How to Attract People to your Restaurant. Checklist. Part 2.

Attracting new customers to your restaurant is difficult. Once a person gets familiar with your place they are likely to come back if they like the food, the service and the atmosphere. In this blog post we’ve put together a list of additional strategies on how to keep customers coming back to your restaurants. They will help you minimize the cost and not break the bank.

1. Organize a Group
The sense of community is becoming more and more important to people, especially in the times of isolation and lockdown. They tend to come to physical businesses because they want to see other people and socialize. To some extent, you can achieve this goal by having friendly staff and personalized service. But you can take this effort even further. 

Think about what your organization offers in terms of mission and value to the community. Explore the ways you can create a group or a community that could benefit from your business. This is a low-cost option to raise engagement and interest in your location.

If you offer some healthy breakfast options like smoothies or freshly squeezed juice, you could start a 21 weight-loss challenge that would get regular customers at your door for weeks. If you serve French cuisine, it would be a good idea to start a French Club, where people learning the language could regularly meet to practice and enjoy some menu items.

2. Have a User-Friendly Online Ordering App
As an owner of a small local business, you might feel insecure about creating your proprietary IT product, worried that the investment will be too high. However, there are lots of user-friendly apps that you can use in your business for food delivery and online ordering. Look at services like Yelp or Uber for special food delivery services.

Statistics indicate that restaurant delivery services have grown 20% in the last five years. Overall, online food delivery sales are estimated to grow as high as $220 billion by 2023 – 40% of total restaurant sales. 

3. Host Large Events
Organizing special events is a great way to get new customers and increase their loyalty. If you have large TV screens, you can have parties related to sporting events. The most popular occasions would be the Super Bowl, World Championships and Olympic Games. You can also host parties for holidays like Halloween, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s, etc. 

You can always come up with your own party ideas and offer some specials on those nights, like half off a drink or a discounted appetizer.

Restaurants having the space for private events for local groups and families can be quite attractive. Allocating a banquet space for people to rent is a great way to make your business a popular destination and increase the profit.

4. Giving Away Free Gift Cards
If you want to have more people in your restaurant, the easiest way is to give away free samples of food. But this will naturally cost you a lot of money. Instead, you could offer free gift cards for a complete meal. 

This way you can control your investments in advertising your restaurant. A good idea is donating $10-20 gift cards to a local charity to give away in an auction. You could contact your local radio station and have them distribute those gift cards among listeners in return winning at some game of contest. Lots of people will hear the name of your business and come in to try your food. 

Offer discounted gift cards to your regular customers, such as “buy $20 worth of gift cards and get $30 instead”. If clients like your location, they will tend to spend more than the amount on the gift card, and they will come back for more positive experiences later.


5. Communicate with Local Media Outlets
Local food culture evolves with a great speed. People love to visit the hottest and Instagram-worthy restaurants in the city. It doesn’t matter what your focus is, there must be something special about your business. You should formulate your unique selling proposition very clearly and convey this message through local news outlets. 

Maybe your cafe is a business that has been run by a family of immigrants for decades and has an interesting story to share. Maybe your food is so unique that tourists search for your place on the map just to come in and try your food. Maybe you have special decor created by local craftsmen or artists. Whatever this is, you can boost interest by creating a good story about your unique feature and have local media tell about it to their audience.

The tips listed in this blog post are great options to use if you are thinking about how to improve customer satisfaction in restaurants. Want more life hacks on running your restaurant business? Read more articles on our blog. Be sure to reach out to Tawreed if you are looking for a reliable wholesale supplier for your restaurant.