MARKETING: 5 Signage All Restaurants Should Have
One of the biggest challenges for restaurant entrepreneurs is bringing diners into your establishment and at your tables. And while it’s important to look at what sort of outward marketing you can do via social media, targeted Internet ads and traditional methods, operators shouldn’t overlook what they can do to their restaurants that’ll grab attention and bring in new guests. Fortunately, one of the most cost-effective ways to market your restaurant is via signage. Here are five signage all restaurants should have.
DID YOU KNOWS…
V-Day at White Castle
Want to take your loved one on a romantic dinner for Valentine’s Day? Good news! White Castle is now accepting V-Day reservations. With each rez comes hostess seating, tableside service, and romantic decorations. More than 30,000 diners went to White Castle for Valentine’s Day last year. What have you planned for your love-dove guests?
#WhiteHouseDinners
As expected, the internet is having a feast, as it were, after Donald Trump met with the Clemson football team and served a buffet of fast food on the White House’s silver platters. And unlike the food, allegedly, things got pretty hot in the #WhiteHouseDinners. Even Burger King got in on the action.
America’s Most & Least Trusted Professions
Nurses came top of Gallup's trust league for the 17th year in a row with 84% of respondents rating them very high or high for honesty and ethical standards. The healthcare sector scored high on honesty in general with doctors and pharmacists also among the top-three with 67% and 66% respectively.
SHARE-AWAY
Why it matters to you: Shareable large platters encourage guests to engage each other while dining.
Most diners that visit your restaurant are there to “share a meal,” but that idiom has lost its literal meaning over the years. Customs houses and taverns of old (the original entrepreneurs) served communal meals with one platter for all those in attendance. Some modern restaurants still embrace this style of dining, think Melting Pot fondues or Korean BBQ. Since the shared meal experience is how most of us dine at home, there is some value in creating dishes that a group can share to enhance their experience.
Of course, many diners come to your restaurant for variety of choice but offering some shared-platter options gives them the enhanced experience of a shared meal. It causes your guests to lean in and actually engage with their dining companions. Many of you already offer some sort of platter appetizer, but that isn’t quite the same thing. Why not offer an entrée that is designed for sharing, where guests can see a beautiful presentation with the drama of a large-scale format? This primer on how to execute large format plating is a pretty good place to start your menu development.
DIGITAL MARKETING ONE DETAIL AT A TIME
Why it matters to you: Crank up your digital marketing by paying attention to the details.
Here’s a fun fact: Instagram has outgrown Facebook by 117% in ad sales over the past year. That doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t a viable advertising platform, but it does mean that your social efforts need to be better split over various platforms if you want to drive traffic using social. While we all know the value of online marketing, many of us fall short in our efforts to execute on it. Entrepreneur Magazine enumerates four steps you can take to supercharge your online marketing. For example, the blog encourages you to optimize your search for voice search.
With the explosion in personal assistant software like Alexa from Amazon, folks are relying heavily on voice driven search. In fact, 40% of adults are reporting they use it daily and 20% of those searches are done via mobile.
Another smart suggestion is to optimize your videos for mobile consumption. According to Mobile Overview Report (MOVR), 94% of users watch videos vertically, even if they were intended to be watched horizontally. As with anything marketing, it’s the details that make the difference. These steps will ensure you have the details covered.
[Source: Entrepreneur]
