Even with the best restaurant online ordering system in place you still need to know how to make it work for your business. As your customer base increases it is crucial to incorporate a worry-free online ordering system for your business. Here is how to take full advantage of software for meal prep industries and …
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The best online ordering system for restaurants should be easy to use and improve productivity. The current trend of consumers ordering in is increasing and doesn’t look as though it is slowing down anytime soon. It’s not just a simple pizza people are choosing to have delivered, but complete meals from contemporary food restaurants to …
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Bring previous visitors back again, get new customers, and watch profits increase. Your restaurant promotion ideas make a big difference in your business success. Promotions help market your restaurant to your target audience, so unleash your imagination. Why Is It Important to Promote Your Restaurant? Promotions are important because they help you achieve your goals. …
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Restaurant marketing tools are essential for growing your business. They help you keep track of your customers and their orders. The best marketing tools for restaurants can send out automated messages to boost sales and draw people in using images and video content. By removing menial manual tasks, you can keep focused on making great …
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Capture the attention of potential customers by taking advantage of social media. You can stay on top of your game and become the “IT” restaurant by navigating your digital presence correctly. This means marketing your food and drink to attract attention and adding some trendy restaurant menu items to draw in a crowd. Unique restaurant …
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If you read the restaurant survey questions from our blog last month, you may be looking for additional questions to ask your customers. Survey questions in the food industry are important in helping you better understand your target audience and grow your business. Customer feedback about your website, menus, and ease of ordering gives crucial …
Do you want to increase your food establishment profits? The best online ordering system for restaurants will improve your visibility, increase your sales, and streamline your processes. Customers want a simple way to choose their meals and place an order all from your website. The solution is a software program that highlights your menu options …
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It is almost a cultural cliché that college students are always starving and broke, so many restaurants ignore college campuses when they are looking outward for expansion of their delivery programs. Believe it or not, college campuses represent some of the most concentrated markets for certain types of delivery food – and many restaurants find that delivering a limited menu to local college campuses can exponentially increase their order volume when college is in session. If you’re on the fence about whether or not to advertise your delivery options to a college campus near you, these five stats and tips might change your mind.
When a college student has a great meal, or places an order for something to eat, they are more than twice as likely as the rest of your target market to go to their social media networks to place an update. Whether you are looking to expand your presence on Facebook (still the most commonly used social media network in the world) or upstarts like Foursquare and Yelp, college students will become your best friends if you can provide prompt and professional service.
Many college students even use social media as their primary “research” tool when they are making buying decisions – so a single review on the social media page of a well-liked college student can translate into dozens of orders for your company, or even your selection for catering projects and large institutional orders. Of course, if you don’t deliver to your local college campus, you’ll never break into this close-knit social referral community.
According to the US News and World Report, up to a third of all college students will settle, work, and ultimately live in the city that they went to college in – and they will continue to frequent many of the same restaurants and establishments that they used during their college years. Your ability to cultivate a future audience for your restaurant is dependent on your ability to bring in college students – showing them the variety of cuisine that you offer, and guiding their tastes and their appreciation for fine dining.
This tip is particularly important if you are an “upper budget” restaurant that doesn’t typically do a lot of business with budget-conscious college students. It might be worth investing in a limited delivery menu that you advertise specifically for delivery to colleges – “hooking” college students on your food and your brand, and gradually upselling them to your fancier fine-dining options by the time they graduate and start working locally. For example, a fine Italian restaurant might consider offering pasta deliveries to college campuses during exam time as a great revenue-boosting marketing stunt.
While there are certainly exceptions, the average college student has parents that are 40% wealthier than the national average. Aside from paying their children’s college loans and giving them money for textbooks and tuition, these parents also take an active interest in their young students’ lives – and they frequently visit campus for formal events and to check on their kids. When parents are in town, students always go out into the city for their meals – since they use their parents’ arrival as their chance to have a nice dinner without being on the hook for the bill.
When students are doing their research for a nice restaurant to take their parents to, their mobile devices will be the first place that they look. A good advertising campaign on a local college campus, coupled with a delivery program that exposes a large number of students to your food, can put you out ahead of the competition when graduation and alumni events roll around and your restaurant fills up with parents and students.
Many a sports bar and casual dining restaurant has opened up within two or three miles of a college campus, only to be disappointed with the paltry in-restaurant crowds that they receive from the schools. No matter how perfectly priced and designed your menu is, you’ll have trouble filling the seats of your restaurant with college students because of their low mobility. Only a small percentage of college students have cars on campus – so they usually only go to restaurants that they can walk to. College students would much rather order their food online using their mobile devices or computers, and have the food delivered to campus where they can share it with their non-car-owning friends – all without having to take an hour or two out of their day to walk to a restaurant nearby. If you don’t offer delivery to your local college campuses, you’re missing out on as much as 70% of the potential orders that you could receive from students.
As every restaurant owner knows, it is far easier to adjust the scale of a delivery or take-out business than to adapt to seasonal demands for a large sit-down restaurant. Offering delivery to college campuses allows you to tap the high demand around exam time and during the school year, without leaving you on the hook for massive facility expenses and staff fees during the summer when the orders from the college campuses dry up. Many popular delivery-only restaurants hire the majority of their staffs from college campuses – allowing them to adjust their workforce and their order volume along with the return of the students in the fall.
The best times to offer delivery specials to college students are in the fall (during move-in, when college students are too busy with campus events and socializing to go out to restaurants) and during the very end of each semester, when meal plans start to run out and students are looking for alternatives to their food that they’ve been eating all year.
Whether you are new to the restaurant business, or you have been in the field for years, there is no getting around the fact that you need to have good marketing if you hope to succeed. Word of mouth can still be powerful, but you need to make sure you have a strong online presence. In fact, even much of the word of mouth marketing happens online today via reviews and your customers talking about how much they liked your restaurant on social media. It has a huge influence.
The following are some simple and effective tips that will help you increase visibility for your restaurant so you can start getting more customers.
When you are marketing your restaurant, you need to think locally. Utilizing geo-targeted ads is a fantastic idea. It can help you to save some money, as your ads will only be shown in the cities and geographic areas that you choose. Since most people are looking for food near where they live or where they are vacationing, this ensures that you have the right potential customers looking at your ad. After all, if you have a restaurant in Tucson, you do not want to have your ads running for people in Bangor.
You can use geotargeted ads through many of the advertising services available today including Facebook, Twitter, and Google AdWords.
Set up an account for your business on Yelp. This is a highly popular site that many people frequent when they want to learn more about what a restaurant can offer. You want to add your location, the menu, the price range, photos, hours, and any other features of your restaurant that customers would appreciate knowing before they arrive.
If you respond to reviews on Yelp, whether they are positive or negative, you need to maintain a positive, professional, and nonconfrontational stance. If a customer has a legitimate complaint, see what you can do to make it right.
While this might not work for all restaurants, it can be a good option for many. Loyalty programs are a fantastic way to get your customers to keep coming back for more. It is also simple to implement. You can simply print up some cards that you stamp whenever the customer comes in and makes a purchase. After a certain number of purchases, they can receive a discount or a free item. Plenty of places have had success with this including sandwich chains and coffee chains. It can work for you, as well.
Social media is important for all types of businesses today, including those in the food industry. You should have a strong presence on the most popular sites, including Twitter and Facebook. Utilize other social media sites, such as Pinterest and Instagram, as well. You can upload photos of your restaurant, your food, and more to help capture the interest of people on those sites, who can then share the information and talk about your restaurant. This is the digital word of mouth marketing mentioned earlier.
Most people are going to want to check out your website before they come to the restaurant. It will give them a better idea of what they can expect when they arrive. If you don’t have a website up and running yet, you are behind the pack. If you do have a website, you need to make sure it is fully functional and that it provides the visitors with a good experience. It should be easy to navigate, have a good layout, and all the necessary information about your eatery. This includes a menu and photos of your restaurant and your food. It is a massive part of your marketing today, and you can’t do without one. It doesn’t matter if you are a large restaurant or a small food truck. Want to set your restaurant apart from the crowd, offer online ordering on your site! This is not only convenient for your customers, but lets you save time/money not answering calls & also your customers don’t have to resort to the food portals to order from you through the food ordering portals.
Marketing is one of the aspects of your business that will continue to evolve, and you need to continually look for new and effective ideas to use. Start improving your marketing today.
The goal of any business is to increase sales, but it can sometimes feel as though your restaurant business is stagnating. You might not be losing sales, but you aren’t doing anything to get ahead, either. It is time to work on some different tactics and strategies that can help you improve your profits and surge ahead of the competition. Fortunately, many of these tips are relatively easy to implement. The following tips have the potential to help you increase your sales.
The upsell has been an important part of the restaurant business, and any business for that matter, for ages. However, you’ve probably been to plenty of restaurants where they never even bother with upselling. This is something you need to teach your staff. Upselling can increase the average ticket amount by up to 10% in many cases, and it is simple enough to do.
They simply need to ask the customers if they would like to try any appetizers, or if they would like a dessert or some coffee after the meal. They could let the customers know about other additions that they could get for the meal, such as extra fries, as well. Every little bit helps, and an additional five to 10% on even a fraction of the tickets can make a difference. You might want to give your servers an incentive to help them with upselling, such as a prize for those who have the most upsells in a month.
Do you have online ordering available for your customers yet? If you don’t, you could me missing out on a huge opportunity. Many people would like to get food from your restaurant, but they do not have the time to get out. They might be working, they might be at home and simply don’t want to go out for dinner, but they would still like to pick up some great food.
By offering online ordering for pick up, as well as delivery if possible, you can reach a large group of consumers. It is easy to get set up with a site such as 247waiter, which takes care of much of the work for you.
The average amount ordered online tends to be larger than what is ordered in the restaurant. In addition, those who order from you once are very likely to order again, if they had a good experience the first time. This can help to increase your sales without bringing more people into the restaurant. It is a fantastic way to increase your sales without needing to expand your business.
When people are looking for a place to eat today, many will simply pull out their phones and start searching the area for nearby restaurants. You want your establishment to have a good mobile presence. This means you need to have a site that is easy to navigate through phones and tablets. It should be simple for the users to find your address, to search through your menu, and even to call you if needed for reservations or to check the hours. In addition, you should be active on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as this can help you to reach even more potential customers.
Another way that you can increase your restaurant sales is to offer catering. You could make the food at your restaurant and then have the customers pick it up, or you could provide full catering services. In addition, you might want to host parties, events, and the like at your restaurant. If you have a separate room that could be used for these events, even better. Offering these services is a good way to increase your business, as you can host all different types of functions including birthday parties, anniversaries, office parties, meetings, and more.
Offer New and Exciting Dishes and Drinks and Promote Them
By adding some new and interesting items to the menu occasionally, it can help to breathe some life into your business when things seem like they are stagnating. While the old tried and true items on the menu might never leave, that does not mean you can’t be creative. In fact, you should be creative and start to add new items, including food and drinks. You might want to have holiday specials or seasonal dishes that you can promote, as well. With some great descriptions and photos, and the right marketing push, it can help to bring more customers into your restaurant.
Consider some of the different types of special events that might work well for your establishment. Perhaps you could have a live musician come in once a week, or on the weekends, to entertain your guests. Maybe you could have a karaoke night, or a half price drinks night. Depending on the type of restaurant or bar you run, there are plenty of interesting options that could work well for you. Think outside of the box and make it memorable.
A loyalty program is a fantastic way to increase your sales. For example, a reward card that requires ten purchases for one free item means that a customer needs to come to your eatery and order ten times. The more customers who are a part of this program, the greater the chance of return visits. This can substantially increase your sales, and you have nothing to lose. Even with the cost of the free item, you will more than make up for it with those other ten sales!
Finally, you can increase the prices. However, you should only increase them a small amount. You want to make a profit and increase your sales, but you do not want to gouge your customers.
With these tips, you can increase your restaurant sales, and it is easier than you might have thought. Always keep an eye out for other cost effective ways that you can boost your sales.
