Tuesday, 30 July 2013

Restaurant Success System – Increase the traffic inflow of your newly established restaurant

Whether it's the economic climate, competition, location, or time of year, the issue of restaurant traffic is something that restaurant owners have to be constantly mindful of in order to be successful. As with many restaurants, business is good during popular times, but greater effort is needed to fill tables during off times. That's when it's time to put some creative marketing efforts into place, like promotions and specials.
Improving restaurant traffic involves a proper restaurant marketing analysis to determine what would bring diners to your restaurant. For example, if you want to increase business during weekday lunch hours, determine the needs of business customers in your area. Evaluate current lunch options in your surrounding area, check out what your competition offers and think of ways you can bring your restaurant's uniqueness to fill a void that others aren't providing.
The restaurant management as well as marketing plan for your restaurant should include a comprehensive strategy to address restaurant traffic. It should include a complete analysis of your location, competition and dining habits of customers, as well as action goals to address challenges. Based on this plan, you can implement the necessary measures to bring diners into the restaurant during slow times. It's important that your marketing plan is reviewed periodically and revised if necessary to meet your goals. There are several promotional measures that can be implemented to bring in more restaurant traffic. Promotional flyers distributed within a 15-mile radius of your establishment can boost business if they offer an incentive, such as a percentage off the bill or a reduced price offer. During off times, consider offering an early bird special and get the word out through your website, emails, publications geared towards your targeted market and promotional flyers.

Many people now utilize technology when deciding on a place to eat. So it's important for your business to be connected with a website, email and a presence on social media networks. Twitter is a great way to enhance restaurant traffic because you can send a real time message about promotions and specials currently being featured. Restaurant traffic can be enhanced through smart advertising strategies. Consider direct mail and coupons as long as they are trackable and targeted to your market or demographic.

There are a number of free ways to boost restaurant traffic and build up a proper restaurant success system. Use your website to capture customers' emails so you can send them information about drink or food specials, promotions, events and special offerings. You could also start a customer loyalty program or a referral program with another business that complements yours and attracts a similar clientele. Many dining establishments enhance restaurant traffic by adding convenient features, like take out, an express service with pickup at the door and delivery. While these services don't directly fill the seats in your restaurant, if the quality of the food and service is good, these customers are more likely to dine in the restaurant when they can. In addition, word of mouth from those who use your take out services will eventually bring more business into the restaurant and improve your restaurant success monthly.

Saturday, 27 July 2013

Restaurant Promotions – A quick guide on how to promote your restaurants and make it a huge success

A well promoted restaurant business will attract many customers that will make you more profit. You should be able to come up with promotional gimmicks than can get people to your business whether you serve fast food, family dinners or offer fine dining. You need to find promotional gimmicks that are suited to your concept and market. Getting the right combination of good food, excellent service and effective promotions can make your restaurant flourish. You can also seek some useful tips from professional or experienced restaurant consultants. They will eventually guide you in the right direction.

Begin marketing your restaurant business before you open. Announce a grand opening and invite your community. Your guests should include influential business owners, bloggers, magazine editors, socialites, news photographers and reporters. These are the people who can help spread the word about your business. Wine tasting events are always popular. Offer wine tasting at least every other month. Make the event a strictly appetizers event too so you can exploit your appetizers and wine. Most people order main dishes only. This is a good chance to let people discover more items on your menu. Everyone likes wine tasting events, people will talk about it and ask each other to go and attend it.
Present cooking demos before holidays and festivals like the 4th of July, Thanksgiving or Christmas. Demonstrate appropriate recipes they can use for the holidays. Like BBQs for the 4th of July or a new version of turkey stuffing. Demonstrate how to make desserts with Christmas holidays. Limit the attendance on a first come first serve basis to encourage people to sign up early. This also allows you to make sure that the foods to be demonstrated are enough for the participants.
A popular restaurant promotion idea that will surely click is to offer champagne brunches on Saturdays or Sundays. You can offer a buffet brunch and free champagne for a limited time, maybe till around noon to 12:30pm. Make sure that you charge a brunch buffet price that will cover the cost of the part of the champagne. You will make decent profit from the buffet anyway.
Create an afternoon coffee break gimmick. Offer desserts with coffee and price the desserts with a small percentage off. This should at least provide some sales during off-peak hours. Market it as a convenience for shoppers tired after an afternoon of shopping. It will be the perfect caffeine boost and sugar rush tired shoppers need.
Sponsor events like the local golf championships. This will improve your logo's visibility. You can offer a free meal for the winning players. When they celebrate at your restaurant, they are bound to bring in friends or family members who will pay full price. You can also hold company events at your restaurant by offering a discount for office parties or celebrations.

A proper and innovative restaurant marketing system will eventually provide a heavy traffic inflow for your newly established restaurant and make your restaurant start up a huge success.

Thursday, 25 July 2013

Restaurant Marketing – Transform your restaurant into a successful venture in the market

If you own a restaurant or eatery, you know it's not always easy to rake in the dough. To have a successful and prominent restaurant, it takes a lot of research and patience to get ahead. Selling the food you provide at your restaurant means selling your restaurant itself! Not literally of course, but through promotions. Restaurant promotions can without a doubt ease in a fresh business or gain an already established business some great exposure and new customers. Daily, weekly or monthly promotions are fantastic ways to gain extra customers, but to also, and more importantly, show your customers that you care. And obviously, keeping your customers happy is essential, after all, they're the reason you have a restaurant to begin with.
Opting to have daily, weekly or monthly promotions for your restaurant is a wise decision. Your customers will appreciate your promotion offers as well as restaurant business plan and so will your business, as acting on such outgoing opportunities will result in higher sales. Depending on your restaurant's ambiance and menu, you can consider the following types of restaurant marketing offers to better position your business against competition:

The Lovely "Happy Hour"
Of course, Happy Hour, something the working class is all too familiar with. For hard working individuals, happy hour is a convenient and inexpensive way to relax, or even let loose for a bit after work at a favorite restaurant and/or pub. Here, as an owner, you can obviously offer drink specials and even opt to sell half off appetizer deals, provide some sort of free snack or offer a miniature buffet consisting of finger foods that are cheap to provide to entice more traffic in and out of your establishment. This might seem like a simple and all too easy gesture to mix with drink specials, but it works. Customers truly appreciate this.
Live Entertainment and Open Mic Nights
Music is a great way to draw in a crowd. Again, the type of music you will book will vary. If you have a local pub or family restaurant a local band would be just fine. But, if you have a more upscale restaurant, consider booking a pianist or jazz trio to make things livelier, yet maintain classic ambiance as well. Specifically, focus scheduling live music on your more busy nights, so you'll know a crowd will be certain. This keeps the band upbeat -since they'll definitely receive gig payment-, but also ensures that your booking a live group doesn't go to waste.
Give Away Freebees
Everyone enjoys free things, obviously. So, why not, as an owner, incorporate giving your customers something useful on their next visit to your establishment. All you need to include on the freebee is your restaurant name, logo or slogan. By the simple and economical addition of a few promotional items -which could range from bulk style printed t-shirts, to key chains or even beer mugs- you can easily pass them out to fellow customers; it's certain they'll take them. By doing this promotional action you will ensure those customers return, but will inevitably also draw in new customers just by spreading your restaurant name, logo or slogan out in public.

If you want to get you restaurant some extra business, consider utilizing the above restaurant promotions. It will just turn your ordinary restaurant start up into a big success.

Friday, 19 July 2013

Restaurant Promotions – Help your restaurant mark its presence in the market

Have you opened up a new restaurant and not getting the right kind of response as you are supposed to get? If the answer is in the affirmative, then your restaurant may be suffering from poor promotional ideas, and that is why people do not know about the delicious cuisines that are prepared in your restaurant. Restaurant promotions and advertising can be effective, but like all restaurant marketing systems, it must be applied in the right way. Campaigns that only build a brand and have no specific reason for being are for the big restaurants that already have an image. And just ignore all of those ad sales reps that come begging for your restaurant marketing money to put an ad in another guide or newspaper. Keep this in minds that if advertising isn’t about making a sale, or achieving a specific goal, then don’t do it.
So in order to make your restaurant popular and promote your restaurant start-up, it is important that you follow certain restaurant promotion tips that would make the restaurant well known in your city. Some of the useful tips are given as follows:


Bounce back gifts - this is one of the best promotional ideas that you can apply in order to increase the number of customers in your restaurant. You can prepare chits containing various offers for customers and ask them to pick one after they have finished eating. Now the offer you give is completely up to you, but it is advised to give a discount offer on their next visit and the offer should be valid a month only. In this way, you will be sure that customers will come back to your restaurant in the next month before the offer expires.
Discount flyers - this is one of the most common promotional ideas and is very effective too. You can order for flyers that would have the name of your restaurant printed and a discount offer for the customers. You can also mention that the discount would be valid if the bill is above a certain amount. You can ask people who work in your restaurant to distribute the flyers when the restaurant is closed. This way you would not have to spend extra money in appointing people to distribute the flyers.
Online discount coupons - In the present day scenario nothing is better than online discount coupons. The best part about these coupons is that you just need to put the offer on the internet and people can view or know about it sitting from their own home. Most of the customers are aware of such coupons and they, in fact, search for such coupons as they want to save some money. The best part about these online coupons is that they don't have the chance of getting lost. The validity period of these online coupons should not exceed one month.

Even before thinking about the promotion of your restaurant, you must ensure that it has an attractive appearance and the location of the shop should also be appropriate. All these tips will eventually ensure your restaurant success and help your restaurant to mark its presence in the market.

Monday, 15 July 2013

Restaurant Marketing Systems -The best way to turn your restaurant into a successful venture

A quick search online shows no shortage of restaurant promotions idea. But do they work? It is a shame to spend your hard earned money and time on a promotion strategy that is doomed from the outset. The following three restaurant promotion ideas have been tested to work for others and they will work for you too.
Build a Facebook fan page. Facebook is often the most visited site on the Internet (it floats back and forth between first and second with Google). Facebook allows you to create a page where you can collect a following and promote your ideas and your restaurant.

The way to promote your restaurant using Facebook is to create some kind of contest that people will want to join and want to share with their friends. Consider 'free ribs for a year' if you are a rib joint. That's something that people in your community can really get into and share with their friends. The key is that visitors to your Facebook page can only enter the contest after they like your page. This gives you an immediate surge of traffic to your page and to your restaurant business plan and a long term asset as you can continue to promote your restaurant to all of your new Facebook fans.
Form a strategic alliance. With this restaurant marketing system, the key is to find a business in your community that has a similar clientele to yours but is not a directly competing business. For example, if you are a high-end restaurant you might consider partnering with a local luxury car dealer.
You could arrange to have the car dealer hand out a $50 gift certificate to your restaurant with every qualified test drive. Chances are the people who test drives the car won't come alone and they'll spend well over $200 at your restaurant. The key is not what you make on the first meal but keeping these clients for life. And there's no need to stop at the luxury car dealer - why not add jewelers, dentists and more. The possibilities are endless.
Create and mail a customer newsletter. People want to feel like they belong at your restaurant and regular communication is key to fostering that sense of belonging and to increasing return visits. The key to creating a newsletter is to make it interesting (personal is best), consistent (once a month works well) and have it contain a call to action. The newsletter should reflect the personality of the restaurant and present a special offer the reader if they take action and call to make reservations right away. Regular communication sprinkled with special offers is a great way to promote your restaurant and build up an effective restaurant success system.

Sunday, 14 July 2013

Restaurant Promotions – Fill in your empty tables with some excellent restaurant promotion ideas

If you are struggling to fill in the tables of your newly inaugurated restaurant, then you need to switch over to some excellent, innovative and intensive restaurant promotion ideas. As a responsible restaurant owner, you can promote your business in a number of ways. This may include restaurant marketing systems like window promotions, printed paper advertisements and online email marketing campaigns. You can also promote your restaurant with promotional gifts. Well, in this article, I will describe some of the best and proved restaurant promotion ideas that will help you to become a successful restaurant owner.  
If you want your restaurant to be successful, then you need to follow an effective and efficient marketing plan. Your restaurant marketing system should reflect the quality of your restaurant in the best possible manner. Below listed are some useful restaurant promotion tips and ideas by which you can attract more and more customers.
  • It is a fact that everyone loves to get free stuffs. In order to promote your restaurant, you can consider promoting some free stuff among your target audience such as key chains, mugs, t-shirts and other trendy or inexpensive gift items. All that you need to make sure is that the logo of your restaurant is printed on these promotional gift items.
  • Creating an online presence is one of the best ways by which you can promote your restaurant in the market. You can consider building up an official website of your restaurant and upload some useful information about your restaurant on it. You can also promote your restaurant by getting the official website of your restaurant linked with social media platforms such as Google Plus, Twitter, facebook etc. You must also take care of the fact that you are updating your restaurant’s official website regularly with new events and exciting food stuffs.
  • You can consider providing a buffet style luncheon to your customers with sample food stuffs. This is really one of the best ways by which you can represent the good quality of your restaurant in front of your customers and impress them. You must also try to find out what your customers exactly love to eat and you can improvise your regular meals accordingly.
  • During the restaurant start up, you can consider creating special menus for your customers and make sure that this special menu is comprised with inexpensive meals. There are many customers who consider looking for recession menus.
  • Most of the people love to dine up together on special events like birthday parties and anniversaries. You can consider proving special offers to your customers on such events and make some special arrangements for your guests. This will eventually help you to build up your market in the best possible manner. However, you need to make sure that you do not compromise with the good quality of your food stuffs and other exclusive cuisines.
Well, these are some excellent restaurant promotion ideas by which you can mark your presence in the food market and become successful.