5 Savvy Ways to Drive More Restaurant Sales

Driving restaurant sales is an art-form that takes practice and creativity to perfect. Nonetheless, there are a number of things that you can do to greatly improve your chances of success. Here are five time-proven ways to build more sales in your restaurant business.

#1. Make Selling More Fun for Staff

Your staff are the hands that make the sales happen. Getting them enthused about boosting sales is key to the success of your plan. Set goals for shift sales and share them with your staff. Try instituting fun and fair shift sales contests for servers and kitchen teams alike.

#2. Utilize Suggestive Selling Techniques

Recognize and reinforce suggestive selling efforts often during a shift and let servers know how they did goal-wise before you release them. Instruct your servers in the psychological aspects of sales, such as how someone will often choose one of two options you present (ex: this high end beer, or that) or how they will often take your suggestion of making their order larger or adding something extra if you simply smile and nod slowly while you ask them if they want it. There is a ton of information on how to be more effective at sales through simple changes in body language, or the words you use, and it’s worthwhile to the restaurateur to train their employees in the art thoroughly.

#3. Encourage Slow Day Restaurant Traffic

Look for ways to bring people in on slower days to help boost sales. For example, if you have a frequent diner program, you could offer double points for orders placed on a slow day or a free piece of pie for orders over $40. Get creative about how to entice people into your establishment.

#4. Build Your Restaurant’s “Social Capital”

One of the best ways to drive restaurant sales is to be better at local store marketing than the competition. Make a point of visiting every single school, business, charity and organization within a three mile radius of your restaurant at least once a month. Focus on building positive relationships with the people in your trading area and look for ways to either bring them into your restaurant or cater to them directly. Have your managers adopt specific local businesses and come up with marketing plans to drive more sales to each one. A hyper-local community focus is an incredibly effective sales and traffic building technique. Factor in these visits as part of your weekly marketing plans and efforts.

#5. Offer a Consistently High Quality Experience Every Time

All of the previous efforts will go to waste if you’re not ensuring that your restaurant is able to provide a consistent, high-quality experience to your guests every time they visit. Cleanliness, food, quality of service and even how your employees do their suggestive selling needs to be consistent, and of high-quality, in order to ensure that sales continue to grow. Managers should seek out strangers and do table visits every shift, touching every table with hospitality and ensuring that guests are enjoying their experiences.

In sum, utilize sales data to set goals, project upcoming sales and beat sales targets at every shift. Look for creative ways to network with, and tap into, your local community, and brush up on your suggestive selling techniques to make those sales soar.

3 Best Practices for Restaurant Menu Expansion

When it comes to expanding a restaurant’s menu, there are several important considerations to be taken into account. You need to know when to follow trends and when to ignore them, which new items will make the most bang for your buck and which will allow your restaurant to blossom into an ever more successful venture. Poorly thought out choices can have long-term business consequences. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when expanding your restaurant’s menu.

Be Discerning About the Menu Trends You Follow

Menu trends come and go on a regular basis, and not all are going to be a good fit for your brand. Choosing which are and which are not is a matter of assessing how well the trend fits with your overall brand image and appeals to your target demographic. If it fits with your overall brand strategy and is feasible to implement, go for it. Just remember that there’s no shame in letting a few of those trends pass on by, or in even trying to set a few trends yourself. Authenticity and individuality wins big in any business, but especially so in the restaurant industry. If you do decide to follow the trend, design what you offer around a quality experience for your guests, not the cost of implementation. There’s no sense in trying to do something specific if it’s not done right.

Allow Your Restaurant Menu to Evolve

While you don’t need to change your menu every time a new trend comes around, it is important to have flexibility and diversity built into what you offer. For example, there needs to be enough diversity in your menu that you’re not relying on just a few items to get you by in case of food shortages and price spikes.

Furthermore, your menu needs to be allowed to evolve. It could be that certain items or practices that worked ten years ago are no longer serving your restaurant business well today. Look for ways to be visionary with your brand image and discard those elements that no longer serve that purpose. If changes are made, strong leadership and communication skills are needed to ensure that team members, guests and franchisees are brought up to date and are on board with the new plan.

Listen to Your People. Look at Your Menu Data

It would be remiss to make menu changes without talking to your people and looking at your numbers. Your employees are your most reliable resource when it comes to decisions about menu expansion. They are on the ground with the guests daily, observing and serving their needs. The numbers will tell you what is most profitable to your business; your employees will tell you how your guests feel about what you offer, what impresses them the most and what they’d like to see more of. Some restaurants even go so far as to involve the guests’ decisions about new menu items directly. However you do it, utilize the people and information you have at hand to make the best determination for menu expansions.

Expanding your restaurant’s menu can be an exciting and profitable venture. If done well, the opportunity is there to attract new customers, increase sales and drive your brand’s overall expansion into the profitable restaurant business it is meant to be.

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.

How to Appeal to the Typical American Wine Drinker

Despite the fact that the U.S. has become the single-largest market for wine (passing France last year), American wine drinkers aren’t easy to understand. In part, this is due to the fact that there really isn’t any such thing as the “typical” American wine drinker. We come from diverse backgrounds with very different motivations for drinking wine. How then, as the restaurant owner, do you know which is the best wine to offer on the menu?

One way is to consider how customers make their choices when it comes to wine. Constellation Brands, a global wine, spirits and beer producer and marketer put out an interesting survey that breaks Americans into six groups—each with a different motivator behind their choices in wine. The results are telling, in terms of how to appeal to the American wine populace.

American Wine Drinkers Driven by Price and Habit

According to the study, price is the top consideration for 21% of American wine drinkers. The belief in this group is that a person can get great wine without paying a lot of money for it. The only way they are going to try something new on your wine menu is if it’s within the same price range as their standby favorites. These folk like to buy cheap good wine and drink a lot of it. In fact, wine accounts for 38% of their total consumption of alcoholic beverages. The other group who is unlikely to try anything new are the everyday loyals (20%) who drink wine as a regular part of their day to day routines. They know what they like and tend to stick to it. Appealing to these two groups is a matter of providing good, cost-effective wine and favorites they already know about.

Appealing to American Wine Enthusiasts and Image Seekers

Some Americans drink wine as a status symbol, others are genuine enthusiasts who love everything about the ritual and experience of wine. Both can be profitable groups for the enterprising restaurateur. For the image seekers (18%), the important thing is that the wine they are drinking makes them look good. They enjoy trendy labels and sweeter wines. The enthusiast group (12%) is more into food and wine pairings as well as new adventures in the wine tasting world. They tend toward bolder, more robust reds. Both groups appreciate knowing the back-story of the wine they drink and tend toward options on the classier “in-the-know” side of the menu.

Appealing to the American Wine Drinking Newbie and Those that Are Just Plain Overwhelmed

People’s reactions to the world of wine typically goes one of two ways—they’re either overwhelmed or intrigued. Those that are overwhelmed (19%) typically like to drink wine, but are intimidated by the complex array of options presented when trying to buy it. This group is going to get scared away from ordering wine if they don’t see something on your menu that they recognize. The group that is new to, and intrigued by, the world of wine (12%), has a different reaction. They still tend toward sweeter wines but are looking for authenticity and trying to learn about the beverages they are drinking. Like the enthusiasts, this group is going to be interested in the stories of the wine makers themselves, and are the segment most likely to buy organic and biodynamic wines.

Understanding these different groups of American wine drinkers helps the restaurateur make smart decisions about what to include on the wine list. Some restaurants will put a little something for everyone on the drink menu; others will cater to a specific type of wine drinker. What you choose for your menu is entirely dependent on who you’re trying to attract to your establishment.

3 Customer Texting No-No’s Restaurants Should Avoid

There’s no doubt that marketing to mobile devices is a smart move on the part of restaurant owners. There’s also no doubt that texting, or SMS messaging, is an efficient and cost-effective way of getting started with mobile marketing—well within the reach of even the smallest restaurant business.

Text marketing can be a powerful way to reach your customers, if it’s done well. Do it wrong and you end up alienating your customers and tarnishing your business’s reputation. Here are three text marketing pitfalls you’ll want to avoid on the road to a successful mobile marketing campaign.

No-No #1: Overwhelming Your Customers with Too Many Texts

There’s no magic formula for determining the right frequency at which to text your customers, but most sources say that 3 to 4 times a month is sufficient for the average restaurant. The reason people are sometimes reluctant to opt in to a text or email subscription is because they are afraid of how their information will be used. No one wants to feel spammed or badgered. Be clear upfront about approximately how often customers can expect to hear from you and stick to it. Let them know that you respect their privacy, will not share or abuse their information and that you appreciate their willingness to let you contact them. Ask whether or not they can/want to receive media text and ensure that you don’t send big media texts to people who request plain text only. Bottom line: realize that you are trying to build trust and a rewarding relationship with the people you’re communicating with. Remember that mantra in every message you send, and don’t over-do it.

No-No #2: Sending Poorly Written and/or Inane Messages

Perhaps more important than the frequency at which you contact your customers is the value of the content itself that you send. It is critical that every message offers something that is interesting and of value to your restaurant customers in order to keep response rates high and opt-out rates low. Text campaigns can include contests (text-to-win), text or loyalty clubs, soliciting polls, coupons, discounts, offers and announcements. You might even opt to send a text on a day when you have excess product or empty seats to let your customers know that a members-only special is available. Whatever you decide to say, ensure that it is an enticing message, and valuable to your consumers. It only takes a couple irrelevant or unprofessional texts for a customer to permanently opt out of communication with you. Pay attention to your grammar and spelling too. These texts are part of your brand’s overall reputation and image!

No-No #3: Sending Messages Blindly Because You’ve Failed to Do Your Homework

Assuming you’re sending out meaningful, well-written messages to your consumers at an appropriate frequency, your text campaign is still remiss if you haven’t analyzed your results. You need to know if your customers respond better to say, a 20% discount off their entire orders, or a buy one get one free offer. You need to test to see whether your response rate is higher if you impose a shorter time frame for coupon redemption or if you send out the offer on a certain day of the week.

This type of data takes some time to accumulate and utilize to fine-tune your mobile marketing campaign, but the effort is well worth the trouble. The better you know how to solicit a response out of your restaurant patrons with your text messages, the better positioned you are to utilize this form of marketing as a powerful tool in your overall marketing campaign and customer-relation efforts.

Obtaining Useful Customer Feedback in Your Restaurant

Customer satisfaction means everything to a restaurant business. Fortunately, the easiest way to ensure that your customers are satisfied is to quite simply ask them for their feedback. Most people are happy to share their opinions—especially if they know that you will actually take action on the feedback they provide.

Asking people what you can do better before there is a reason to complain demonstrates your commitment to integrity and excellence. It makes your customers feel valued and underscores that you are committed to creating an enjoyable experience for them. Plus, you might be surprised at some of the good ideas your customers will offer! Here are the three main areas in which you can obtain useful customer feedback for your restaurant business.

Getting Feedback for Your Restaurant In-House

There’s no better time to ask for feedback on your customer’s experience with your restaurant than when they are right there on the premises and the experience is fresh in their minds. Ensure that you have feedback forms readily available, and train your servers to politely ask customers to fill them out to significantly increase your number of responses. Whether you use an old-school pen and paper, or include a digital feedback form in your point-of-sale system, don’t miss the opportunity to get fresh, in-the-moment feedback on how well you’re doing (or anything else you’re curious about, for that matter) right there, in-house.

Getting Feedback for Your Restaurant Through Online Mediums

The digital world offers another rich arena for you to gather feedback from your consumer base. Make sure that your restaurant’s website has a comment form and direct people’s attention to it by putting it on their receipts and sending your social media followers to it. You can also send your mailing list a survey via email. Ensure that the survey is easy to use and express how the feedback will be used to improve the restaurant. If you have an example of how you have taken positive action based on a customer comment, post it for everyone to see. People are more likely to take action if they know that you are really listening.

Useful Feedback Is Already Available in Your Restaurant’s Data

Whether or not you’re actively asking for it, your customers are always giving you useful feedback; you’ll find it in the numbers when you analyze your restaurant’s data. By doing this, you’ll be able to see not only which items you are selling the most (and least), but will also be able to discover trends in the sale of your products that you can take advantage of. Keeping a regular eye on these numbers is particularly easy if you’re running a digital or online ordering system.

The type of feedback you ask for is up to you. You should certainly try to gauge your customer’s satisfaction, but you can also gather feedback on anything else you might be curious about, such as that new menu item or latest change in décor. Some restaurants offer some form of incentive to customers in exchange for providing feedback, and if you’re comfortable giving something away, it will most likely increase your number of responses. That said, you also need to be careful not to undermine your brand’s reputation. Making customers feel that their feedback can really lead to change in the restaurant can be incentive enough in and of itself. However you do it, make sure you are doing it. Gathering customer feedback provides you with invaluable information that can help you run a better and more successful restaurant business.

Tips to Set Your Restaurant Business Apart from the Competition

Building a thriving consumer base of loyal traffic to your restaurant is often about how well you can set your business apart from the competition. With myriad food options that people have available to them, restaurants must find a way to distinguish themselves in some form or fashion if they hope to attain any memorability—and thus, return customers. Here are a few concepts to think about when considering how to make your restaurant business shine apart from the rest.

Get Your Restaurant Behind Something Novel or Cause-Related

By definition, standing apart from the crowd means that you are not afraid to do something that is, well, different. Having the confidence to be unique and let your individuality shine is attractive to people. Being different than every other restaurant out there can be done in a number of ways. For instance, you could get your restaurant behind a cause that is important to you or the people in your area. There are many to choose from, but a few examples include donating a portion of your proceeds to charity, locally sourcing your ingredients, only providing hormone-free meat on your menu, having a waste reduction and recycling plan in place, etc. Choosing causes that help and affect the local populace are particularly potent choices.

You can also be different by doing something novel. Novelty can come in the form of something old, re-done in a new way, or can be something entirely new that has never been done before. The bottom line to the effective use of novelty is: deliver the unexpected and offer surprises. Think about what is being done in your area and what would catch people’s attention.

Whatever you choose to do to set your restaurant apart from others in the area, make sure to let your customers know about it. Educate your staff to speak about the good or cool things you are doing, provide literature for customers to read while they wait and post regular reports about that awesome thing on your social media sites.

Little Differences in the Restaurant Can Make a Big Difference in Long-Term Loyalty

Setting your restaurant apart from the crowd doesn’t always have to be done in the form of something big, like taking on a cause or niche market. Little differences in the experience people have with your restaurant can be enough, in and of themselves, to keep people coming back again and again.

For example, you might offer unusual sauces for your french fries, like wasabi or pesto. Maybe you bread your dill pickles in a beer battered sauce, grow all of your restaurant’s tomatoes in the parking lot, or artfully arrange your plates complete with your restaurant’s logo toasted onto the inside of the bun, so that even a regular burger and fries feels a little more special than normal. Perhaps you only offer local brews, or even better, maybe you have your own little microbrewery in the back. The point is, these are little touches that are pleasantly surprising and unexpected, yet subtle. They’re not the kind of thing you’re going to put on your marketing materials. Their purposesare to be “cherries on the cake”for your customers’experience when dining in your restaurant.

Keeping a Balance in Your Restaurant Between Service and Sensationalism

Although there are some notable exceptions, novelty and uniqueness alone usually won’t keep customers returning if the food and service isn’t good. This might seem an obvious statement, but it’s crazy how much time and energy some restaurant businesses throw into marketing and getting people through the door without paying close enough attention to their customer’s experience once they’re actually there. Namely, this experience comes down to the customer’s interaction with his server. Do not underestimate the power of direct eye contact, a sincere smile, attentive service and a welcoming atmosphere to pull more weight in building loyal traffic to your restaurant than any other endeavor you could employ.

Restaurants Are Well Positioned to Take Advantage of Record Tourist Year

A record number of international tourists (71.8 million) are expected to visit the U.S. this year, spending over $100 billion on tourism-related goods and services. A good chunk of that money will be spent in restaurants on meals, and restaurant owners and managers who have taken measures to ensure that they are easily found by those tourists will be the beneficiaries of the influx.

A Significant Portion of Restaurant Income Is from Tourist Dollars

Of course, international tourists aren’t the only tourist dollars restaurants should be concerned about. Approximately one out of every four industry sales dollars comes from both international and domestic tourism, underscoring the importance of local and national marketing efforts. Previous research shows that quickservice and tableservice, in particular, attract a significant portion of visitors. Up to 20% of quickservice and 30% of tableservice sales are from travelers and tourists!

Despite the significance of these numbers, many restaurant managers have not yet taken measures to ensure that they are visible to the travelers and tourists passing through their areas. Failing to take travelers into account and not taking measures to attract them is folly. In this year’s modest economy, restaurant owners would be remiss to ignore this ready source of traffic and sales.

Ensure Your Restaurant Is Listed in Local Convention and Visitors’ Bureaus

Getting a piece of the tourist pie is all about having your establishment listed where travelers will find it. Start by joining your local convention and visitors’ bureaus. Look for other “destination marketing” organizations in your area, and inquire about including your information with their materials. States and bigger towns often have their own membership-based organizations as well. When you get involved with these organizations, your restaurant has the opportunity to be listed on their websites and newsletters and be included with visitor information packets. Membership to these types of groups provides another avenue to promote your restaurant’s business and has the added benefit of helping to support the local economy by attracting travelers carrying an influx of cash.

Make Your Restaurant Easy for Travelers to Find Online

Along with ensuring your presence among the physical organizations in your area, you also want to ensure that your online presence is strong. Make it easy for travelers to find your location, menus, prices, and great photos of your food when they do a general search for the type of food and service you offer in your area. Do this by optimizing your website and content for search engines and mobile devices, by listing your establishment in as many directories and travel guides as you can find and by maintaining a strong social media presence and community. Consider encouraging your existing customers to direct their visitors to your business by providing a special “local fare” offer to travelers.

It is clear that tourism dollars are an important percentage of the restaurant industry’s overall income. This year stands to be particularly good in terms of tourist dollars spent in restaurants. In order to be found by travelers, you have to think like a traveler. If you were visiting a new place, how would you pick a place to eat, knowing nothing about the establishment or area? Making yourself easy to find both on and offline is the key to attracting a portion of the tourist dollars currently flowing through your area.

Twitter & Instagram Social Media Tips For Restaurateurs

Every restaurant owner is aware of the potential power of social media to help drive traffic and build strong relationships with community members. Using social media effectively, however, is a skill that must be built. Twitter and Instagram can be particularly powerful for restaurant social media campaigns. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you make the best use of these powerful mediums.

Keep Your Personal and Business Social Media Accounts Separate

There are a couple of reasons why it’s smart to separate your personal and business social media accounts. The most obvious advantage is that keeping your business accounts separate allows you to delegate the work of keeping them current to someone else. Your personal accounts should be used both to promote your restaurant’s posts, as well as to develop your own unique voice and personal relationship with your followers. Your personal feed is an opportunity for you to post other things that are of interest to you, and for your customers to get to know you on a more personal basis. It’s also important that you write your own tweets for your personal account—it doesn’t come off as authentic if it’s not really your voice.

If you have multiple restaurant locations, allow each team to manage their own social media personalities, community and campaigns. Take the time to educate your teams so that they really understand what you are trying to do with social media, and empower them to represent the restaurant’s brand in a fun and authentic way.

Last, but not least, always take the time to proofread your posts –both business and personal –before you publish them. Like everything else that you post to the Internet, what you say tends to lives forever.

Frequently Post Appealing Pictures to Instagram & Twitter

Images are a powerful form of communication. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest are built solely around the sharing of images; posts that contain images in Twitter and Facebook feeds generate buzz far faster and more efficiently than words alone. Therefore, it pays to ensure that you are posting high-quality, appealing images to all of your social media accounts, and doing so frequently.

What kind of images should you post? New dishes, obviously, but also new ingredients, your prep processes, any special events, etc. If you have the ability to hire a professional photographer, do it. If not, consider creating a work-trade agreement with a photographer interested in trading food for service. Don’t underestimate the power of a good picture to sell out a new dish that very evening. You’d be surprised at the traffic one good photo can generate, as well as how many people will end up checking your Instagram feed to decide what they want to eat, rather than looking at the menu itself.

Don’t Be Helter-Skelter About Your Posts—Put a Social Media Plan in Place

Last, but not least, developing a plan for the management of your restaurant’s social media campaigns is paramount. Work out what you are going to post, who is going to post it and when they are going to do so. Ensure that everyone is on the same page about how to respond to customer comments and represent the brand. Find a nice balance between sharing all the fun things that happen during the day(in and out of the restaurant) without overwhelming everyone. Due to their brief and visual natures, Twitter and Instagram can be powerful sources of traffic and relationship building that restaurateurs should be sure to take advantage of. Remember that upbeat authenticity is the key to a successful social media campaign, no matter which platform you’re using.

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.