If you’ve made it to Step 6 then you’ve put a lot of effort into developing your restaurant marketing with social media. Now it’s time to kickstart engagement with your customers. To be successful, you’ve got to compete with all the other voices out there in the cyberworld. Standing out takes creativity and individuality.

The way you accomplish that with your restaurant brand is up to you.

Here’s one example of how a restaurant really succeeded
in social media marketing:
Ivar’s Seafood Restaurant in Seattle, Washington pulled off a brilliant piece of restaurant marketing that resulted in a 400% increase in clam chowder sales.

How did they do it? Well, it’s a funny story actually. Ivar’s dreamed up this scheme to get a kooky story going in the local media and virally on the web through social media outlets. The tall tale went like this: the restaurant’s founder, Ivar Haglund, long since dead, had arranged for billboards advertising his restaurant to be planted on the bottom of Puget Sound in the 1950s. Apparently Haglund fervently believed that people of the future would travel the depths of the Sound via submarine, and his billboards would one day be perfectly located.

Ivar’s let the story steep in the media for a couple weeks, then staged a recovery of the billboards, which got a lot of attention. Unbeknownst to the media or the masses, the billboards had been planted a few short weeks before the “recovery.”

The restaurant then announced they would roll back the price of a bowl of clam chowder to 1950s prices to celebrate the discovery of the long lost billboards. The story blew up all over the internet, and soon Ivar’s had a lot of new business on their hands, leading to the 400% increase in clam chowder sales.

Ivar’s story reveals how effective a well-designed social media marketing campaign can be. Innovative thinking and a willingness to go all in can bring astounding results if it’s properly executed. There’s no limit to the things you can do with social media. As Ivar’s has proven, the weirder it is, the more likely it’s going to stand out from the rapidly growing crowd using social media. There really is no limit to the creativity you can harness for your marketing efforts online.