If you’ve recently opened a new restaurant, you probably already know that the hardest part is attracting new customers, but there are some creative marketing techniques you can use to boost your bottom line.
Check out these five innovative ways to promote your new restaurant:
- Social media – If your restaurant doesn’t have a presence on social media, then you’re missing out on a huge portion of your potential customer base. At the very least, you should create a Facebook and Twitter profile for your restaurant and start thinking of innovative ways to connect with people online – keeping in mind that everyone you connect with is a potential customer. Be sure to post daily specials, new menu items, and the occasional discount code to keep people interested.
- Yelp reviews – Yelp is one of the first places people go to find out whether a new restaurant is good or bad. While it’s not exactly kosher to put fake reviews up on the site, you can encourage your customers to leave reviews about what they thought of the restaurant. If you’re doing things right, you’ll naturally start getting good reviews, and if you’re doing something wrong, you’ll know what to work on.
- Traditional ads – We’re not talking about newspaper or Yellow Book ads here, those are things of the past. But people do still pay attention to billboards and TV spots, so if you’ve got the money, come up with a creative ad campaign to spread around – something that will make someone sitting at home on the couch or driving by in their car want to swing by for some food.
- Samples – We’ve all seen people standing outside of a restaurant handing out food samples, and this is a great marketing tactic, because let’s face it – who can resist free food? Cook up some signature dishes and ask one of your employees to go hand out some samples, if the food is good, you should see an influx of new customers in no time.
- Celebrities – Okay, this isn’t a valid marketing technique for everyone, but if you’re lucky enough to know someone famous – even if it’s a local celebrity – try to get their help in advertising your restaurant. Ask them to be in a commercial or send out a Tweet about how they love your food, you’d be surprised how much influence a celebrity can have over other people’s decisions.
Citations:
- Image via Microsoft Office
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