The COVID-19 Pandemic did an incredible amount of damage to restaurants and takeaways worldwide. With these businesses struggling all over the UK and the rest of the world due to having to unfortunately cope with the cost of lock-down, we thought we’d share five ways that you can go the extra mile to help your favorite restaurants and takeaways!
Help them on Facebook!
It might seem unusual but most restaurants and takeaways really rely on Facebook to get customers. Liking your favorite restaurants and takeaways on Facebook, writing reviews or recommendations, liking and sharing their posts, and giving them an occasional shout out can really help to get struggling businesses get back on their feet. Taking pictures of the food with mobile devices or cameras and sharing them can also be helpful! You can tag the restaurant with their @tag so people can find the business easier!
Don’t Order Using Just-Eat
It can seem like a really simple thing to do to order from your favorite places using Just-Eat, however Just-Eat is often one of the most damaging things eating away at the businesses they support, they do this through taking a high percentage of sales, competing with the business and forcing uniformity so restaurants can’t offer lower prices on their menus or websites. The best way to order from your favorite takeaways and restaurants is to call them and place an order over the phone. You will be saving them money and helping them tremendously.
If you’d like more information on the damage Just-Eat does to businesses, you can find it by clicking: here.
Give them a Review on Google!
Google My Business is really useful for just about every company, no matter where they are in the world. People come to Google when they want to look for local companies or find out information about a specific business. Your reviews on Google can make a real difference to people considering eating at the business or ordering from them, so it’s well worth taking the time to leave one.
Tell Your Friends
Word of mouth is one of the best ways any business can be promoted. Nothing beats a good reference from friends and family. I have been asked time and time again where the best places to eat or order from in Colchester are, and many people have taken my advice and visited places for many reasons from food quality to decor. By telling your friends and family where you had a nice Indian, Chinese, Fish and Chips or Pizza, you could help increase the amount of people ordering from a takeaway or visiting a restaurant. Sometimes saving a business can mean just one new person finding it and telling all their friends. So this is definitely worthwhile!
Review them on TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor is a fantastic site to review your favorite places. By leaving a well rounded review and solid rating, you could be helping keep these businesses afloat. Many people come into restaurants, pubs or make orders based upon what they see on TripAdvisor, and a large number of the restaurants I work with have a lot of praise for the website.
Why Take The Time?
At the end of the day, saving your favorite places to eat locally is worth a little bit of effort. Having watched businesses being torn apart by Just-Eat, the recent COVID-19 Pandemic and more, I have come to the realization that sometimes it’s well worth the effort keeping these businesses alive. Nothing is worse than the horrifying realisation that you can no longer order your favorite kebabs, especially when all the other local kebab places have chicken that tastes of dish soap and have survived because everything they sell is cheap and low quality.
You can also share this article on social media so that your friends and family can also see how they too can help their local companies!
If you know a business or Takeaway, you can also share my guide to helping their business out. It’s free and I’m always adding to it!
Thank you for reading this, please take the time to share it and help your local restaurants as much as possible. I have been working with businesses, mainly restaurants and takeaways for the past 4 to 5 years. I have worked with just about every kind of business and cuisine imaginable, a wide variety of takeaways and restaurants all over the UK and with two (so far) restaurants abroad, one in Germany and the other in the United States. The most important thing when you love something is to keep it up and running, and taking the time to leave reviews and support businesses won’t cost you anything more than the time it takes, and could make all the difference.
With everything that’s happened recently and with most services like Just-Eat such as Deliveroo taking large cuts out of the profits of our favorite restaurants and takeaways, it is becoming a lot harder for these businesses to survive. This isn’t helped by rising minimum wages and universal cost of living increases, which force them to up prices to a point where customers will think twice about ordering from them. Services like Just-Eat that take a huge cut of profits over time will drag a company down and force them to use cheaper profits, which will over time degrade the quality your restaurants provide.
If you are an influencer…
If you run your own Facebook Pages or Groups, maybe run your own Website and write your own blogs or if you have your own YouTube channel, you could always do so much more for the restaurants and takeaways you value. Setting cover photos, sharing posts, or blogging about businesses could make a real difference if you have a good audience! YouTube videos linking back to their website, and even blogs linking back to them can also help them get found locally and potentially even help them with their offsite SEO and ranking. It’s very much worth taking the time to do what you can!
Thank you, and I hope this helps!
