By Alicia Rother, Contributor
It is an understatement to say that the US’s restaurant industry is extremely competitive. With more than a million restaurants operating in the US right now and more opening each day, it would be naïve to think this business is anything but cutthroat. In such a competitive industry, what are your chances for success as a new eatery?
In this article, we explore various strategies to attract new customers to a restaurant and make those customers loyal patrons.
Set Up Your Restaurant’s Google My Business Account
Technology can be any restaurant’s best friend. In addition to a kick-ass website (that’s always updated with new information), you should also set up your restaurant’s Google My Business account. We’ve mentioned this before, but how many of you have actually spent the time to set one up? The service is free and lists your business in its local listings. It will also put your restaurant up on the map and make you much more visible to searchers.
It will also allow the new customers to look for your restaurant’s location easily, share it with others, check out the photos to see how the place looks, see what your ambiance is like, and give your restaurant on overall instant credibility.
Setting up your Google My Business account comes with an inbuilt, powerful analytics tool, packed full of data that you can use to drive your marketing efforts further.
Effective Social Media for Restaurant Brands
Not all social media was created equal. Some are more suitable for certain kinds of content than others. You or your social media team must have enough knowledge and social media suave to understand how to use each of the social media channels at what time and to its best advantage.
For example, Instagram is where you should go all out on your visuals. Shoot the best photos, make them hi-res, high quality, and spot-on with your restaurant brand.
For Twitter, bring in your wit, sense of humor, punchy lines, and short and snappy one-liners.
Facebook has enough meat to be used as a second website, so use it as such. Decorate it with media-rich content, use it to have engagement and conversations with your patrons, and utilize it as the strong marketing tool it is.
Knowing which social media your target market is using the most, and how they are interacting with it, can help you devise a social media marketing strategy that is data-driven and goal-oriented.
Be Consistent with Your Restaurant’s Branding & Logo
According to Upserve, 90% of guests check out a restaurant online before they visit it. What does it mean for you?
It means that wherever you are advertising your restaurant, it should be speaking a consistent language. This language is the core of your brand. Whether you are marketing online or distributing fliers, your restaurant logo, colors, typography, and theme must remain uniform and placed consistently across media assets.
Transforming your restaurant from a business to a brand is how customers can learn to spot you wherever and whenever they see you. Whether on search engine pages, social media headers, or through marketing fliers handed to them at events. This consistency in your visuals, communications, and interactions will always reaffirm your restaurant’s branding, and if it’s effective, guests will develop strong affiliations with it.
Create Partnerships with Local Businesses
What is shared is what grows. To make your restaurant business visible and viable, you don’t just have to rely on marketing. Be proactive and start approaching local businesses in your area. Start offering catering services, or delivering snacks for meetings on reduced prices to these businesses.
If what you’re offering is good enough – both the menu and the prices – these businesses may become your regulars and share word of mouth.
Offer Discounts, Deals & LTOs
According to Restaurant.org, 50% of guests are looking for deals and discounts when choosing one restaurant over another. So, keeping your costs and budgets in mind, be as generous with your discounts as you can be when attracting new customers to your eatery.
Some easy discount and deals options you can offer:
Varied menu prices during off-peak hours.
Discounts or freebies when they check-in and share your restaurant on social.
Discount on showing their receipts if they revisit within a week.
Free drinks, appetizers, or desserts during off-peak hours.
Offering a special, off-menu item only one day a week, making it exclusive.
Whenever you are offering a discount or a deal, make it a Limited Time Offer (LTO), to build the idea of scarcity and encourage the customers to take action.
Have Your Restaurant Offer Breakfast All Day
People love breakfast items. According to the Restaurant.org research, 55% of guests said they’d eat breakfast items if restaurants offered them all day. This is data that can give you your unique selling point. Be the restaurant in your area that offers breakfast all day.
Selling breakfast items all day has other benefits too, e.g. it consists of inexpensive items, it’s considered the most important meal of the day, and has high-profit margins. But before you announce it on your website, see if offering breakfast all day at your restaurant is right for you.
Do You Have a Happy Hour?
Though Happy Hours are usually associated with bars and nightclubs, there’s no reason why your restaurant can’t start offering it too. Happy Hours are great ways to not only generate more income but bring in the crowd that usually will head to a bar during this time.
To make the Happy Hour your own, you can start offering special menu items with the drinks, offer a complimentary drink with your meal orders, or go all out and curate brand new drink items.
To attract new guests, you have to do something that you weren’t doing before, and Happy Hour may just be that thing.
Improve Your Restaurant’s Customer Reviews
We’ve already talked about how the majority of the guests check out a restaurant online before they decide to eat there. What do you think they are doing when they’re checking you out online? Most certainly, they are looking at your restaurant reviews.
Reviews are important to new restaurant guests, especially since peer reviews are considered more authentic and relatable to searchers. If your customers aren’t rating you well, new guests will likely won’t step a foot inside. Almost a third of new guests refuse to eat at a restaurant if its rating is below four stars.
To make your reviews work for you, even the bad ones, we suggest start responding to them – but strategically. If you see a problem being complained about repeatedly you need to address it. Start a conversation, keep the tone light, admit your mistake, promise to improve (and then follow up with the guest when you’ve made that improvement), and exit the conversation.
Hopefully, as you continue to grow and learn, the positive reviews will outpour the negative ones and you won’t have much to worry about in the long run.
Don’t Forget to Celebrate Major Events
To become a real part of the community and announce your presence to your target market, start participating in local and national events.
Sporting events, annual holidays, Veterans Day, New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, and other such events make for great occasions to invite new customers to visit you through exciting deals and a pumped-up social media presence.
Also, take part in local trade shows and other community events where you can meet new customers and offer your menu samples.
Final Take-Away
The global audience on the whole, and American audience, in particular, is becoming more and more experience-oriented. According to Restaurant.org, 52% of customers would rather invest in an experience, like going out to eat, than purchase a new item. For such an industry with a high potential for new customers, it is important to think of unique and effective ways to bring in the new guests and offer them an experience that they can’t refuse.
About the Author
Alicia Rother is a freelance content strategist who works with small businesses and startups to boost their brand reach through creative content design and write-ups. Her area of expertise include digital marketing, infographics, branding, and SEO. For service inquiries you can connect with her here.
