture of the patties on the grill when they come off the grill.
When someone visits your website and sees that picture, they may be hungry at that very moment, and your efforts in food photography just sparked an interest.
It allows you to emphasize your dishes.
When putting certain dishes on your menu, you can strategically price them to help entice customers to your restaurant. Alternatively, you may have dishes that are very popular at your restaurant. A rotating homepage picture would be a good idea. A variety of dishes can be showcased in the photos to promote your restaurant.
The use of food photography can highlight the work of your chef’s effort. Food is showcased to its fullest potential. Furthermore, it gives you a chance to advertise the menu items that you wish to attract customers to your establishment.
Reasons Why You Need Professional Photography for Your Restaurant
It establishes a great first impression.
Generally speaking, first impressions last. Don’t let your online presence fade into the background by making a poor first impression. Images on your website should speak for themselves, as they should convey your brand values.
In other words, your images should be designed to attract the customer’s attention, whet their appetite, and trigger their visual appetite. Your restaurant will be remembered if they see your mouth-watering photos as the first point of contact.
It maximizes the potential of your marketing efforts.
You should make food photography an integral part of your marketing plan. You can build your restaurant’s brand and further establish your business with it. If you market your food in a good way, consumers will become acquainted with you.
Also, using food pictures on social media can be a powerful tool for generating attention and conversation. And knowing that social media influences approximately fifty percent of diners. In other words, when your establishment offers something that appeals to them, they will be more interested to visit.
Professional pictures are important even to restaurant managers who have little to no marketing experience. They’ll use them across multiple marketing channels, including social media and traditional marketing, to keep your brand in front of your target audience.
It increases your average bottom line.
The quality of photography attracts more attention and leads to more sales. When menus feature combos, chances are people will order all of them instead of ordering just one dish.
In addition to providing eye-catching images of high-profit food items on a printed menu, food pictures on your digital menu can help improve your website conversions and will boost your search engine ranking.
It makes your brand trustworthy.
Food photography has taken on a new significance as we recognize the importance of what we can see and what we can access in this age and place. There is a great deal of satisfaction in knowing what the customer will get.
Generally, food is not the subject of surprises, but it can be. Photographing your food professionally demonstrates professionalism and establishes trust.
Nevertheless, it is important to not make too big a promise only to let the customer down when they receive the meal. There are a few food styling tricks that are a bit excessive.
A good photo should look like the real dish, despite any tricks the photographer uses to make it look good.
It boosts your SEO.
A good search engine optimization strategy can elevate the ranking of your website to Google and other search engine sites. For SEO purposes, food photography is vital for two reasons.
The first advantage of photos is that they enrich articles and make them more engaging. The chances of a user clicking on an article containing a high-quality and significant picture are higher. As the number of website clicks increases, the number of visitors increases, and overall ranking rises.
Secondly, food photography has the benefit of allowing you to enhance the images and make them more noticeable. An alternative text that contains relevant keywords will make every image more search engine-friendly.
Photography in Restaurants – Best Practices
Your photographer already has the skills and proper set of tools, but what can you do to increase the success of your restaurant’s photography session? Here are helpful food photography tips and tricks that are widely utilized in the industry.
Highlight your most popular menu items.
The images taken of your menu items should align with your marketing goals before your photographer starts taking them. You should use the best images on the homepage if you want to make a good first impression. This should be the first thing that users see when visiting your restaurant’s website.
As an example, if you own a Chinese restaurant and intend to market authentic dishes to middle-aged customers, it would make no sense to photograph a pizza instead. If you specialize in Chinese cuisine, you should make sure you are showcasing the cuisine.
Provide the appropriate dishware.
Dishware is an important element of the shot. What will be the positioning of your food? Whenever you plan to display colorful food, it is best to use white bowls and plates.
Your food is the focus of the photo when it’s served on white plates. You might want to use colorful dishware when serving bland-looking food items to highlight them visually.
Bowls, plates, platters, and so on are all types of dishware, all of which vary in dimensions, weight, and design. You should think about the food you will be serving and how the dishware will complement or match the food.
Keep it simple.
Talk to your photographer and emphasize what you want to highlight. Since it’s for your restaurant, it’s natural to highlight your food items. Make sure that your photographer understands this goal of yours.
There are instances where the food is being upstaged by the additional props or even the background. Establish clear communication with your photographer to avoid this mess. Having too much on a single photograph makes it harder for your customers to distinguish what you want to tell them.
Hire a food stylist.
A perspective from another expert won’t hurt. If you’re in doubt about your styling skills, and you want to put an additional artistic mind into this project, then hiring a food stylist is a great way to move forward.
Just make sure that everyone is on board with this initiative. Communicate well with your food stylist and food photographer to prevent creative conflicts between the two.
source https://www.etakeawaymax.co.uk/professional-restaurant-photography/
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