“How do you fill your restaurant with new diners every night?”
The secret to a successful restaurant is more than just good food. Of course, the quality of the food is important, and it’s usually the food and the service that keeps people coming back time and time again.
But… it’s not enough.
If you want a full restaurant every night, you need to be able to reach new people and encourage them to come to your restaurant.
You have a number of options to do this, but nothing is as instant or potentially as effective as online marketing.
Let me explain.
With Facebook marketing, for example, you are able to target people who live in a certain area and like a specific type of food among other characteristics.
If you team this targeting with one of the super effective campaigns I’m going to share with you, you have a great chance to attract new and old customers to your restaurant in hordes.
In other words: you can fill your restaurant with new diners every night!
But that’s not all… The added beauty of social media marketing, like Facebook, is the ever-present potential for any campaign you run to go viral.
And if you don’t know:
Viral = a good thing.
When your marketing campaign goes viral, you begin to witness a snowball effect where more and more people become aware of your restaurant and attracted by your offers. And each and every campaign you run has this potential.
New Diners Every Night: The Campaigns
Let’s look at the three campaigns that every restaurant should be running.
1. Attract With Images; Drive Action With An Offer
Images can make or break the success of a restaurant’s marketing efforts.
Since we can’t smell or taste the food through the internet, you need to make the visual representation of your food as persuasive as possible.
Achieving mouth-watering images isn’t as difficult as most people think. You just need some good lighting, a tasty angle, some colours and contrast, and then throw some blur or a light filter on and you’re good to go.
Close ups are a win as well.
When you have a good photo of some tasty food, you just need to create an equally tasty offer.
Something like: ‘buy two get one free’, ‘bring a friend and they eat for free’, ‘try our new milkshake free with any steak’…
You get the idea.
When you have the image and the offer, you just need to get the action.
Something like this:
“NEW BURGER ALERT!
100% prime cut beef
Fresh avocado salad
Maple cured bacon
And our special tangy signature sauce.
This week only: come and try our new burger! Bring a friend and they eat for free.”
(Note: this is just an example and not a live creative. But do you see the different elements at play here?)
This strategy alone has enough power to fill your restaurant with new diners every night, but if you want more… read on:
2. Reward Loyalty
The above offer works well because it aims to hit a wider audience. But how about rewarding the people who have previously eaten at your restaurant?
Often times, restaurants focus on getting new customers, and they forget about their past customers.
In fact, what I’m about to show you is something that I only notice big restaurant chains do.
A loyalty program.
Now, you don’t need to have a complex point scoring system that places like Nando’s have. In fact, what I’m about to suggest might even be better (it’s definitely easier).
What you need is an exclusive members’ email list.
Here’s how it works.
When someone eats at your restaurant, you encourage people to sign up with their email to receive exclusive discounts and offers.
What happens is, people sign up with their email, and every week or so you send them an offer that is exclusive to people on your email list. Because the amount of people who will take you up on this offer, you can afford to be a bit more generous with your offers.
While this campaign may not fill your restaurant with new diners every night, it is a great way to reward those who choose to return to you again and again.
3. Celebrate the Good Times
Do you know what people do on their birthday? They go out for a nice meal with their friends and family. If you can be the first choice for someone when it’s their birthday, you could guarantee a bunch of bums on seats.
And when you blow their socks off with your food and service, that’s a group of people who will consider having their birthday at your restaurant.
So how do you reach people on their birthday?
You have a few different options:
- Post in a local paper
- Get on the local radio
- Post flyers and leaflets
- Put it on your website
- Put a leaflet in your menu
- Post it on Facebook
All of the above work, and I’m sure you’ve tried a few of them. The problem is that the strategies above are either expensive or too wide reaching (or both). You don’t know if the people you want to reach will actually see your promotion.
That’s where my favourite option comes in: Facebook ads.
With a well-targeted Facebook ad and a great offer, you can actually show your promotion to the people who will be most interested in your birthday promotion.
Once you have the targeting set up, use the advice above to set your offer, and wham bam, you have yourself a nice little birthday promotion.
What’s Next?
So there you have it. Three campaigns that you can use to have a full restaurant every night.
Now, I understand that you might be thinking one of two things:
- Will these work for my restaurant? and
- How do I do all of this?
I can say that if you have a restaurant that serves fresh, delicious food, then these strategies will work for you.
As for the set up and the tech?
That’s what we specialise in.
We take care of all the tech, the offers, the ads, the email lists, the promotions and chatbots, and make it so new and existing customers can either call you to book or book in online, so the whole system works with you and your business seamlessly.
You might call it magic…
Anyway, we only work with a maximum of 2 restaurants from the same city – and we never work with two restaurants that serve the same type of food in the same city (we don’t do competition like that…), so as you can guess, we have very limited spaces to offer.
Want to see if we can work together?
Want to find out how our system can fill your restaurant with new diners every night?
Then click the link below and book a free strategy session with us today.
https://beyondleadsmarketing.com/free-strategy-call/