If you own and run a restaurant, you’ll always be battling to find more customers and to ensure the ones you already have keep coming back. This is not always an easy task, but it’s something you’ll need to put a lot of thought, effort, and money into if you want to be successful; a restaurant lives and dies on its clientele. With that in mind, here are some useful strategies you can put in place to attract more customers to your restaurant.
Run Limited-Time Promotions
The idea of running limited-time promotions for your restaurant may not be particularly new or even unique, but that doesn’t mean it’s not something that will work. The sheer fact that restaurant owners have been doing this for so long proves that it actually works.
You can choose to offer free desserts on certain days, or you can do a two-for-one on appetizers, for example. Make sure that the promotion has a clear start and end date so that people feel the urgency and come to try it out. The idea is that they will enjoy the experience and return even when you don’t have an offer running.
Make The Environment Pleasant
No one wants to sit and eat in an unpleasant dining room. Even if they do come through the door, it’s highly unlikely they’ll ever come back; there are many other places they can go if your restaurant is not a nice place to be.
Work hard at making the dining room somewhere people want to stay and enjoy their food. Consider the décor and the comfort of the chairs and tables. It will have to be extremely clean, and your staff has to offer the very best customer service. Look into background music for restaurants to ensure the ambiance is exactly what you and – more importantly – what your customers want.
Run Competitions
Who doesn’t like to get something for free? Most people love a competition, and when it’s run by a restaurant, it’s even better – after all, they were going to buy food anyway, so winning it saves them money (not to mention the fact that it’s exciting).
Run regular competitions so that people keep returning to your restaurant to try to win. You might give away free drinks or desserts or even a whole meal. The competition could be open to diners who have already been to your restaurant as well as new customers so you can attract both types of clientele. Make sure the competition is easy to enter and that it’s fair, and promote it as much as you can.
Market The Chef
A lot of the time, restaurant owners will focus on the food itself and the dining room experience when it comes to their marketing, and this is not a bad thing. However, what if you also marketed the chef themselves? If people can get to know the person who is cooking their food, they will feel more like a part of the restaurant’s ‘family’, helping them to stay loyal.
Plus, when you focus on the chef, you’ll stand out from the competition, who will most likely be marketing their food and other elements rather than the human ones.
