Running a restaurant can be at times challenging and at other times rewarding. The lofty goals are feeding the world and making money doing what you love combined to create a great experience for your customers. Unfortunately, if potential customers don’t know about your restaurant, they can’t patronize it. This eventually leaves it languishing in obscurity. Fortunately, there are ways to improve your business-level using the power of marketing your restaurants. Here’s a short guide we put together to help you do just that.

    Social Media Promotions

    One of the biggest ways people communicate, socialize and learn about new things these days is through social media. One of the best ways to get the word out that your restaurant is by promoting there. Here are a few tips:

    • Create a Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram presence
    • Showcase some of your best meals on Instagram
    • Advertise promotions on the various platforms
    • Create a strong call to action with engaging social media posts
    • Create a positive in-person dining experience with high-quality food and ask patrons to rate their experience on Yelp, Google Reviews, and other restaurant review aggregator sites
    • Use Pinterest and YouTube to showcase your establishment
    • Start a blog
    • Give back to the community
    • Optimize your website SEO to drive engagement

    Social media can be a powerful promotional tool, so don’t be afraid to get creative, interact with your community, and promote yourself as much as possible. 

    Contactless Dining

    While in-person dining can be a viable option, there are still some people who aren’t as comfortable spending time eating in a restaurant and would prefer to eat their meal at home. That’s where contactless dining or curbside pick-up can give your restaurant an edge over some of the competition. If you have an app, the customer can have more control over their entire experience. It’s a win-win situation for both parties. Your establishment gets to enjoy increased business while the customer gets the benefit of more convenience and control over how to enjoy their meal. You can use text marketing to add some additional benefit via loyalty programs, coupons, and promotions exclusively for contactless/curbside customers. 

    Offer Delivery

    If a customer doesn’t want to physically travel to the restaurant (and you don’t already offer it), think about making delivery an option for your customers. Everyone has times where they’d prefer to have food delivered. Maybe they’re strapped for time or exhausted after work and just want to have something easy for dinner. Regardless of the case, adding delivery as an option might result in a small additional operating cost, but it can lead to big gains. Making delivery available provides more visibility to your restaurant and gives customers more options to enjoy your food. Restaurant owners can also partner with a delivery service to help drive sales. Either way, there’s potential for revenue growth when it comes to delivery, so you may want to consider adding it to your repertoire and using it as a form of marketing as well. 

    Use A Text Message Marketing Platform

    Driving business and customer loyalty to your restaurant requires a marketing plan. You’ll need a solid marketing platform for restaurants that can handle everything from text message marketing to measuring the impact of your various promotions. A text message is an incredibly effective means to reach a large pool of customers. Almost everyone has the ability to text or engage with text messages in some way, so the reach is tremendous. A good marketing platform takes the information you supply it with and sends messages to your customers. Then you can measure the open rates, impact, conversion rates, and retention rates for your customer base. You can measure how well your messages are doing, gain valuable insight into what needs to change to be more effective, and prevent redemption fraud all with an easy-to-use system that’s dedicated to helping you market your brand effectively. 

    Start A Loyalty Program

    Another proven method for generating more customer visits and revenue is through a loyalty program. But in order to actually benefit from a lovely program, you need to make it easy for the guests to participate. That means ditching the traditional card over membership token and opting for a digital world program instead. That way, all you need is their phone number, membership number, or email address to let them take advantage of the program. The program should be as simple as possible so as to be conducive to allowing the customer to take advantage of the rewards without relying on much leg work from them – other than showing up and buying things. It should also provide benefits that make sense. Coupons or so-good-you-can’t-miss-it offers are a good bet for rewards. Don’t skimp on promoting the program though. customers needed to know about it so they can use it and promoting it everywhere – maybe even through some of your text message marketing – is a surefire way to get the most out of offering a customer loyalty program.

    Richard is an experienced tech journalist and blogger who is passionate about new and emerging technologies. He provides insightful and engaging content for Connection Cafe and is committed to staying up-to-date on the latest trends and developments.