Are you brave enough to invite food bloggers for dinner?

Having your restaurant feature in the food supplement of a Sunday newspaper can be a lifelong dream, and restaurant marketing gold. But these days it’s not just the professional food critics people listen to for advice. The internet has created a vibrant community of food bloggers that travel throughout the country searching for the best, undiscovered food around.

This was illustrated in a recent episode of the Radio 4 Food Programme (listen from 16 minutes 50 onwards) in a report from a car park in South London where 100+ food bloggers had congregated to try out the delicacies of a particular burger van, knowledge of which had been spread on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites (The Meat Wagon is on Twitter with @themeatwagonuk).

With 100s and even 1000s of readers, these food bloggers can generate a lot of exposure after posting about their culinary experiences. Just imagine gaining this sort of user driven publicity for your own restaurant’s marketing?

How to reach out to food bloggers

People blog about food out of passion. Not for money, a free meal or to promote somebody else’s restaurant. So it’s imperative to build up trust and rapport with food bloggers before inviting them for dinner.

You can do this by subscribing to their blogs (this list of 50 food bloggers from the Sunday Times is a good starting point) and follow them on Twitter, getting a feeling for what they post and contributing to their blogs by posting helpful, relevant comments. After you’ve built up some familiarity, you can then broach the subject of whether they’d like to review your restaurant.

Bear in mind that food bloggers take pride in providing their readers with honest, objective reviews. They’re under no obligation to sing your praises if they didn’t enjoy their meal, as Cantina Laredo found out after inviting a few food bloggers (among them Lizzie of Hollow Legs, Chris Pople of Cheese and Biscuits) following a Twitter discussion on pricing of some of their menu items.

But if you have a delicious special dish or are confident that you serve the best Sunday roast around, inviting food bloggers for dinner can enable you to reach 100s or 1000s of their readers and gain a boost to your restaurant’s marketing as well as inbound links boosting your search engine optimisation.

Darika Ahrens (@Darika) at Grapevine Consulting recently acknowledged that in general, PR firms and marketers are not great at dealing with bloggers. She decided to be constructive about it, and write a series of blog posts focusing on the good, the bad and the ugly by simply talking to the audience in question and get the bloggers’ view on the topic. Sounds like a great idea, do check in with her updates.

By Magnus Hultberg in Blog, Restaurant Marketing, Social Media Marketing