A successful restaurant is not only about food and the place, it’s about how you promote it to people around you. Nowadays, the best tool can be your creativity. If you want to attract more customers, you need to find unique ideas and ways that will capture people’s attention. No matter the fact that people think it’s easy to boost local visibility if you focus on preparing quality food, you won’t have any problems, and it’s enough for people to visit you once and start to like your restaurant. This is not always the case, especially in bigger cities where the competition is high and you need to find your own way to ensure your visibility.
The Menu is What Makes a Quality Restaurant
You should always start from the menu, as this is the most important feature of a restaurant. If you want to attract more people, make sure your menu includes something for everyone. This way, you won’t be limited by an audience who prefers only certain things you offer. If you want to experiment a bit, you can offer weekly mystery meals for adventurous people who won’t know at all what to expect, just make sure to mention some of the ingredients in case of food allergy and restrictions. Offer both meat and vegetarian meals, and don’t forget something for the youngest.
Did Someone Say a Birthday Party…?
Another very useful way to be open to different things is for sure birthday parties. Birthday parties in restaurants have become increasingly popular. You can offer birthday reservations for a certain part of the restaurant, or even the whole restaurant if necessary. This is good for people who don’t like bothering with birthday decorations or food preparation. You can collaborate with local decorators and offer everything in one place. However, you also need to think about how to let other customers know about the birthday reservation, and the best way is through social media.
Postcards Never Die…
Marketing is everything, no matter the type of restaurant, you always need a good marketing strategy. When it comes to reaching the local audience, the easiest way is to do this the traditional way. Design a catchy, yet elegant postcard, and pay close attention to printing direct mail because you want quality and practical postcards. To interest people more, you can also use space for weekly specials so that people know what you offer.
Use Social Media to Share Information
Social media has become the best way to promote any type of business. You can use the benefits of people using their phones every day, to share different information with people. For example, if you have some discounts or if you plan a party so that your customers can know when they can come. Also, you can offer reservations through social media platforms like Instagram, which is much more practical than phone reservations. Use every chance you can to promote the meals you offer, share a photo, share some updates in the menu, and ensure your customers have everything they need to know about you online.
We Want to Share Our Story
If you want to show the “hidden” side of your restaurant and your team, the best way to do this is through storytelling. Storytelling has gained popularity, mostly because people need to be closely connected to businesses if they want to get in any way associated with them.
This is great for boosting local visibility because no matter how much you tend to stay professional, you can step out of that professional picture and use a chance to introduce the staff to your customer in a more creative way. Share why and how they started working for the restaurant, share their daily activities, and ask the staff to be casual and friendly. This way, when they serve your customers, the customers will have an impression that they know a side of them that no one else does.
Trends Are Always What You Need
Owning a restaurant doesn’t have to be only about offering serious and precise services, without having any fun. If you want to be noticed by the younger population, trends are, for sure, the best way. Participate in different social media trends and use them as a chance to promote your restaurant and introduce people to what you offer. You can even create some type of competition to connect more people and boost your visibility. The winners can get different prizes, and you can even collaborate with other local businesses to boost both your and their visibility.
Personalized Discounts Are Always Useful
As with every other business, restaurant owners should consider offering some type of discount that you can either personalize or offer every once in a while. To promote these discounts, you can use social media where people will follow all the newest updates. There is one more possible option. You can, again, use the benefits of postcards to offer personalized discounts and attract more people to come and see what you have to offer and how they can use the discount.
Encourage Feedback
All this is useless if you don’t encourage your customers to leave feedback. This feedback can include different things, how they liked the food, the staff, and your marketing strategy. This is the best way to see what your customers might like or not, and to adjust your strategy based on their preferences and needs. Your customers are what you need the most and you need to pay better attention to what you can change to improve their satisfaction. Encourage them to provide honest feedback, so that even the negative feedback can be used to improve your strategies and come to the best results.
Many people believe that boosting your local visibility is not as difficult as it seems, that you only need to be professional, to offer good services and food, and that people will come back. This is not always the case, as you need to devote some time and effort to finding the perfect marketing strategy because what might be successful for others might not be for you, and you can just waste your time.