Are you looking for marketing ideas for the restaurant to grow your business?
Let me share with you 12 marketing ideas that will bring in tons of customers to your restaurant.
Let’s keep reading.
1. Eating Contest of Your Signature Dish
Having an eating contest is a great way for you to get to know more about your customers.
Offer the winner with a t-shirt, or took a picture of them and include them in the wall of fame so they can show off to their friends in social media and word of mouth.
This is going to give your restaurant a lot of awareness.
One more idea is having an eating contest where you invite local or international competitive eater to participate.
This eating contest might put you in your local news if one of the competitive eaters broke an international record.
2. Loyalty Program
Do you have any loyalty program for your regular customer?
Offer them to dine in your restaurant with a discounted price on their birthday, anniversary or any special occasion that means a lot to them.
Do you know that 60% of loyal customers will purchase more frequently from their preferred companies? (source : InMoment)
3. Get listed in Google My Business
Get your restaurant listed in Google my Business. This will help your customer to easily find your restaurant, find out your opening time, leave a review or even give you a call to make a reservation.
4. Have A Proper Visual Branding
Proper visual branding will help your customers to properly recognize what type of food you are serving before they step into the restaurant.
Let’s take an example if you are selling vegan food, blue color visual branding theme might not align with what you are trying to sell.
Perhaps earth tone colors such as green or yellow theme visual branding will be much more appropriate.
When you work with a branding agency, they will come out with a brand guideline so your visual branding will stay consistence.
A brand guideline will include information such as how to use your logo, type of image to use, the color of your overall branding ..etc.
Proper branding is going to help a lot when you are having a promotion on both offline and online in the future.
Facts: Using color raises your brand recognition by 80% (Source: University of Loyola)
5. Have A Website
You can do a lot of things when you have a website.
You can blog about the non-profit event that you just did, announce new dishes, let your customer book a table online, show your menu, or have a promo code on the festive season.
A website is a great platform for you to build a relationship with your customers.
6. Get The Right Menu Design
Do you know the right menu design will make your customer order more?
There is a lot of phycology in menu design. Check out this post about the psychology behind menu design.
7. Email Marketing
Collecting emails from your customers is a great way to keep in touch with them. You can easily reach out to them and tell them about the latest menu, promotion, or even coupon.
8. Partner Up With a Food Delivery Startup
If you are looking to take online orders, partner up with a food delivery company is a great way to get started.
They will help you promote your food on their apps and this will help you get free traffic.
Facts: 76% of people are likely to dine in a restaurant if they had previously enjoyed an online delivery from there (Morar HPI)
9. Get Active On Instagram
Instagram is a great platform to showcase your mouth-watering dishes.
Get personal with your customers showing them where you get your ingredient, behind a scene of your restaurant, or run a giveaway!
10. Partner Up With Food Blogger/Influencer
You could bring some serious traffic from this partnership.
Invite them to your restaurant to have a meal, take a picture or video and ask them to tag your restaurant on their social media.
Maybe you can offer them VIP membership to make them feel appreciated?
Facts: 23% of U.S. consumers reported loyalty to brands that partner with celebrities. (Accenture)
11. Be Generous With Complaint
How do you feel about it when you go to a restaurant and the food is not up to the standard, then the restaurant actually replace that food and offers you that meal for free?
I am pretty sure you will tell your friends about it and probably leave a good review of their restaurant.
Facts
- 69% of American customers would spend more on a company with better customer service (American Express)
- 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service. (HubSpot Research)
- Happy American customers will share their positive experiences with and refer to about 11 people. (American Express)
12. Start a Food Truck
Driving around with your visual branding on the truck is a great way for free advertising.
It is like a moving billboard.
Other than that, a food truck is a great way to reach new audiences by participating in a food event.
You get to serve more people to try out your food in a different location.
Here is one more hack that I learn from local businesses, find a location with a lot of traffic and park the truck there for free advertising.
Do you have any marketing ideas for a restaurant to add? Leave a comment down below.