Welcome to this lesson. Today we’ll give you advice on how to get more customers into a restaurant.
Our Growth Hacking Academy always offers good ideas and useful information. In earlier lessons we covered how to increase sales and growth hacking strategies, gave you the grounding on what growth hacking is, pointed you at the best growth hacking books, explained how growth hacking tools work, and plenty more…
If you’re new to the Growth Hacking Academy and haven’t followed the earlier lessons, go and read them now.
You’ll find them all here ➡️ Growth Hacking Academy.
Restaurant marketing is a subject closely tied to growth hacking — do you know why? Because the aim is to get more customers into a restaurant, and therefore to increase sales — to grow the business and lift the revenue of a restaurant. That’s the point of growth hacking applied to restaurants.
Winning new customers for your restaurant matters enormously, and we’ll help you see how.
Are you here for strategies to draw customers into your restaurant? Do you need ideas for filling your place?
We’re ready with everything you need. Let’s begin.
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Getting more customers into a restaurant
We’re living through a downturn that has people going out less often and therefore cutting back on lunches and dinners out. Many restaurants have seen a fall, very noticeable during the week especially, and quite rightly want a way of filling the room as far as possible.
We believe strongly in the power of digital marketing, which is why we’ll give you advice on doing web marketing for your restaurant and using social media marketing for restaurants.
Can growth hacking techniques be used to get more customers into a restaurant? Of course — and today we’ll reveal a few.
If you haven’t followed the earlier lessons, we’ll start by explaining what growth hacking is.
Growth hacking is a new approach to marketing: innovative, creative, analytical, technical, and one that brings the client results. Growth hacking marketing uses experimentation and testing. You have to try various strategies over limited periods so you can quickly work out which is the most effective.
This new approach works, and it will work for you too.
Through its tools you can attract customers online for your restaurant and put in place online strategies for lifting a restaurant’s revenue — yours.
Now we’re confident you’re with us, so let’s begin.
The restaurant has to be its own marketing
Yes, we know, you’re thinking you don’t quite follow that line — so let’s explain.
Your restaurant has to be the first to communicate and to present itself as an excellent proposition for your audience.
Want more customers? Then make sure your restaurant presents itself at its best. So the first strategy for drawing customers in is simple: show your restaurant at its best, make your strengths visible and convey what’s unique about you.
Once those things are clear, focus on this alone: the benefits your audience gets by coming to your restaurant.
Now let’s see how to use your strengths.
Food marketing: build a memorable social campaign
Now that you’ve identified your strengths, the first thing we’d suggest is putting yourself online as well as you possibly can.
Open a Facebook page for your restaurant and use Instagram to promote it (on which note, our lesson on Instagram for restaurants may be useful) as a tool of online marketing for restaurants.
Don’t create a page or a social profile just to say “right, done, that’s sorted” — make your social presence memorable. Facebook and Instagram are full of profiles devoted to food, so you have to do something unique.
If you’re wondering how to promote a restaurant through social media, the answer is through advertising. Sadly the networks, Facebook and Instagram especially, give very little room to profiles that don’t promote. So we’d suggest adding paid social campaigns (Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads) to your strategy.
So build creative advertising on social to promote your restaurant. Create curiosity and convey to users what’s unique and valuable about the place.
Want an idea? Create a post promoting an event where, on that date or in that window only, people can taste some of your best dishes, or dishes that are unique and original. Include photographs, the hashtags that suit them, and describe the whole thing.
People have to be moved to share your content, so think of something original to offer.
Start doing strategic hospitality.
Create word of mouth to fill the room
Sometimes you have to be a little inventive to put in place marketing that lifts a restaurant’s revenue.
That doesn’t mean doing anything extreme, but finding a way to spread. Doing restaurant marketing means giving people a good reason to share and to talk to others about your place.
You could start with interesting offers — a free dessert for anyone who brings two friends, for instance.
Or you could post online offering a voucher with 20% off for anyone who comes in.
Get your name circulating as widely as you can, and look after your customers, always.
You can use these techniques for getting more customers offline too: offer them through flyers, or by collecting email addresses and sending a newsletter with discount codes and whatever offers you’ve chosen for the occasion.
Need a list of growth hacking tools?
Need tools to grow your business? Want to use growth hacking for your clients and work out which tools are available? No problem, we’ll give you the full list. FREE!
Request the free growth hacking tool list
Offer free Wi-Fi — and say so
A service that may look small and pointless, and is increasingly treated as valuable.
Want to grow your business? Want to know how to get more customers into your restaurant?
Here’s another idea you could put into practice immediately.
Giving customers free internet access is a weapon that works twice over: first, customers are pleased because they can browse without using their own data; second, you could actively involve them by asking them to share the dishes they order on their social profiles, talking about you and leaving a positive testimonial.
Build a registration form for Wi-Fi access, with the aim of collecting your customers’ email addresses — addresses you’ll then use to send promotional messages.
Use these strategies and plenty of people will come to know about your restaurant: it’s one of the ideas for drawing customers into your place. Very simple, but it can bring excellent results.
Be original: create a signature of your own
This is another growth hacking technique, and a way of winning new restaurant customers.
Have you heard about creating your own “personal signature”? Perhaps you’re wondering what we mean. We mean that if you put something creative on the receipt that creates buzz, you come across as unique and original, and that will certainly generate word of mouth.
Adding a line at the bottom of the bill — LOVE at €0.00, say — can raise a smile and a bit of wonder. It’s certainly not what people expect, and it makes noise. 😉
If you wanted ideas on how to promote a restaurant, find your “signature”: it’s already a form of advertising.
Free image from Pexels
Be reachable
Earlier we suggested creating social pages and using them as strategies for drawing customers in.
Our Facebook Academy and Instagram Academy have plenty of information on running them well, but here’s the point: customers have to be able to reach you and find you, so it’s essential not only to have those pages but to tend them carefully.
Restaurant marketing requires you to look after the content you offer and to be active, fast and courteous in your replies. If someone asks you a question on Facebook, answer as soon as you can and be endlessly polite: the prospective customer has to trust you and form a good impression straight away.
Bear in mind that running the pages well means publishing a steady stream of content on your Facebook page and your Instagram profile.
On that note, you can schedule Instagram posts and set up automatic publishing on Facebook through dedicated tools such as Iconosquare, Crowdfire and many others, also covered in our Academies.
And not only that: create a Google My Business account if you haven’t yet. Google My Business is a service from Google for promoting businesses, helping users and prospective customers find you anywhere, any time.
Google My Business ➡️ Go to the official site
What are you waiting for? Get yourself found.
A good website matters
Perhaps we were taking it for granted, but it’s worth saying: to carry authority and to be read immediately as serious, professional and credible, you need a website that’s well made and well tended, presenting the restaurant with good photographs of the dishes, the room and the staff.
In short, one of the fundamentals of getting more customers into a restaurant is starting with a website, its content always current, optimized for mobile, fast, simple, intuitive, creative, and carrying testimonials.
If you’ve wondered whether it’s worth building a website, the answer is 100% yes. Don’t worry about the cost: today there are various options, and low-cost websites are perfectly possible.
Free image from Pexels
Pay attention to reviews
What customers want when they walk into a restaurant is a good experience.
Make sure you give them a wonderful one — the best possible — and always work to get reviews from them. Ask directly, or encourage them with special offers or other devices.
But take care.
It matters to monitor what people say about you online, so always read the reviews (on Google but also on TripAdvisor), always reply, and always politely.
To draw customers into a restaurant it’s important to have plenty of positive reviews, because other people’s opinions count for a great deal these days.
Always try to satisfy the customer, and never let them leave unhappy.
Positive reviews bring more customers into a restaurant, and are therefore a way of lifting its revenue.
You now have plenty of tools to work with in order to fill your restaurant.
Good luck.
Conclusion
To close this lesson, you’ve learned some growth hacking techniques, and we’ve also given you ideas that are easy to put in place and could help you work out how to get more customers into a restaurant.
Food marketing certainly isn’t simple; it takes continuous work built on quality, courtesy, availability and creativity. We hope our advice has been useful, if only in prompting ideas about how to act.
If you enjoyed our lesson on getting more customers into a restaurant, stay tuned to your favourite Growth Hacking Academy.
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