How we've consistently 2X restaurant sales all over texas.
It’s easy to lose sleep over your business’s bottom line. After all, cutting costs and managing margins can’t be taken lightly, especially with inflation and the covid-19 disaster.
While you’re doing all you can to reduce food and labor costs, consider these strategies to show you how to increase restaurant sales, have fewer slow days, and generate more attention for your business.
These strategies are the glue keeping our clients restaurants profitable and in business in 2022.
If you have any questions specific to your business or would like us to set it up for you, schedule a free call (don’t worry, you can leave your credit cards in your wallet).
Step 1:
Use a (profitable) IRRESISTIBLE offer to get people in the door.
Your potential customers have busy lives and your restaurant is probably the last thing they are thinking about.
But don’t worry, research shows that almost 70% of people can be convinced to go eat out on the spot with a worthy offer.
What you offer to them has to cut through all the noise in that moment and create intense desire in them that only your restaurant can satisfy.
Some good offers to start with are FREE Appetizers or Desserts, but you can get as creative as you want (make sure your customers would really want it).
For example, we increased an asian cuisine restaurant sales in Corpus Christi by 14% in the first 90 days by:
Running a Free specialty dessert for tables of 2+ made the restaurant a little under 25 grand in extra profit in less than 90 days.
Another example, we increased a local sports bar in College Station by 32.2% within 6 months by using a couple different offers that brought more people through the doors:
-FREE Hour of pool with a purchase of a drink.
-$3 dollar drafts on AGGIE game-days if you wear a jersey.
-Free frozen margaritas if Aggies win
The point of this offer is to hook a potential customer and create desire in them so they come willing to spend their hard earned money at your establishment.
If you’re greedy on your offer, think why should your customers spend their money with you?
Step 2:
Place your IRRESISTIBLE OFFFER in front of AS MANY EYES as possible!
Once you have a really good offer that grabs peoples attention, its now time to put it in front of as many peoples eyes as possible.
This can be done many ways (some free and some cost money). Here are some of my favorite:
1. (PAID) The easiest way to get tons of views in your area is to use paid advertising. The cost of ads won’t matter as long as your offer is profitable.
Plus this is the perfect way to use some sort of offer to build up your businesses email list.
I repeat if you can make more money with your ads than the sum of all the expenses – your ad budget becomes infinite.
For the food industry we recommend platforms like snapchat, facebook, instagram, and next-door.
Depending on your location some platforms may be better than others so it’s a good idea to test them out and see which ones does the best.
2. (FREE) This is why building up your social media accounts can be so useful.
You’re basically building a community of customers where you can share info, deals, and market to them for FREE.
To grow your social media, we recommend consistent posting of pictures that actually deliver your customers some value; whether it’s entertaining, informational, or a great deal.
3. (CHEAP) Find people in your area who have large social media followings, and pay them or offer them something in exchange for them to post your offer on their page.
This allows you to leverage their built up audience as well as leverage their followers trust in them (win-win)!
Now this isn’t free but can be a lot cheaper than going with the tradition paid ad strategy that still provides amazing results if done correctly.
There’s a million ways to get traffic, it’s all about being a creative business builder and doing everything you can to generate as much attention as possible with your offer.
THE MORE ATTENTION = THE MORE SALES.
Step 3:
Create Your Sticky Customer Net.
When you’re spending the effort, time, or money to generate attention and traffic for your business/offers..
You want to make sure you’re sending them to either your website or your social media or at least capturing their email so you can re-market to them via email marketing.
Think about it from your customers perspective:
You show “Nancy” a 38 year old mom with 2 kids who’s tired after a long day of work an Ad for a free specialty cheese cake your restaurant is famous for!
She sees your ad on facebook and stops scrolling to read it. Her tastebuds start tingling and she desperately wants to evade having to cook dinner for the entire family.
She clicks on your ad just for it to take her to an old, unattractive website with a hard to read menu, with pictures of the food that look like they were taken by a potato.
Or even worse it goes to your social media page – where you’re either inactive, have old photos, or just do a bad job portraying the quality of your establishment to Nancy.
Boom and just like that you lost an entire family as customers for your business!
So how can we prevent that from happening?
Make sure you have a Website that looks great, easy to use, and has some sort of agenda/objective for people who land on it.
In addition, make sure you’re treating social media as your businesses most essential asset!
Having a social media account that grows on auto-pilot and that people share is huge! If you can do this with your business you’re on track to be super successful.
A tip to see where your website & social media stand is to look at the competitors in your area that sell to the same potential customers as you. Is yours better or worse, if so by how much? What can be improved to boost your reputation?
Customers will far more likely choose the restaurants that have modern sleek websites and popular social media accounts because it increases the perceived value of the business.
Step 4:
MAKE CUSTOMERS WORTH MORE (INCREASE LTV)
After spending the time, money, effort to bring someone in the door you want to make them as valuable to your business as possible.
You can either do this by selling them more things while they are there or some how ensure/increase the odds that they’ll be coming back.
You can run offers like:
“Share us on social media and we’ll give you a free desert the next time you come as well (with proof)”
You can make it to where customers can earn points for every meal they eat.
You can teach your server staff some sales skills to be able to persuade them to try new appetizers or different desserts.
The opportunities are endless it just depends on how creative you are.
Heres a real world example:
Let’s say you had 1000 customers, and they on averaged ordered $10 worth of food.
Let’s say that they on average came 3x a year. That means your business would generate about $30,000.
Now let’s say you convinced your customers to come 4 times instead of 3x. You now make $40,000.
You just increased your sales by 33%!!!
Another example: Let’s say you convince people to order $12 worth of food instead of $10 using upsells, cross-sales, and a bit of persuasion.
With the same number of customers, you’d now make $36,000 instead of $30,000.
Which is a 20% increase in sales!
It gets even crazier if you combine the strategies together!
I hope you see how valuable it is to really optimize your backend. You can dramatically increase sales with the SAME amount of customers.
Combine this with an irresistible offer, and a great website and social media presence to engage with your customers, and you have a serous business that will only grow stronger with time (NOT WORSE)!
Being able to leverage the internet is key for increasing sales, and getting new customers in 2022. Leveraging the internet will bullet proof your business and keep you alive with rising costs and inflation.
Keep in mind, this article expects that your customers will be happy with the quality of your food and service.
Theres plenty of other things that goes into running a successful restaurant but this by far are the easiest strategies that can be implemented quickly to significantly drive growth and sales.
If you want a summary of this article with high converting website templates, offer examples, social media strategies, and more fill out the form and we’ll have it sent to your email instantly for completely FREE!
Feel free to schedule a free call with us for any questions or if you’d like us to implement this for your business!
We wish you the best of luck!
-Team ReddyMedia
