Restaurant Virtual Tours could be the Food Industry’s Secret Ingredient for Success

They say we eat with our eyes first, and when it comes to visually engaging and sharing content with restaurant customers, 3D virtual tours speak louder than words. 

One of the pandemic’s most highly impacted industries, Covid-19 altered the restaurant game forever. Restaurants needed to quickly pivot from in-person dining to take-out/online operations in the blink of an eye. What was once a novel exception, delivery began ruling the food game.

Restaurants that once competed for in-person clientele, today’s kitchens serve delivery, take-out, dine-in, event venue rentals, and private events all at once. And with new restaurant business models bolstered by online apps like Uber Eats and Skip The Dishes, ghost kitchens are beginning to flood the market. Competition among restaurateurs is fiercer than ever.

With lockdowns a thing of the past, the restaurant industry is experiencing pent-up demand for unique and memorable food experiences. Whether you own a trendy street fooderie or an established upscale establishment, to meet the demands of today’s food consumer,  restaurants today require innovative, intelligent, and strategic marketing to whet their customer’s appetites. 

No longer tempted only by directly mailed menus or old-fashioned newspaper ads, today’s food fans expect more information, insight, and transparency before opening their wallets and making a reservation.

As more restaurants begin to use traditional video in their marketing efforts, it’s important for businesses to stand out for customers to take notice.

That’s where Restaurant Virtual Tours come into play.

Restaurants are using 3D Tours to introduce their ambiance and menu to consumers for the first time online, turning impressed first impressions into booked tables.

Beyond this, restaurant patrons appreciate being able to see the “best” seats in the house when making reservations. 

Restaurant owners and managers are using 3D Tours to market their restaurants to both corporate and private party planners looking to rent a space or the entire restaurant for their events.

To rise above the internet noise, restaurants must find creative ways to engage with their customer base and attract new business.  The next wave in the food service marketing game is digital and 3D Virtual Tours are a secret ingredient in a successful restaurant’s recipe box.

As more restaurants begin to use traditional video in their marketing efforts,  it’s important for businesses to stand out for customers to take notice.

Changing the way we see restaurants

Virtual Tours for restaurants are one of the answers to the food service industry’s call for something more. Using virtual tour technology, offering a 360-degree, panoramic view, we are helping meet the ever-evolving needs of restaurants, ghost kitchens, and food retail establishments with onboarding and digital marketing with immersive virtual tours. Customers spend 5 to 10 times more on websites with virtual tours.

With restaurant virtual tours on websites, shared on social media channels, and recorded to create video content, they’re offering a wide range of marketing applications and facility management uses for restaurant owners.

Savvy restaurateurs are using 3D Tours to showcase their event venue spaces, providing corporate meeting planners with an immersive preview of their restaurants’ event space. Busy, out-of-town executives that are strapped for time are finding the convenience of touring a space without having to leave their office highly beneficial, making 3D Tours an essential marketing tool for this potential customer base.

Caterers, large groups, and families looking for event venues to hold weddings, bridal showers, birthday parties, reunions, bar mitzvahs, etc. are more likely to click on a restaurant’s event space website that features a 3D Virtual Tour, which offers a view of the space that traditional video or still photography cannot.

We also have food court establishments using 3D Tours to highlight their ambiance, offering a striking first impression online, and enticing first-time customers to visit their favourite restaurants.

And with the ability to be embedded with multi-media tags filled with videos, photos, and links, the uses can be further expanded for facility management, onboarding, training, and other operational purposes.  

An essential tool used to illustrate menu items, introduce cooking techniques, explain inventory and inspection procedures, aid in customer service training, and assist with upselling techniques, virtual tours offer limitless opportunities to run an efficient business and boost a restaurant’s bottom line.

With sustainability, safety, and health being key decision factors at the top of consumers’ minds these days, folks want to know more about the brands they choose to patronize. 

To that end, studies show that the public wants to see more visual content from local businesses because it gives them a behind-the-scenes view and makes the establishments seem more trustworthy and transparent. Customers aged 18 to 34 are 130% more likely to book a table at restaurants with virtual tours.

This holds especially true for restaurants, giving customers upfront and personal views of the food they’ll be eating and the space they’ll be dining in. 

Leveraging the power of 3D Virtual Tour marketing for your restaurant will give you a better shot at attracting hungry diners by enticing customers with realistic mouth-watering images that can’t be captured with traditional video or still photography. It also gives customers a sneak peek into the restaurant’s workings behind the scenes.

Spices up your social presence

Foodies today love to share every aspect of their palate-pleasing experiences. Whether it’s a perfect finger-licking chicken wing added to an Instagram story or a flaky croissant and steamy latte uploaded to their Twitter feed to ensure your restaurant stands out, you need to rise above the loud social media noise.  

Just about anyone with a smartphone can create videos and post them on social media. To increase engagement, breed brand loyalty, and gain followers, matterport virtual tours will capture the attention of your prospective customers and excite your base.

Ridge Rock Brewing Co. in Carp, ON uses Restaurant Virtual Tours on its website to show its locations, tell its rich history story, highlight its chef’s personal style, and announce new menu items or upcoming events. 

Paints a vibrant picture 

There are few businesses that rely more on physical ambiance and environment than restaurants. It can be a painstaking task to get the look and feel of your restaurant’s interior and exterior with basic images or even traditional video. 

Virtual tours allow customers to get a more realistic feel of your restaurant. The ability to adjust the mood with lighting and set a virtual table helps to entice customers more vividly than any other medium. We helped Hyde & Seek, a new hip speakeasy in downtown Ottawa by showcasing their new fresh digs online and enabling online bookings with Tablz.

Faster employee training

As the labor shortage continues to loom large, restaurants and facility management companies are having a difficult time hiring and retaining qualified staff. Using virtual tours in hiring sites, businesses can effectively market themselves to the most qualified candidates.  New or visiting employees can access your store from their own computer to quickly understand the flow of the space and overall atmosphere without the hassle of an onsite visit. 

Restaurant operators for the likes of Starbucks love using 3D Virtual Tours to understand what equipment is installed at what location. They also get an inside view of the entire restaurant, helping them coordinate new marketing campaigns and construction projects. Helping new employees learn their way around means they can hit the ground running on their first day, speeding up the onboarding process tremendously.

Higher Google ranking

Professional Google Street View Trusted virtual tours can be paired with your restaurant’s Google maps and street view, which helps with SEO. If a prospective customer is conducting a near-me search for restaurants in a specific geographic area on Google, for example, multiple results will be displayed.

Not only will restaurants with virtual tours in place stand out, but the increased engagement and uptick in clicks will boost your SEO, moving your restaurant up in the ranks.

Highly cost-effective digital marketing

Not only are virtual tours more interactive than traditional video production with over twice the time spent on the page, but they are also surprisingly affordable. And because 41% of virtual restaurant tours result in an on-site visit, they are a highly cost-effective marketing tool.  Did you know 67% of people want more businesses to offer virtual tours?

Brand Showcasing

When Figaro Coffee House wanted to showcase its brand, featuring fine Arabica coffee beans from around the world, it knew it wanted to brew something that stood out from the competition.  That’s when they got in touch with Point3D to harness the power of virtual presence for their new flagship location in Ottawa, ON.

They had us create 3D Virtual Tours to highlight the company’s superior roasting tactics, giving customers a birdseye, behind-the-scenes view that captured the brand’s sophisticated style and high-end standards.

Promotes Corporate Events and Private Party Hosting

Matterport Tours has the ability to allow planners to view your space without having to take time from their busy schedules for a live visit. When customers search for catering venues, restaurants with virtual tours will attract more visitors and draw more business. This powerful showing and placemaking tool can be easily shared and viewed by any device with an internet connection.

To show its separate room styles, Live Real Factory had us create two 3D Virtual Tours, one for its Corporate event venue and another for Events. Having these 3D Tours as separate links helps management show the setting for more event venue space bookings than ever before.

Creates an immersive experience

With more and more restaurants adding video to their marketing strategy, 3D Virtual Tours give you a leg up on today’s crowded online marketplace. An immersive experience that lets customers “walk-in” to your restaurant with their phone or computer long before they ever actually walk through your front door, prospective guests can wander through your restaurant virtually, scroll through your online menu, and gain deeper insight into your business’s unique universe.

By adding additional elements to the 3D Showcase, Aiana Restaurant Collective leads their guests by the hand into a whole new world. Their virtual tour has multimedia labels to show menus, recipes, interviews with chefs, and customer testimonials.

We Are Restaurant Virtual Tour Specialists

Point3D Commercial Imaging is a contributing member of the Ottawa Board of Trade. We’ve worked with almost a hundred restaurants in Eastern Canada to help market their tables and event space options digitally. If you are a restaurant and are ready to use 3D Virtual Tours for restaurants in Ottawa, Montreal or Toronto, contact our team!

With tremendous Automotive and Marketing industry experience, there is no better company in Ontario for capturing Dealership Virtual Tours than Point3D Commercial Imaging.

It used to be all about radio advertising, and catching drivers on their commute to and from work, but now most dealerships are opting to spend more and more of their marketing budget on digital marketing. It’s 2022. For some dealerships, traditional media like radio, TV, and Out-Of-Home advertising spend still dwarfs digital. But other dealership groups are using digital marketing to generate local brand awareness and brand recognition at a more competitive cost than blanketing the airwaves with dealership ads. As cars are seldom sold online and without a test drive, the digital strategy of these car dealerships is to attract consumers to their showrooms. Having the consumer confident about the showroom and ready to buy so that a salesperson can easily sell them is everything. Enter dealership virtual tours and take it from Evan McCosham, Marketing Manager at Tony Graham Automotive Group in Ottawa, ON.

“After deploying them on our contact page, the dealership virtual tours enticed online visitors to make appointments and to visit in person more often.”

– Evan McCosham, Marketing Manager, Tony Graham Automotive Group

We’re helping Tony Graham Automotive Group and many other dealerships in Ontario by creating dealership virtual tours with 3D Matterport every year to keep up with the latest-generation flagship models. Our service provides the most immersive and state-of-the-art dealership virtual tours. The 3D Matterport tour is embedded onto the dealer’s website, a Google Street View tour is added to Google Maps, the 3D Tour is shared in monthly dealership promotions (i.e. flyers, newsletters), and in other sales communications.

Using the 3D dealership virtual tour a user can freely preview the entire dealership, learn more about select models, and book a consultation or test drive. Using multimedia labels, the 3D Matterport tour embedded on the websites can add additional context, videos, and more. Our systems are integrated with the inventory stock of the dealership and can let a user know if a particulate model is available to be seen at the dealership. When users do visit in person they are ultimately more comfortable as they will recall the layout and car models in the dealers’ showrooms. This results in confident buyers more often for the car dealership sales staff to work with in person.

We love to capture 3D Matterport dealership tours. One of the unique features of our 3D Tours over other companies is the ability to show the interior of car models in 3D. We scan the vehicle interior allowing users to step right inside of the latest and greatest car models, see the dash, and really get a feel for the car. From the driver’s seat, users can see the sales brochure, watch a video, or even book a test drive.

Dealership Virtual Tours for Toyota

Tony Graham Automotive Group was the first dealership in Ottawa we had the pleasure of visualizing in 3D. Tony Graham has incredible brand power and their radio tagline from the 1990s is still unforgettable to any Ottawa native. In fact, our Founder Spencer MacPherson’s first car, a 1995 Toyota Corolla, was originally purchased at Tony Graham Toyota on Merivale. Since then, MacPherson’s belief in the Toyota promise of reliability and quality remains to this day. The company car is now a much updated 2019 Toyota Corolla. In this dealership virtual tour, the Toyota Corolla Hatchback and Toyota 86 were featured as brand-new models that year.

Dealership Virtual Tours for Lexus

After the first dealership virtual tour at Tony Graham Toyota, other car dealerships were looking at using 3D Tours on their website. Toyota’s more affluent or well-dressed cousin, Lexus, was looking for a way to bring more clients to their dealership With an email request to Point3D, they procured an estimate for a dealership virtual tour including in several vehicles. The cost is nominal and could be co-opted by the Lexus brand as a marketing initiative. This ultimately made it more feasible for a new 3D Tour to be created each year. We now visit annually when new-generation models are released to update the car dealership 3D Tour.

Dealership Virtual Tours for Kia

We don’t just service Ottawa, Ontario. When car dealer Kia Durham reached out looking for a car dealership virtual tour with Matterport, we sold them on our expertise in capturing the very best Matterport scans with cars in dealerships. We chose a day that space was closed to the public, cleaned, and with each vehicle specially placed to allow navigation and completed the 3D Virtual Tour capture. The Matterport scan took a full day to complete, with deliverables ready within that same week. To deploy the marketing collateral, the car dealer set up a “Shop From Home” sales funnel that incorporates the 3D Tour and embeddedd it on the contact page of their website.

We are Car Dealership Virtual Tour Experts

Capturing Dealership Virtual Tours with Matterport requires a comprehensive understanding of 3D virtual tours and the automotive industry. Trust the firm with experience in Matterport virtual tours for dealerships and car showrooms. If your Ottawa, Toronto, or Montreal dealership is thinking about how a 3D Virtual Tour can help attract new customers and bring more people through your front door, contact Point3D to learn more about the service. If you want to know more, visit our About Us page.

We work with several businesses that provide Ontario facility management for large chains of stores and restaurants. They all use Point3D to quickly bring new location digital twins online as they are built, renovated, or re fit up. This allows all project and company stakeholders to view the location in its as-found condition. For example with our 3D Tours a restaurant chain in Toronto can monitor the construction of its new flagship East Coast location virtually, then have a quality marketing asset of the brand-new location.

To talk a bit about using 3D Tour for facility management, let’s play pretend, and in this dream world, you are a new restaurateur. Native to Ottawa growing up you just recently came back from opening up Salt Bae’s newest Nusr-Et steakhouse and for two years before that you were working under some of the greatest chefs throughout Europe. Back in Ottawa, you start your own farm-to-table steakhouse. Finding a suitable rent on Elgin Street, fitting up, furnishings, installing new utilities, and equipment, it’s no small labour. On top of that, you’re to come up with your own signature plates and cocktails that draw from your world experiences where you developed your culinary craft. It’s a tight deadline but you’re able to get all this done ahead of your big opening. Oh, that’s right! You can’t forget about your grand opening party! 

Sounds like a lot right? Now multiply it by hundreds of locations

Multiplied by hundreds of locations, there are enough moving pieces to make anyone’s head spin. That’s the dilemma corporations encounter during aggressive expansion, things move so fast that inevitably things get lost in the fray. What coffee machine was installed at location #1001? How many high-top chairs are at location #347? Have all locations received and installed the latest POS systems?

When it comes to facility management for corporations, being available to check these items in-person for hundreds of locations is just not possible. What if companies were able to walk through all of their locations without leaving the office? That’s the facility management solution offered by Point3D Commercial Imaging. We give companies the ability to view all of their locations, perform quantity audits, and measure spot distances with the click of a button.

View and maintain hundreds of facilities without leaving the office

Using 3D Tours, a company can easily view and share the existing conditions of their locations. This can assist property managers with their facility maintenance projects as they will have a clear understanding of what equipment is installed where and being able to convey that information to contractors for tender bids.

• Share: Easily share locations with project stakeholders, allowing them to see the facility without actually having to be there in person.

• Label: Label specific items such as tiles, equipment, and furnishings for inventory and replacement purposes.

• Measure: Spot measure distances to help with determining replacement and installation costs.

Canada’s Leading Facility Management 3D Virtual Tour Provider

We provide digital Several companies are already using Matterport digital twins by Point3D to assist with their Ontario facility management needs. If your organization manages several locations, capturing them with 3D Tours is a cost-efficient way to facilitate maintenance or fit-up projects across your location network.

For more information, please visit our Facility Management page or contact us.

Get more customers through the door with stunning images of your business on Google Maps.

Choosing a Google Trusted professional for high-quality photos on your business listing can improve your user experience, and make it easier for customers to find you. 360 Tours let customers peek inside before they arrive, and boost your visibility online.

Google Street View Tours

How Matterport 360 helps in creating Virtual tours?

Our 360-degree cameras by Matterport are the best devices for creating a 3D virtual tour. We can come to your business and create premium quality Google Street View tours with Matterport 360. Any business or company can benefit from Google Street View tours by Point3D. We create the best 360-degree virtual tours for all commercial spaces, industries, and companies at the most reasonable rate. Inspire trust and help customers find you faster by publishing an immersive virtual tour of your business or updating Street View at your doorstep.

Check out the Industry solutions page to learn all types of spaces that can benefit from the 3D Tours and Google Street View tours we create.

In addition to Point3D Commercial Imaging is a Google Trusted Photographer in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, we are also expert Matterport 3D Tour capture specialists. We provide Google Street View Tours to supplement the Matterport 3D Virtual Tours we create for industries such as retail. Some stores that want an immersive 3D Tour to feature their showroom or restaurant also benefit from the Google Street View tours. While our Matterport 3D Virtual tours are easier to navigate, faster to load, and an overall better, richer experience to have embedded on your website, Google Street View is the more familiar platform for business owners. Google Street View typically also garners a further impression and reach as it is available through Google Maps. That’s not to say you should decide either-or, as having both is cost-effective.

No matter your business, you want to showcase your space in the best light to the most users possible. Our recommendation is to embed a Matteport 3D Tour for your website and have a Google Street View for your Google My Business listing.

WHAT’S A GOOGLE STREET VIEW TOUR?

To have a Google Street View Tour of your business is essential if your products or services are available through a brick-and-mortar location. Since 2012, many Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal businesses have had a Google Tour created. These virtual tours live on your Google My Business listing and are hosted on the Google Maps platform which is visited more than a billion times each year.
You might have even used it your self considering 44% of consumers used mapping products to search business locations in 2017!

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HOW’S IT DIFFER FROM A MATTERPORT 3D TOUR?

The immersive 3D tours we do in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal are made using Matterport. Matterport is an online 3D platform that ‘nests’ high-resolution photorealistic imagery throughout a three-dimensional space. This allows for a ‘Dollhouse’ view and walkthrough experience that navigates smoother than any other technology on the market and is more engaging than video on websites. It’s like Google Street View on steroids.

Not only is this a much better experience to show on your website, but further context can also be added by installing multimedia labels into the 3D Virtual Tour that can show images, video, PDFs, and more in order to really speak to your customers.

DIFFERENCE BREAK DOWN

Pretty neat right? On one hand, you have Google Street View, an established platform visited by tens of thousands per day. On the other, a fully immersive experience that serves your business functionally. So here are the key differences between the two platforms.

ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, BUT THE COST?

So you’ve seen the experience difference between the immersive 3D tour and Google Street View tour and you’re interested, but have to get an idea for what this could cost for the space you have in mind.

It’s quite reasonable really. Our pricing starts at $250 for just a simple Google Tour, the larger the space the more it will cost. We recommend however that you get both Google Tour and Matterport Tour, we can even make it cost-effective by throwing the Google Street View Tour into the deal. Contact us today to learn what it would cost to get a Google Tour or 3D Tour. We work throughout Ontario and Quebec.