As anyone who has opened a restaurant, bar or café will know, there are many considerations to keep in mind to ensure your business is a success. While many focus on choosing the right chef, training their staff properly and creating a delicious menu, hospitality professionals can sometimes overlook the finer details that establish trust in the dining public.
Just like with any business, accuracy is key when it comes to delivering information to your customers. This is just as true of having the correct location details on your website as it is making sure items are spelled correctly on your menu, or making sure there are no misleading spelling errors on your website. A customer is going to be suspicious from the get go if they are at a French restaurant, for example, yet the menu they receive contains incorrect names for the dishes.
In a highly competitive industry, it is also one way you can signal that you are better than your competitors.
As a foodservice professional, foodservice is what you are good at. If writing and proofreading are not your strong suits, outsourcing these tasks to a freelancer writer or editor can be a cheap, simple and effective way of boosting the reputation of your business.
In partnership with Fiverr, we’ve put together some things to keep in mind when you are working on your menu and website design:
1. Ensure consistency
More than ever, the branding of your business is crucial to stand out from the crowd. A strong brand presence makes you recognisable to your customers, ensuring they’re able to recognise your business when they see it and know what to expect from your service. If your business name is spelled in different ways in different areas of your marketing – or, for example, if it sometimes formatted in uppercase letters and sometimes in lowercase – this will make it more difficult for a customer to know whether you are the same venue they were searching for online.
To ensure your branding is consistent across all of your communications, it pays to hire a freelance sub-editor to go through and make sure these finer details are in order.
2. Watch for typos
Poor spelling and grammar can have a surprisingly damaging impact on your brand reputation. The effects can range from simply leaving a bad impression on clientele (for instance, if your website is littered with typos) to completely misleading them (for instance, if you include the wrong name for a dish on your menu design). In the case of the latter example, this can even pose a health risk to your customers.
One way to avoid this happening is hiring a freelance content writer to take care of your written and printed communications instead of doing it yourself. Or, if you’re an established business and your content has already been written, hire an editor to do an audit of your content and come back to you with any changes they recommend.
3. Foolproof your advertising materials
More than just leaving a bad impression on potential customers, errors in your advertising content can cost you a fortune. For example, imagine spending thousands on an ad campaign designed to bring in new business only to realise your website was typed incorrectly! Or, potentially worse, the tagline you used breached a copyright infringement.
Particularly when it comes to advertising, any errors in your materials can result in an even costlier exercise. To make sure you’re not hit with any potentially damaging unexpected costs, consider hiring a copywriter to foolproof your campaign – and even a proofreader in the final stages to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
No matter what type of materials you need created for your foodservice business, there are professionals available on Fiverr that can help.
Click here to find more proofreading and editing resources for your business.