Why Restaurants Need A Virtual Tour

Welcome back to another Momentum 360 Blog!

In this week’s blog, learn about why restaurants need a virtual tour! Not next month, not next year, right now. If you’re in the restaurant business, take 5 minutes out of your day and read this. It just might make or break your business.

For those who don’t know, our co-owner Sean Boyle and his family used to own a restaurant and bar on South Street called “The Boyler Room”, pretty good name we have to say. That being said, we have a lot of experience in this niche and know exactly how to show off our virtual tours for maximum exposure and return on investment.

Showcase

First and foremost, restaurant owners owe it to their customers and to themselves to show off their lovely location! Momentum 360 uses a virtual tour supplier known as Matterport. Their amazing technology has given us an extremely useful way to give business owners an entire different glimpse of their place.

Think about it. If you’re a hungry customer in the area and come across two restaurants, which would you pick: the restaurant that has no pictures or videos of their place, or the restaurant that shows off their place with a virtual tour? We think you’d pick the latter. We did too.

Bad Content

Good Content

It’s very simple. If a business owner isn’t interested in showing off their place, more often than not it’s because they think their place looks low quality! It’s not completely their fault. Business owners are some of the busiest people in the world, sometimes they forget about upkeep of their fine establishment.

Even if they forget, we feel we have a need to remind them about how important it is to keep their place in the consumer’s minds. There’s absolutely no way this will happen if the place doesn’t have any content, or worse, looks terrible to begin with!

Whether you’re a small corner bar, a medium-sized restaurant or a franchise chain, it’s imperative to make sure that all bases are covered with a virtual tour.

If you’re lacking content in 2019, you’re losing. Simple as that. So go do yourself a favor and get a virtual tour and professional photography.

Remember, “if a picture is worth a thousand words, a virtual tour is worth a million.” – Sean Boyle

Digital Presence

If you’ve kept up with our blogs to date, you know that we talk about the importance of being on Google. When people find out about your business, they want to be amazed at the amount of content your place has. Google is the perfect platform to host and communicate all your business information. Not only can you post photos and videos, you can put your virtual tour on here as well!

Google has multiple platforms such as Google My Business, Google Street View, and Google Maps that tie a business together. Through these three main Google mediums, businesses now have a chance to show off their business better than ever.

However, Only 44% of business owners have ever claimed a Google My Business account! This is staggering because so much lost business is simply left to being lazy. Momentum 360 takes pride in our digital presence. This has been an enormous factor for our success. You can see from our previous blog and video with Momentum Digital, How to Setup a Google My Business Account.

We encourage all restaurant owners to have fun with their business and generate content that you can put online!

See what we did here with Views Venue. One of our owners Sean took a nice selfie with the owner Victoria. We posted this on our Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn! Of course, we also posted this on our Google accounts.

So from one picture, we made over 6+ pieces of content! Not saying that everyone needs to follow our model, but it definitely helps to get more views on your Google platforms and social media mediums as well.

If you’re one of the 66% of business owners that don’t have a presence yet on Google, then please take our advice and make an account. It will only help, and it’s free!

Reservations for Couples

Here lies the most important reasons for getting a virtual tour….. Reservations. Need the perfect place and seat for your anniversary? Or how about a first date? We got you covered. Imagine looking at a restaurant through their virtual tour, being able to call the place from the tour, and selecting the exact seating arrangements you want. Take about visualization. With our virtual tour technology, we can make this possible.

Watch here as I screen recorded this process using Savona in Gulph Mills as an example.

Using the popular Matterport term that are known as mattertags, we can make this happen! What we normally do with restaurants is select a mattertag inside each section of the place, this way the future customer can take a look at the exact section they want, and then pick their desired table from there. This is something your parents talked about as being the “future.” They weren’t lying to you, it’s here.

The best part about it? It’s a unique experience to each and every individual. Everyone has different tastes and pleasures, so they will pick their table with their significant other in another manner than someone else will.

This way businesses can always appear fresh to the consumer without growing stale overtime. This is a troubling feature of businesses that are over 5+ years old. Most of the time, they get away from what made them great in the first place. We decided to fix that. Now with our Matterport virtual tours, we have the ability to create new business growth opportunities for the future. More than likely, you’ll be the first restaurant in your area to have these virtual tours! So date night is handled, go and enjoy time with your significant other.

Reservations for Groups

Similarly to our last section, large parties and events are perfectly suited for virtual tours. Sure, pictures and videos are nice, but how about a medium where you could see exactly how many people can fit into a space? That’s the ideal scenario. This way if you’re the lucky person planning the event, you can sleep well at night knowing your space is large enough to hold all your beloved friends and family.

As you can see from our visual walkthrough above, you can explore the restaurant section by section, knowing exactly where you should throw your event. We can also take little snippets of your tour and put them on your website as well. In the past, we’ve dealt with restaurants with as much as 4 event venue floors!

Instead of cramming everything into one place, we were able to break up the entire thing and chop it into four bits for each floor. This gave future event throwers a more organized way to view and book a venue. We even went into great detail as to estimate party size, preferred event type, even the best type of wine and food that complements the floor!

We take care of our clients because we want to see them be successful. It doesn’t just happen with shooting a virtual tour, people need to have a way to view it in the proper manner on their phone or tablet.

Regardless of what type of event your restaurant specializes in, make sure your future customers book it using a virtual tour! If you can make sure that clients are navigating your tour properly and aren’t getting overwhelmed with the size of your establishment, you’ll be in for a real treat when you start noticing more and more events being thrown at your place!

More Business Insight

More often than not, before you set foot into a business you look it up first. In fact, 70-80% of people research a restaurant online before visiting.

Why do we do this?

Is it to look up your restaurant hours? Perhaps.

To see what kind of specials they’re offering on Thanksgiving? Sure.

Make sure you find that special new holiday beer you’ve been waiting for? Of course!

What we’re saying is that we do this to become comfortable with the restaurant before visiting If we don’t see any pictures or content for a business, more times than not we’ll search for a different business.

I mean ask yourself, when have you ever gone to a business without it having any pictures of it? Almost never right?

So if you’re a business owner, why would you expect your customers to do the same when you know in the back of your head they won’t visit based off of this very factor!

But a virtual tour is something that exceeds all expectations. Most people are thinking a few pictures and maybe a video, but here you are with a virtual tour that encompasses your entire restaurant.

Not to mention that virtual tour is something that no one is using for restaurants! Your future customers are going to see this virtual tour of your place and become completely comfortable with it. Hell, they could probably even give you a tour of your own since they know it so well!

It’s insulting to your customers to try to play ignorant to the fact that business photos don’t matter. It’s going to be 2020 in a little over a month, so what’s your excuse? It takes about 20 seconds to post a photo to your social platforms and Google My Business account.

Here is a helpful blog we did a few months ago talking about how to optimize your Google My Business and provide valuable content there. If you’re one of those businesses that we just talked about, it’s time to make a switch.

If you customers don’t feel comfortable while learning about your business, they simply won’t go there. Don’t be that business. Make them comfortable!

Reviews

This means everything. If your business doesn’t have good reviews, you’re dead in the water. Look from our image above, which review would appear better for your business? The other with ⅖ stars, complaining about the business and such, or the one with 5 stars and loving the business? The 5 stars for sure!

If you don’t have at least 4 stars out of 5, consider yourself now known as a “bad business” in the digital world. With our virtual tours, we help get your reviews to improve, and your overall rating to go up. `

So, restaurant owners, are you convinced now? If not, re-read the blog. When you’re sold on the power of virtual tours for your establishment, we’d love to hear from you. We’ll optimize your tour to start becoming a customer-generation machine. Like we mentioned before, we preach a digital presence because that’s what the world is now. Everyone is doing the same thing…expect using a virtual tour. Now is your time to stand out from the competition and take a chance to be different. To be futuristic, to get with the times.

So…Why Go With Us?

Regardless of the industry, we have your back. We have experience in every single industry and customize your virtual tour to beat your competitors and enhance your customer experience. It’s our pleasure to make a virtual tour that suits your business only. We never use a cookie cutter system. Everything is individually customized to meet your needs.

Momentum 360 has been the leading-virtual tour provider in Philadelphia since our inception. Why? Because we deliver a top-quality product at a reasonable price. We take pride in helping small-businesses rise and get more traction. We lived through the struggle that most business owners go through on a daily basis, that’s why we get along with them so well.

If you’re looking to grow your online presence with a quality virtual tour, look no further.

You can schedule a call with Sean or Mac and always get more information on our website!

Our owners Mac Frederick and Sean Boyle have over 20+ years of digital marketing experience and are ready to help take your business to the next level! Our team members have also worked at Google and Facebook before, so we have the most up-to-date knowledge in the business. All to help your business rank at the top of Google and kickstart your journey to be a future lead generation machine!

You can email us or check out our website for more information!

We hope this blog informed you on how to correctly publish your tour to Google Street View and the neat features that comes along with this!

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If you have any questions or concerns, leave them in the comments below! From everyone at Momentum 360, thanks for the love and until next time, build Momentum!