Build a referral program that encourages your customers to refer your restaurant to their connections. Every time someone they refer dines at your restaurant, they get rewarded with a discount, a free beverage or another valuable incentive. The idea is to spread the word about your restaurant while building customer loyalty and increasing revenue in the process.

Everyone loves a good offer but the key is to be strategic about it. Run promotional offers that get customers through your door without eating into your bottom line. Here are some creative ideas you can consider for your restaurant:. There are many low-cost marketing strategies you can implement to get people talking about your restaurant, attract customers and improve your bottom line.

English - Singapore. Share article. LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Link copied Copy link. Sign up for an online reservation tool What does an online reservation tool have to do with restaurant marketing, you wonder? Encourage user-generated content User-generated content UGC is content that has been voluntarily created by users.

Most of the ideas in this guide focus on taking simple actions that will result in moderate bumps in attention. Many can be done repeatedly and only take a few minutes to set up. These viral promotion ideas will require a bit more creativity, time, or investment.

Hell Pizza had its biggest sales day of all time during this promotional event and saw an overall increase in sales at a time when the local economy was struggling.

This is a great example of how running a challenge-type event for your customers can grab attention and increase sales. At the same time, these types of accounts tend to grow so quickly that k followers nowadays is considered pretty small. The rise of food bloggers and micro-influencers has been a mixed bag of experiences for restaurant owners.

Every other week, we hear a new story about entitled influencers walking around demanding freebies. But in reality, the vast majority of these individuals are just regular people who are passionate about food and working hard to create content to build what is essentially a media business.

The key to this type of restaurant marketing is understanding how to align your incentives with the influencers you are trying to work with.

One of our partners named Leo Mattias — owner of Cilantro Lime in downtown Los Angeles — has nailed this formula. He reaches out to micro-influencers like Mexi Papa and offers to name a new menu item after them while inviting them for a fully filmed, behind-the-scenes tour.

In many cases, these types of collaborations only cost the restaurant some time and effort. What can we learn from 33 million people watching a video of random guys turning fast food into a giant lasagna?

One of the great things about social media is you no longer have to guess about what draws attention. All you have to do is look around to see what gets people excited.

Hundreds of brands like Epic Meal Time have created multimillion-dollar media empires with over-the-top, showstopper meal creations that are more about the spectacle than the meal itself. Is there a showstopper dish you could create in-house that could really get people talking?

Sit down with your chef and see what you can come up with to make a splash on social media. This restaurant promotion idea can potentially combine the benefits of both a showstopper meal and a micro-influencer. Today, thanks to sites like Youtube, Tiktok, and Instagram, there are millions of amateur, semi-pro, and professional chefs with large online followings.

A large percentage of these chefs are solely online content creators and have never worked for a restaurant. They are struggling to monetize their following, and many of them are looking for ways to establish their cooking legitimacy offline. This is a great opportunity for local restaurants to partner with popular online chefs who are looking to make offline moves that build their brand.

This type of promotion has a ton of upside and very little downside, and I could see it being a staple strategy for restaurants five years from now. In a low-margin industry like restaurants, the best promotions maximize perceived value while minimizing cost. This is a concept the gambling industry has perfected, and we can take a page out of their book with a promotion where the house always wins.

Promotions like this are fun, funny, and endearing, and they provide some buzz and entertainment value rather than feeling like a sales technique. If you check your wallet right now, you probably have a handful of loyalty cards from various restaurants, cafes, or other businesses.

All you have to do is offer a low-cost freebie — for example, coffee — in exchange for loyalty cards from local companies. You could even offer better freebies for cards that have been marked with points. This is a fun way to steal even loyal customers from your competitors while making the customer feel like you are trading them high-value food items rather than low-cost freebies.

There are a wide variety of motivations behind this, but if you can facilitate this documentation as a restaurant, you are going to get thousands of dollars worth of free advertising from the people who visit your restaurant.

A selfie station is an aesthetically pleasing backdrop designed and placed in a way that people can easily sit or stand in front of and take pictures of themselves or have others take pictures of them.

These photos and hundreds more if you keep scrolling were all taken and published by customers on their own individual Instagram accounts. This is for a very small, local cafe with just over 4, Instagram followers, and this one little wall is generating hundreds of free advertisements for their business.

A food truck is the perfect way to show up wherever the action is and put your brand and food in front of new people in your local area. Food trucks are also relatively low cost, extremely lucrative, and double as an ongoing, mobile source of promotion for your restaurant.

Imagine bringing in that extreme income while ALSO getting a bunch of those customers as repeat business at your restaurant. Perhaps most importantly, they are an example of a brand that leveraged a strong local fan base into becoming a national chain.

This is how you make a secret menu feel special. You can also make this part of a loyalty program, where secret menu items are announced to and even decided by VIP members only. One of the best ways to turn a local fan base into brand ambassadors is to create branded merchandise that they then wear wherever they go.

Well, Chick-fil-A grew to be one of the largest privately held companies in the world by offering a full year of free food to the first visitors to each new location. Every time a new location opened, people would camp out in the nights leading up to the opening, hoping to be one of the winners.

This phenomenon was frequently covered by local press and resulted in millions of dollars in free advertising over the years.

You can do just one winner instead. Nearly half of all workers are employed by small businesses. This includes thousands of potential customers in your local area. A great way to get in front of these customers and generate some viral buzz is to simply show up and provide food for free. You could provide lunch for the entire staff of most small businesses at a very low cost.

Try just showing up with enough food for 20 people, or if that results in some problems, try calling ahead and arranging things with the owner or office manager. Start with small businesses, but you can also aim to give back to the community while gaining more attention when you provide food for teachers, nurses, and other employee groups that are highly regarded in the community.

On the topic of giving back, one of the best ways to gain attention in your community is to give something to that community. Regularly and visibly giving to the community and well-regarded groups in the community is a great way to make people feel like you are on their team rather than simply attempting to profit from their patronage.

The key here is being genuine and offering something that feels meaningful. Just like marketers, journalists are always looking for a good story. Give your local newspaper or TV station a call and see what sort of stories they might be looking for. Sometimes the simplest things work the best. These promotion strategies are simple, proven, and can be used over and over again.

This is as simple as it gets, but percentage discount promotions are consistently the most profitable campaigns for our restaurant partners here at Owner. You also want to create some urgency by saying the quantity of offers is limited and on a first come, first serve basis, AND the promotion will only run for a limited time.

com platform. For our restaurant partners on the Owner. Our platform then automatically sends out periodic offers to each customer based on their order history.

At this restaurant, people who order Chicken Parmigiana often order the Creamy Garlic Chicken Pasta as well. Our software will take note of that and then automatically send the customer a discount offer for the Creamy Garlic Chicken Pasta about two weeks after their Chicken Parmigiana order.

com was built specifically to address these frustrations and help grow your restaurant business. Promotions are all about getting customers to take action, and few things motivate action quite like a deadline.

Regularly offering limited run items also opens the doors for additional promotions down the road. You can run polls allowing customers to vote on which items to bring back and possibly make voting a perk of your loyalty program , or you can simply take popular items and give them an encore.

Happy hour specials are a niche staple that should be a near-universal practice for restaurants open during the afternoon. They provide an affordable first-contact point for new customers, and they provide an easy focal point for ongoing promotion on social media.

When done correctly, Happy Hour ticket prices often average out higher than lunch tickets. The key is being strategic about the food you offer in addition to the drinks.

If you run a more upscale restaurant, try offering scaled-down versions of your dinner menu at an enticing price point while keeping drink prices close to retail.

While BOGO buy one, get one free offers tend to be associated more with fast and casual restaurants, they can be used effectively by virtually any restaurant. The restaurant now has 2, people to reach out to with additional offers, AND a large chunk of those customers are very likely to return.

The reach you get from offering a compelling promotion goes far beyond the actual people who walk in and redeem the deal. These menus and any little freebies or specials you attach with them make for an evergreen source of promotion as well. Check out this great example from Shake Shack:.

Free appetizer campaigns are another type of promotion that work really well for our Owner. com partners but require a bit more effort and intentionality. The key is finding a menu item that has a low cost and brings in a high margin — think chips and queso, fried pickles, fried onions, mozzarella sticks, salads, desserts, breadsticks, egg rolls, etc.

If you can find something that can be given away sustainably, that allows you to consider the campaign for an ongoing promotion. You can also limit the quantity of the free items given out, creating urgency to take advantage of the offer before it runs out.

Business card giveaways are an old strategy, but just like many of the strategies in this category, they remain effective today.

The process is simple: offer customers a chance to win a free meal in exchange for dropping their business card in a bowl.

Make the prize a free meal for TWO and then advertise that you select a new card from the bowl every single week. We want as many cards as possible because our modern twist takes advantage of every card we get. Family-sized meals have been a staple tool in the fast and fast-casual eatery toolbox for decades, but this concept remains underutilized elsewhere on the restaurant spectrum.

As we talked about earlier, people care a lot about the experience of eating out, and that experience is often deeply connected to the people they are eating out with.

When a person sees a meal-for-two-offer, they think about sharing that meal with someone they know. Offering shareable meals and preset, multi-course menus for specific group sizes is a great way to get people thinking about the experience they want to create and envisioning themselves having a great time with people they love at your restaurant.

Offering samples is a great way to drive sales. According to The Atlantic, free samples at stores like Costco can help boost sales considerably. If you have one or two dishes that always score big with customers, have a staff member outside the restaurant offering bite-sized samples to passersby.

If someone is in the mood for Indian food, they are usually going to choose their favorite Indian place. Your real competitors have the same or similar cuisine, the same or similar mood appeal, and the same or similar location.

Local ingredients, foods, and craft drinks tend to be more expensive, but they also tend to be very well received by local customers. Choosing local suppliers, loudly advertising that fact, and collaborating with them provides a great focal point for ongoing promotion.

If you are already sourcing local ingredients, foods, or drinks, reach out to the supplier and invite them to collaborate. Pro tip: it will be a lot easier to set something up if you have a clear game plan to propose from the beginning. In addition to non-competing restaurants, there are tons of non-competing local businesses in your area that would love to cross-promote with you in order to mutually grow both businesses.

One creative idea is to partner with businesses and organizations that need meeting space during your non-service or even low-service hours. Even better if you can offer online ordering for the busy working crowd. While most of these restaurant promotions are pretty straightforward and accessible for most restaurants, running any kind of marketing campaign takes time—something those of us in the restaurant industry know is always in short supply.

Popmenu automates many marketing tasks, freeing up you and your staff from having to do them manually. Its SEO tools, Facebook page integration, and SMS marketing make it easy to find and reach your customers—and spread the word about your current promotions.

Schedule a free demo today. How do you get smarter with your marketing without working overtime? Download our digital toolkit and immediately access resources that will help you start and strengthen marketing activity, expand revenue opportunities, and outpace competitors.

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Reviews Blog Events. Login Schedule A Demo. How Can Restaurant Promotions Be Used as Marketing Tools? Restaurant promotions can help market your restaurant in a variety of important ways: Enticing new guests to visit your restaurant for the first time.

Encouraging past guests to make a repeat visit, increasing their lifetime value.

Offer a Happy Hour Special Offer a BOGO Deal Offer a Special Menu

Cost-effective food promotions - Create a Limited-Run Menu Item Offer a Happy Hour Special Offer a BOGO Deal Offer a Special Menu

It can be in the form of reviews, testimonials or social media posts. This type of content is effective because it denotes authenticity, adds credibility and helps instil more trust in your brand. This serves as third-party validation and improves brand reputation in the process.

Your loyal customers are your greatest assets. So, why not formalise this process by launching a referral program? Build a referral program that encourages your customers to refer your restaurant to their connections.

Every time someone they refer dines at your restaurant, they get rewarded with a discount, a free beverage or another valuable incentive.

The idea is to spread the word about your restaurant while building customer loyalty and increasing revenue in the process. Everyone loves a good offer but the key is to be strategic about it.

Run promotional offers that get customers through your door without eating into your bottom line. Here are some creative ideas you can consider for your restaurant:. There are many low-cost marketing strategies you can implement to get people talking about your restaurant, attract customers and improve your bottom line.

English - Singapore. Share article. LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Link copied Copy link. Sign up for an online reservation tool What does an online reservation tool have to do with restaurant marketing, you wonder?

Encourage user-generated content User-generated content UGC is content that has been voluntarily created by users. And guess what? Companies lose money on time and effort, and customers get no more value from the businesses to which they are "loyal. Make yours a little more interesting by making it a game!

Give your customers a punch card, and when they fill it up with visits or meals, allow them to enter into a raffle for a big prize. If you make it something more exciting than just a typical discount your customers will be eager to enter.

Did you know it costs a business about X more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell to an existing one?

Bounce-back coupons target current customers with an offer that can only be used on a return visit. Most restaurants hand out a card with 10 percent off your next meal. Not very exciting. During the holidays , hand out fancy sealed envelopes to customer after every meal.

Each envelope will contain a gift coupon ranging from a free appetizer to a free group party. Are there other businesses nearby that pair up well with yours? This shows customers that you care about their interests, not just your bottom line. Here are 10 things to cut from you restaurant marketing that will help free some of those dollars up.

Restaurants spend more on payroll than any other expense, so it makes sense to use employees to generate sales. Getting to know customers makes it easier for servers to offer relevant suggestions. Here are the basic tactics on upselling:.

Hosting an event at your restaurant is a great way to keep your current customers coming back and attracting new ones. A restaurant can be a venue for all kinds of occasions, including live concerts or shows, stand-up comedy, movie screenings, tastings, and holiday parties. Provide a venue for a fundraiser, raise some money for the community and make some money for your restaurant at the same time.

During Thanksgiving and Christmas, raise money for soup kitchens. You can also volunteer your restaurant to host participants and volunteers after charity walks, marathons and relays.

In conclusion , be creative so as not to make restaurant marketing mistakes. Try new things. There are many new ways to get customers in the door.

The key is to have a plan, stick to it and measure the results. Get in contact with us to execute your restaurant marketing at Kulture Konnect Blog Cutting-Edge Marketing to Grow Your Business. Latest Stories. Search this site on Google S.

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Cost-effective food promotions - Create a Limited-Run Menu Item Offer a Happy Hour Special Offer a BOGO Deal Offer a Special Menu

Ready to start driving business? Use these restaurant promotion ideas to inspire your next restaurant marketing campaign. Do you run a casual restaurant?

Appeal to your most competitive customers with an eating challenge. If they consume an oversized item — an enormous burrito, for example, or a comically huge burger — within a specific timeframe, they can get it for free. Post your winners on social media to attract additional competitors.

Get more business from the after-work crowd by adding creative app specials to your happy hour menu. and 6 p. To keep guests on their toes, change your happy hour menu every week.

Find a well-respected local influencer and work with them to create a promotion that benefits a nonprofit organization. Everyone wins — the influencer gets a paycheck, you get more business, and the nonprofit gets a sizable donation.

Buy a pair of tickets to a popular local sporting event and give them away in a random drawing. Reward repeat customers by creating a restaurant loyalty program. Take your cue from coffee shops, which often offer a free drink after the purchase of Sweeten the deal by sending loyal customers exclusive discount codes or coupons.

Brighten up the darkest part of winter with seasonal specials that give customers something to look forward to. Fun winter restaurant promotion ideas include seasonal menus and celebrations or food holidays, such as National Hot Sauce Day January Be sure to update your online ordering system to reflect the changes.

Sometimes, customers just want to enjoy a cozy delivery or takeout meal at home. Entice them to choose you over a competitor by offering special deals. Offer free delivery for the first order, for example, or run a limited-time discount on one or two popular menu items.

The average internet user spends more than 2. Boost brand awareness — and drive more customers to your restaurant business — by hosting a contest on platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. Keep it simple to encourage participation; run a caption contest for a funny behind-the-scenes photo, or ask followers to name your latest dessert.

As a bonus, the bump in engagement could convince the social media algorithm to show your food posts to more people. Create a sandwich inspired by your best-selling entrée, or transform your cult-favorite charcuterie board into a charcuterie cone.

Then, take beautiful photos of the new menu items and post them on social media to spread the word; tag the event to reach even more people.

This promotion brings in more restaurant sales, gives existing customers a new way to try your food, and introduces potential customers to your brand in a low-key setting.

TikTok trends get a huge volume of traffic — capture some of those visitors by creating a deal inspired by the latest social media craze. Then, post a video about it. Make sure to use trending hashtags and audio to get more views, and use location tags to attract users in your area.

Build suspense on social media before revealing the meal, and continue to hype it up leading to the big day. The combination of scarcity and the opportunity to experience completely new menu items will appeal to foodies and trend-followers alike.

Hire a local sommelier to work with your chef on a food and wine pairing event. Before each course, ask the two to explain each selection to guests.

The educational component makes the experience feel richer, so your customers will walk away feeling more knowledgeable. Host a themed party complete with a special menu, decorations, and entertainment. Guests can pay a flat fee to attend — the limited number of tickets creates a sense of exclusivity and excitement.

This promotion adapts easily to the season and your unique restaurant vibe, so you can use it any time of year. Take plenty of photos and videos; they make great social media content. Recognize your best customers and find new guests with a private referral program.

Hand-pick a few people to receive a unique booking code. When another person makes a reservation using that code, give the referrer a special gift, such as a free bottle of wine or a food credit.

You can also welcome the new customer with a free dessert or another small surprise. Give customers an opportunity to earn exclusive deals by signing up for your SMS marketing list.

You can't have a situation whereby you just push out content without answering questions or having conversations with your potential diners.

Also, make sure to offer discounts that are only available on social media; it's another sure-fire way to grow your audience. In terms of content, you need to have high-quality pictures of your food interspersed with photos and videos of your happy customers enjoying a meal with their permission, of course.

Remember, if you are to succeed in this day and age, you need to have a sizeable proportion of your customers finding you online.

Your website is an excellent tool for selling your proposition. The first task is to ensure that your website performs well on mobile. If it's not, interested diners will simply exit your site in favor of one that performs better. Next, make sure all of your information is current.

You will have likely implemented plenty of changes to continue your operations during these uncertain times, so make sure that customers researching your establishment are aware of procedures such as mandatory advance bookings. Again make sure all of your contact detail, hours of operation, and menu are up-to-date.

Finally, if you haven't already, now is the time to implement an online ordering system into your website for either dine-out or curbside pickup options.

This is something that can easily be achieved with the help of a QR code linked to an online ordering page where customers can browse all your items and make orders on their mobile devices.

This simple step can transform your sales in a world where off-premises dining is set to dominate. Another critical element of your restaurant branding is online reviews.

Of course, if a customer decides to do a little bit of research and the first thing they see after Googling your restaurant is a series of poor reviews, then you can guarantee that they'll look elsewhere.

Whether it's Yelp, Facebook, Google My Business, Zomato, or TripAdvisor, every diner is a potential food critic, so you have to be both committed to providing excellent service and high-quality food. But just as crucial is letting your customers know that you appreciate their feedback.

By advising customers who've had a brilliant time that you would be really appreciative of an online review, you can benefit from free advertising. Of course, sometimes things don't go to plan. Thus, it's just as essential to respond to any negative reviews to give yourself a chance to put it right and show that you actively engage with your customer community.

Demonstrating exemplary customer service when you've got something wrong can impress a customer just as much as a five-star review. Email marketing is one of the most under-valued marketing channels for restaurants.

In many cases, restaurants don't even collect their most valuable customers' email addresses, missing out on hundreds of additional meals every month. In these scenarios, business owners frequently send out marketing emails to cold prospects unfamiliar with their restaurant.

This is a mistake. The key to success within the email marketing space is segmentation. No matter how well your restaurant is doing, no one can afford to pass up on those kinds of figures. But how build an email list and then segment it to tailor your marketing efforts?

The easiest way is through a customer loyalty program supported by your POS system. By asking for an email address when offering customers rewards through a loyalty program, not only can you quickly amass a long email list of your best customers, but you can use extensive data analysis of transactions to break your customer base down into segments.