Golden Rules of Restaurant Hospitality

Despite the fact that any restaurant’s success hinges on its ability to attract and retain customers, many restaurant businesses lose sight of the basic rules of hospitality in favor of simply trying to keep the business afloat. While it’s always important to keep an eye on the bottom line, keeping your customers coming in and leaving happy is equally critical. No matter what state your restaurant’s business is in, here are a few “golden rules” of hospitality that should never be absent.  

Take the Craft of Restaurant Hospitality Seriously, Not Yourself

The first important thing to realize about hospitality is that it is an experience that starts the moment your customer sets foot in the door. This experience is largely determined by the mood that you and your staff set. How is it possible for a guest to have a relaxing, enjoyable experience if the staff is emanating a frazzled, semi-cranky, “hurry up and tell me what you want” attitude? Customers want to see that restaurant employees are knowledgeable about the dishes that are being served and that they take the quality and experience of that service seriously, but they also want to receive this service in an environment where people are relaxed and enjoying what they do. Bottom line, recognize that good hospitality can have more to do with friendly, open attitudes and excellent, upbeat service than the actual quality of the food itself.

Treat Every Restaurant Guest as a Family Friend and Every Dish as a Competition

The definition of hospitality includes receiving and treating guests or strangers in a warm, friendly, generous way. This means giving them a warm welcome when they enter, engaging them in some form of personal conversation during their stay and ensuring that their experience is a positive one in every possible way. In other words, treat every customer as you would a dear family friend, taking measures to impress and delight them and to assure their happiness and comfort.

Furthermore, underscore your commitment to excellence by treating every dish that you create as if it were going to be entered into a competition. Ask how customers like their meals shortly after delivering them and be prepared to take any action necessary to make sure they are happy with their orders. Let every customer know that you have worked hard to make their experience with you special, and that every dish has been personally prepared with loving care. Customers who are made to feel special, welcomed and heard will return to your business again and again.

Cultivate Goodwill Between Your Restaurant Business and the Public at Large

Last but not least, cultivate an attitude of sharing and goodwill between your restaurant and the public at large. The can be as simple as freely sharing the recipe for that favorite dish, or as elaborate as letting the local community know that your business is interested in buying local produce and sponsoring local fundraisers, events and gatherings. Also, look for ways to tailor your offerings to better suit your core demographic. For example, if you have a lot of kids come into the restaurant, consider starting a “kids’ club” program, or take a survey of your most loyal patrons to see if there is any way you can make their experience with your restaurant even better.

The take home point here is that a restaurant can’t afford to neglect the basic rules of hospitality if it hopes to survive. Those basics are easily met by treating every customer as an honored guest, cultivating an attitude of openness and warmth and making a commitment to going above and beyond to ensure that your customers leave happy, satisfied and eager to return.

3 Marketing Best Practices for Restaurant Expansion

When trying to expand your restaurant’s brand, marketing plays a key factor in your overall success. Having a proven brand marketing strategy that is both replicable and scalable and is built on a solid business infrastructure is critical—especially if you’re trying to franchise. Here’s an overview of best practices when it comes to marketing and restaurant brand expansion.

Have a Proven Brand and Solid Restaurant Business Infrastructure

Having a proven brand that is built on a solid business infrastructure is the first step to ensuring brand marketing success. It’s difficult to market a brand with different franchise partners if there isn’t a cohesive overview of how the brand will represent itself and how the marketing side of the business will be done. Be sure that all partners are clear about the reputation of the brand image that is trying to be upheld. Also consider that there are a lot of new resources that are needed when entering new markets. For instance, you’ll need to hire franchise and field marketing managers, whose job it will be to maintain the unity and standard between locations.

Be Intimately Familiar with Your Restaurant’s Markets

Another key aspect of being able to successfully expand your restaurant’s brand into new areas is to be intimately familiar with the target market. If you don’t know this information already, hire someone who does. Understanding your markets is critical to your overall business success. Your franchisees will have individual knowledge of local markets that can provide valuable information toward your overall marketing approach. Encourage sharing of their marketing ideas and local product testing efforts among locations.

Have a Scalable Marketing Strategy, Customizable to Local Markets

When it comes to brand expansion, a final aspect of restaurant marketing best practices is ensuring that your marketing strategy is scalable and customizable to the level best suited to the new market that is being entered. Markets vary in their media efficacies and small markets can have a lower cost of media marketing, so something like TV advertising might be more affordable and make more sense there than elsewhere. Strong digital platforms can be ultra-local, with deals and promotional messages perfectly suited to the local community it serves. Again, utilize franchisee knowledge and information about their individual needs when setting up an overall restaurant expansion marketing plan.

In sum, successfully implementing a marketing strategy that helps to expand your restaurant’s overall brand comes down to having proven, replicable brand strategies that have enough flex built into their infrastructures that they can be customized to the individual needs of local markets. Understanding the markets that you are trying to cater to is critical to your overall marketing success. You’re shooting for a unified brand message with proven results that can be adapted to any new market or location. Hire professionals, brainstorm with your franchisees and analyze your data to determine the best marketing plan for your restaurant’s brand expansion efforts.

Standards of Success for Modern Restaurants

The standards that created success for restaurants in the past are not the same as those that will create success for restaurants now and in the future. As a restaurant owner, it’s important to review your current standards for success and update them according to the demands of the modern age. Here are a few areas to consider.

Competition Is No Longer Confined to Foodservice Segments

It used to be that you didn’t need to worry about what Joe Schmo was doing in his restaurant down the street, unless his business belonged to the same foodservice category as yours did. These days, competition for the dining dollar spans across all segments. Knowing that, it’s important to benchmark best practices and outstanding behavior across all segments as well, not just your own. Doing so puts your restaurant in a position of achieving the best practices and standards across the industry, giving your business a far more viable chance of attracting its share of the consumer dollar.

Today’s Restaurant Consumer Wants a Specific Type of Service

Every business since the beginning of time is (or should have been) based around providing quality service. The difference in the modern age is that the consumer has gone from expecting “service in general”to expecting “service in specific.”The modern customer wants speed, accuracy, cleanliness, hospitality and no complaint-generating experiences. In other words, they don’t ever want to have to ask for anything and want an easy experience with your restaurant that demonstrates your respect for their patronage and time-constraints. What this means in terms of setting standards for your restaurant is that you must put a premium on getting the order right as well as providing exemplary service that covers all of your customers’ specific needs. Asking for feedback and insight on what you could do better before there is a problem is another marker for success.

Much of Your Restaurant’s Success Lies in the Hands of Your Employees

It used to be that adequate staffing, supplemented with a little training, was enough to give a restaurant success. Turnover was expected and the focus was more on the business and less on the people who ran it. In today’s world, restaurant owner’s have begun to realize that it is far more cost-effective, and ultimately helpful to the overall success of the business, to choose your employees carefully, invest in their development and encourage their tenure.

Look for low-drama, high-value players who share your company’s values, have a penchant for service and an aversion to creating conflict. Once you’ve chosen the right people, invest in their development. You should have a program that successfully develops people at least one level above where you’re currently hiring. Teach them something new every day!

Last but not least, look for opportunities to create tenure rather than turnover. Examine your restaurant’s employment history and notice how long people typically stick around in their positions. If you can find out why they left, do so and if it has to do with the quality of experience they had with your restaurant, do everything in your power to fix it. Consider offering pay raises, bonuses or other incentives to keep people around about the time that they typically quit. For example, if your cooks usually quit within 36 months, what can you do to keep them around for at least 44?

The bottom line here is that in order to be successful as a restaurant business in the modern era, you can’t keep operating on outdated standards of success. The restaurants that make it now, and in the future, will be those that are able to anticipate what is coming and take measures to adapt ahead of the curve.

3 Tips to Rev Up Special Offers and Successfully Introduce New Menu Items Through Social Media

One of the best aspects about social media is that it allows you to communicate with your restaurant’s customers instantaneously. This makes introducing new offers and menu updates a cinch. If it’s done correctly, social media can be a powerful tool to get your audience talking, induce incremental visits to your restaurant and build a loyal customer base. Here are three tips that will help to rev up your social media efforts, whether it is to introduce new items or simply better engage your community.

Design a Web Based Restaurant Menu, Optimized for Mobile

The most critical aspect of a successful online campaign, social media or not, is of course having a website that is properly designed and optimized for the web—and these days, that means optimized for mobile web viewing as well. Make sure that your menu, in particular, is web based and not a PDF. Web pages are easier to share on social media than PDFs, and they are easier for search engine bots to categorize and return as a search result. Social media sites can also pull more information, such as pictures, titles and descriptions, to include along with the post from a web page than it can from a PDF.

Smartphone use is, in some ways, driving the growth of social media, and it’s also critical that your webpages are properly designed for mobile if you want to properly utilize this form of marketing. Make a paired-down, to-the-point version of your site that is easy to read and takes customers to the information they’re looking for with as little hassle as possible.

A Good Picture of Your Restaurant’s Food Is Worth a Thousand Words

Nothing gets people interested in a new item more than a good picture of the taste-bud stimulating delight that awaits if they visit your restaurant. All social media networks have a strong visual component; some are designed exclusively around the sharing of images (Pinterest or Instagram, for example.) Posts that get shared are almost always those with a good picture. What this means is that it’s worth it for you to invest in a little professionally done food photography of your menu offerings. Send them through your social media platforms and post them on your website. Make sure to include sharing buttons to let people easily pass those mouth-watering photos around.

Take it a step further and install a “photo op” where people can take fun pictures of themselves at your restaurant and post it to their own social media sites. Or, consider rewarding people for posting their own images of themselves or the food in your restaurant to their social media channels.

Partner Your Restaurant with Other Businesses to Promote New Items

Another great way to rev up interest in new menu offerings is to promote them by partnering with a business, group or well-known individual in your community. For example, you might ask a local celebrity to describe his or her favorite dish and then create a version of it in their honor that you can promote. In another example, you could partner with a local charity and donate a portion of the specially created menu item to a fundraiser on their behalf.

The options are truly unlimited, in terms of utilizing social media to create buzz about your menus and service offerings. The key is making sure that what you’re trying to share is interesting and of benefit for the customer to know, is visually appealing and is optimized for easy online and mobile viewing.

3 Restaurant Marketing Trends to Watch in 2014

Marketing in today’s world can feel like a fragmented endeavor, what with all of the various options that are available. Traditional media marketing through television, radio and print remain important cornerstones of successful restaurant campaigns, but modern marketing options through social networks and digital and mobile platforms are equally critical. Rather than despairing over the fragmented nature of all of these options however, restaurant operators should embrace them as an opportunity to shine in multiple avenues and look for ways to implement integrated marketing and branding plans that build consumer awareness in new ways. Here are three restaurant marketing trends you will see a lot more in 2014.

Utilizing Restaurant Industry Applications and Refining Social Media Interactions

Smart phones now account for some 64% of all mobile phones in the U.S. and that figure grows steadily year by year. Consumers increasingly expect to be able to use their phones to interact with your business. Restaurants around the country are rolling out mobile-coupon and mobile-loyalty platforms with great success. Along with payment, loyalty, ordering and reservation functions, several restaurants are also developing games that align with brand messages or give food rewards to players to entertain and engage users. There is as much fragmentation within the type of device on which an application runs as there is in marketing avenue options. So, until there is an ‘ultimate device’ that everyone uses, it’s best for restaurant operators to keep versatility as top priority when developing and improving their applications. 

On the social media front, restaurant operators need to be more mindful than ever about how they look in the eyes of the public, and be prepared to deal with crisis should it arise. Previous years have shown us how quickly a brand’s reputation can get damaged through social media by careless responses from moderators regarding customer concerns. With a number of hot topics, such as minimum wage, poised to make headlines in 2014, restaurant operators should have a response plan of action or think about adjusting their cultural identities to best turn politics to their advantage. 

Old-Fashioned Restaurant Marketing Still Works, Especially on T.V.

With the rise of digital and social marketing, it can be easy think that you can let traditional media marketing fall by the wayside. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite the increasing popularity of digital and social marketing, television, in particular, remains a highly influential form of advertising. In fact, 68% of consumers surveyed in September of last year said they take action at least some of the time after viewing a TV commercial. The only thing that inspires a higher action rate than that is recommendations from friends and opinions posted online.  This underscores the folly of neglecting traditional forms of media marketing. 

Restaurants Co-Brand for Greater Reach

There is one final trend to watch in 2014 that we’ll discuss here. That trend is the potential that can be unlocked by partnering with the right companies and getting your research and development teams to collaborate. Such unions can be wildly successful for both businesses. Think of Taco Bell’s Dorito Locos Tacos, Cinnabon lending its signature flavor to Burger King’s breakfast products, as well as bottles of vodka, and McDonald’s and Kraft’s McCafe-branded coffee scheduled to hit grocery stores this year. Looking for ways to partner up and collaborate with other businesses in your area is a smart way to create a win-win situation for everyone, and you can count on seeing more such unions in the upcoming year.

Media marketing strategies will continue to evolve with technology and consumer demand. To be successful in the coming years, restaurant operators should focus on building integrated marketing plans and recognize that multiple media avenues are opportunities for creatively reaching and engaging customers.

3 of the Most Successful Restaurant Marketing Campaigns in 2013

As a restaurant operator, it never hurts to take a look at what is working really well for the competition. There were a number of highly successful restaurant marketing campaigns in 2013 worthy of review by the restaurateur looking to up their restaurant’s marketing campaign track record. Here is a brief review of three of the most successful. 

Wendy’s Makes a Home Run with Crowd-Sourcing

Crowd-sourcing can be a very powerful promotional strategy, but getting your customers engaged and interacting with your brand can be tricky. Wendy’s hit the crowd-sourcing home run in 2013 with their ‘Pretzel Love Stories’ and ‘Pretzel Love Songs.’ In these campaigns, they encouraged fans to comment on the Wendy’s Facebook and Twitter pages about how much they loved their new pretzel bun products. They then took these comments and cobbled them together into humorous video skits and songs telling the ‘pretzel love stories’ as crafted by the fans. They gave public credit to the people whose comments were selected, and, of course, ended each promotional video by encouraging viewers to send in more comments to help them write the next pretzel love song or story. The campaign went viral and ended up being a brilliantly successful marketing tactic for the restaurant.

Chipotle Mexican Grill Excels at Brand Positioning

Brand positioning can make all the difference in terms of how the public thinks of your restaurant. Over the last several years, Chipotle Mexican Grill has made its name with its ‘Cultivate a Better World’ and ‘Food With Integrity’ marketing campaigns, designed to demonstrate the brand’s commitment to sustainable and ethical food choices. In 2011, they put out a promotional video entitled “Back to the Start” which was wildly popular online. In 2013, they followed this up with a new video and matching smartphone and tablet apps entitled “The Scarecrow.” The object of the game is to guide the scarecrow character through a dystopian future landscape of processed food in search of sustainable sources to feed customers. The chain also offered free food rewards to download and play the mobile game. The campaign was again, wildly successful, and serves as a solid demonstration of how effective it can be to associate your brand with a cause about which people care. 

Domino’s Takes the Pie with Personalized Pizza Profiles

While pizza joints were some of the first restaurants to embrace online ordering technology, it wasn’t until this last year that chains like Domino’s upped the ante in terms of customized online ordering. They decided to give customers the option to save a personalized ‘Pizza Profile’ in which they could save the details of their favorite orders to expedite future ordering. They then paired this feature with an extensive video marketing campaign illustrating the frustrations and waste of time ordering over the phone, and assured customers that they could reduce their order time to 30 seconds or less simply by creating a Pizza Profile on the Domino’s website.  Not only did this campaign bring in thousands of new customers, but it also had the added benefit of giving the company the contact information and permission needed to market to these customers in the future. 

Whether you want to look for ways to take advantage of restaurant technology, focus on positioning your brand, or find inventive new ways to appeal to your customers, it’s smart to scope out tactics being used successfully by competitors and employ them within your own business. Marketing success in 2014 and beyond will rely on taking notes on what’s working for others and integrating those ideas into your own unique restaurant marketing campaign.

Food Trends to Watch in the 2014 Restaurant Arena

This time of year, everyone’s looking ahead trying to guess what the new year will bring. In the restaurant industry, there are curiosity upstarts which are likely to be passing fads, as well as a number of food trends that have been slowly gaining steam for years. Both of these menu trends are quite likely to take front and center in the years to come. Here are the highlights of some of the more important and interesting food trends for 2014.

Good-For-You and Guilt Free Dining

Both health consciousness and environmental responsibility have been movements on the rise in the general populace for years now, and all reports indicate that they aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, when asked which food fads are most likely to remain hot menu trends ten years from now, chefs around the country said environmentally sustainable foods and local sourcing are the top two movements and here to stay. This was followed by health and nutrition, children’s nutrition and gluten-free food options. 

In response to the demand for veggie, gluten-free and eco-friendly dining establishments, healthy ‘green’ restaurants are popping up all over the place and steadily moving into the mainstream. Predictions show that in 2014, early investments in green restaurants could well pay off. 

Single Item Restaurants and À La Carte Menus

As consumers get more and more accustomed to the ease and convenience of being able to order exactly what they want, when they want it, many restaurants have found success by offering extensive à la carte menus. Not only do such offerings make the customer feel catered to, but they actually can increase a restaurant’s bottom line since à la carte orders tend to ring up higher totals than traditional plate meals.

What’s more, there has also been an increase in the popularity of single item restaurants, or establishments that focus on serving only one item, and doing it extremely well. For example, there’s a restaurant in Los Angeles that specializes only in sausages. There’s another very popular bakery in Chicago that serves only meatloaf. Even gourmet PB & J and macaroni and cheese shops are being greeted with open arms. There’s something to be said for focusing on doing one thing, very well.

Strange Cuts of Meat and Novelty Items Mark 2014 Restaurant Trends

The final trend we’ll mention in this post is the recent rise in the popularity of luxury and novelty food items. While the specific ones mentioned here may be passing fads that are hot now and forgotten later, people’s love of the strange and new will never cease. Year after year, we will see trends from the novelty category hitting the top of the charts. 

This year it looks to be such items as ice cubes infused with herbs and other ingredients to flavor cocktails, strange cuts of meat such as tripe, beef tongue and beef pastrami being used in chili, and cheese steaks and sliders. Restaurants are now focusing on providing a neurosensory dining experience with meals in the dark, tactile tableware, diffusers controlling temperature and aroma, or music and visuals cued to courses. 

Some of these food trends, such as hyper-local sourcing and healthy eating, are certainly here to stay. Others, such as beef tongue in your chili, may be trends that are over before they really get going. Either way, it pays to pay attention to what’s hot now, what’s likely to stay hot in the future, and how your restaurant can best position itself to take advantage of these movements.

3 Restaurant Industry Trends to Watch in 2014

Another year has come and gone and the restaurant industry has seen its fourth year of positive, albeit modest, growth. The sentiment is that things are generally headed in the right direction, but that it’s also going to take both shrewdness and creativity for restaurateurs to succeed in 2014 and beyond. Here are three of the bigger trends on which to keep your eye.

Restaurants Getting Tech Savvy With Yield Management 

With all the shifts in demand, competition and the price of inventory over the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of talk about whether or not the restaurant industry should shift to a ‘yield management’ strategy. The airline and hotel industries have been utilizing it for years. There are a lot of advantages to being able to have up-to-the-minute price adjustments, and today’s technology makes it easier to do than ever before.

Restaurants Build Consumer Confidence and Broaden the Scope of Competition

Despite overall positive growth in the restaurant industry, consumer confidence is still down. Only about 13% of consumer spending is on food, and this figure has been steadily edging downward over the last few years as consumers have changed their spending habits. Restaurant operators are going to need to look for more creative ways to nudge patrons through the door––a task made no easier by an increasingly robust competitive environment.  

With consumers delegating more of their funds to other spending categories, restaurant operators are also going to have to broaden their viewpoint of competition to include a more holistic perspective. To be truly competitive, operators should take a note from the grocery store playbook and be proactive about offering discounts relevant to other consumer spending needs––such as discounts on gas, apparel or entertainment. Offering these kinds of discounts can often open a gateway of mutually beneficial networking with other businesses in your area as well; you scratch their backs, they scratch yours, and the competition in spending is turned into a cooperative effort that helps everybody.  

2014 Sees a Growing Appetite for Better-For-You, Luxury and Specialty Dining

In spite of a somewhat sluggish economy, there are a few restaurant sectors that are rolling into the mainstream with full steam. Better-for-you dining is a big one. From salad restaurants, to the addition of pricey vegetables, to upscale tasting menus, better-for-you dining is a trend that is only going to get bigger in 2014 and beyond. People increasingly want to eat local, healthy fare and what’s more, they want evidence that what they are eating is good for them. 

Restaurants that specialize in luxury or specialty items and/or experiences are the other niche that is growing rapidly. While the public at large still doesn’t have a lot of money to throw around, there is a certain segment that is increasingly spending wads of cash on upscale food halls, spare-no-expense tabletops, costly tasting menus and chicken priced like steak. There is even an increasing demand for what is termed ‘eatertainment’, where luxury is expanded into the neurosensory area and diners come more for the sensory experience than the food itself.

Whichever route you plan to take your restaurant this year, take to heart these two main messages: things are looking up, and the restaurants that come out on top in the coming years will be those who take a creative and savvy approach to cost management and growth.

4 Elements Critical to Your Restaurant’s Mobile Website Success

There’s no escaping having a mobile website if you run a restaurant. And more than that, you want a mobile website that is easy and intuitive for your customers to use – one that leads them right to the information they’re looking for in a matter of seconds. Here are four simple rules of thumb to follow when designing your restaurant’s mobile website.

Simplicity is the Key to a Restaurant’s Mobile Website Success

The place for flowery speeches and inviting images of your restaurant’s food and services is on your main website. Your mobile website needs to provide only the most pertinent information given as succinctly as possible. As a restaurant establishment, the pertinent information that your mobile users are going to want is your location, business hours, menu, prices, and preferably the ability to place their order right then and there.

Don’t make them dig for that information! Ditch the heavy graphics and lengthy copy and shoot for straight and to the point. As a general rule of thumb, keep your mobile site to between 5-10 pages.

Make Sure Your Restaurant’s Mobile Site is Usable

Usability is the next major factor to consider in your restaurant’s mobile design. Obviously, your links and buttons need to be large enough to easily push on small touch screens. The more white space you provide around your links and buttons, the easier it is to get around – so don’t clutter up the space with unnecessary elements.

Make sure that the site is logically organized and categorized so that it is easy to get around as well. Everything they want to know should be right up front. Last but not least, take the time to ensure that every menu, image, button, and link is working properly.

Don’t Make Your Mobile Restaurant Customers Wait!

The number one reason users abandon mobile and regular websites alike is lengthy load times. Heavy graphics and video are the worst culprits here, so again, avoid these wherever possible – especially on mobile.

It’s also smart to keep in mind that while your site may look just fine on one smartphone or tablet, it may get totally goofed up on another. Therefore, it’s essential that you test your mobile site across a diversity of platforms before it goes live.

Analyze Your Restaurant’s Mobile Website Data to Better Understand Your Customer

There are a ton of tools that will give you valuable insight on how well you mobile website is serving its purpose. Basic analytics tools will tell you not only where you traffic coming from, but how the people are interacting with your site. You can see what areas are most prominently used as well as where users are leaving your site, and can then use that information to adjust your design accordingly. To make this information most useful to you, make it a practice to monitor and analyze your website’s performance and functionality on an on-going basis.

These simple rules of mobile website design hold true whether those customers are looking for your location, your menu and prices, or the order button itself. Avoiding having a complicated, dysfunctional, or sluggish mobile website will help your customers more easily browse and find the information they’re looking for – how to patronize your business! Find out more about making your site mobile friendly at http://www.TheRMG.com

3 Tips for Effectively Using QR Codes in Your Restaurant Marketing Campaigns

Over the course of the last few years, QR codes have started popping up all over as businesses try to capture a share of the mobile market. As a restaurant, using QR codes can be quite effective in terms of directing people right to the promotions and information you want them to see – IF it’s done effectively. Here are three must-do tips to ensure that you’re getting the most out of using QR codes in your marketing campaigns.

Your Restaurant’s QR Codes need to have a Clear Purpose

It may seem obvious, but before you start using QR codes on your restaurant campaigns, take a second to ask yourself if having a QR code as part of the advertisement truly enhances the customer’s experience. You want to make sure that it’s worthwhile for the potential customer to go out of their way to scan the code. It’s important that they get something like discounts or special information for their effort – otherwise, why bother? If there’s an obvious benefit to participating by scanning your QR code, customers are more likely to participate.

Furthermore, size and placement of your QR code matters. It needs to be in an obvious location on the advertisement with a clear call to action so that people know what they’ll be getting by following it. Since people need to reach it with their phones, it also needs to be placed where it is accessible to viewers. Make sure the size of your QR code is in scale to the size of your advertisement as well – don’t put a tiny QR code on a big billboard, for instance.

Check Your Links, Shorten the URL, and Link only to Mobile for Restaurant QR Code Campaigns

When designing your QR code campaign, it’s critical that you print out the code at the size and medium you plan to distribute it on and then test it on a variety of different smartphones to ensure that it reads accurately. It’s also smart to use a URL-shortener like Bit.ly or Goo.gl to compact the amount of data you are storing in the QR code. Doing this makes the pixels in the code larger, and therefore easier to scan.

Last but not least, it is of utmost importance that you QR code link to a mobile website. The whole point of using these things is to get mobile users to check you out on the go, and the last thing you need is to lose them at the last moment because you’ve sent them to a site that is a pain to view on a small, mobile screen.

Test, Track, and Refine Your Restaurant’s QR Code Campaigns

It’s smart to test a few different versions of your QR campaigns to see which is the most effective at drawing in customers. You also want to track your campaign results so that you can see how users are interacting with the marketing message and whether or not it is serving its purpose. Most of the URL-shorteners will give you this information, but you can also hire companies that specialize in creating and tracking QR code campaigns exclusively.

The bottom line is that QR codes can be an extremely effective marketing tool for your restaurant if used correctly. Following these simple tips will ensure that you get the most out of your QR code marketing efforts and will help you gain valuable insight for future use.