At a minimum, restaurants need to optimize their homepages and other key landing pages in their website for mobile use.  Often a mobile user will conduct a search, find your restaurant in search results, and click on the link to view more information such as your address, location, hours or menu.  Or, they may be searching through a site such as Yelp and want to link to your website for more information.  If your site is not providing this potential customer with the information they need quickly and easily, you may have just missed out on their business.  Take a look at your website on a web-enabled phone. Have friends or colleagues do the same as different phones display websites differently and you want to reach potential customers regardless of the type of phone they carry. If your website has the most important information at the top of the page, you can view and access the site navigation and things generally look good, then you’re off to a good start.

If your site doesn’t look as nice as it should, there are options. As far as we know, there aren’t a lot of restaurant owners out there who are also mobile developers, so we wanted to provide you with some interesting workarounds so get your site appearing on mobile devices right away. Some are free, some are cheap. Check out Mippin, Intersquash and Build My Mobi to get a feel for the options.  There are also plenty of consulting firms who specialize in website optimization for mobile devices who would be happy to have your business.

“…Some restaurants have consciously removed their wine lists from public domain. I used to fantasize occasionally by scanning the list at Veritas on East 20th Street, one of the country’s top wine-oriented restaurants. But when I sought it out recently, I couldn’t find it.

“We did pull it down,’’ Tim Kopec, the wine director, told me. “We felt that a lot of our competition was stealing information. If another restaurant is going to sell all the first-growth Bordeaux of 1982, it’s easy for them to check out our pricing and sell it for $25 less. It makes us look bad. We want to protect what we’re doing.’’

Wine Lists As Armchair Reading (The Pour, NY Times)

“The key takeaway is that 2/3 of the top restaurant marketers in attendance are spending less than 10% of their advertising budget online in a time when customers consume 41% of their media online.

Closing this gap is the key to thriving in a challenging economic climate by increasing marketing targeting and tracking. You wan to advertise and market where your clients are.

This marketing won’t work as effectively for everybody:

It works specially well for restaurants that sell food to go or to pickup.

So what about if you have a sit-down restaurant? You can still benefit from many of the online marketing techniques such as sending electronic gift certificates to celebrate your best client’s birthdays (or anniversaries) or announce special promotions or events.

Your website should be the forefront of your marketing efforts. You need to capture your customers information (email, phone number) and then act upon it to reach your customers and invite them to take action.”

Interactive Restaurant Marketing

“For our last test, we used the Internet to order a pizza from Uno Chicago Grill. We found the Web site useful, with pictures of pizzas and appetizers and tabs that allowed us to browse the salad and pasta sections.

Rick Hendrie, senior vice president of marketing with Uno Chicago Grill, says the pictures have another effect: People ordering online tend to buy more food. “They order with their eyes. Over the phone, you go with a default order,” Mr. Hendrie says. It’s a sentiment echoed by Papa John’s, where online sales are about 10% higher than orders placed over the phone or by walk-ins.

Mr. Hendrie and others also note that orders placed online tend to be more accurate. As one tester noted, “It’s sometimes hard for the pizza place to hear the difference between pepperoni and green pepper when you’re talking on the phone.”

Scoring A Pizza Delivery Via Facebook (WSJ via Cattle Network)

Mobile search
Location based mobile search on smartphones like iPhone, BlackBerry Storm, Sony XPERIA, HTC HD but also more Google phones to come will change business. The proliferation of those mobiles will result in a critical mass. More people will search for the next bank or ATM, Chinese Restaurant or store selling a particular brand nearby.

Blogging a Must
While 2008 was still a year you had to convince people in business to blog in 2009 blogs will be standard and those not having one will simply fall behind. With social media and blogs being even on the forefront of a successful presidential campaign business owners who are just aware of the Internet solely offering storefronts and static pages full of corporate and sales gibberish will lose like McCain did.

Non-intrusive marketing
We have permission, viral and inbound marketing already to name just a few ways of marketing without the in your face appearance of advertising. Still all those practices are nonetheless recognizable as marketing and thus sometimes annoying or unable to get the message through. In 2009 non-intrusive marketing will be more and more providing information you need, where and when you need it.

30 Web Trends For 2009 (SEOptimise)