7 Restaurant Hacks To Increase Your Sales

Attracting customers to your restaurant can become more of a challenge by the day with the revolution the food industry constantly goes through. However, the understanding of humans as simple beings will make you realize that only a handful of acts one consistently can bring about traffic to your restaurant. We’ve curated the behaviors of successful restaurants to provide you a simple guide to increase your market.

1) Social Media Presence

Word never spreads faster than how it spreads on social media, there’s endless possibilities to attract audiences from there and it’s comparatively time and financial friendly. Having a social media presence in diverse platforms will not just help you reach a wider audience but also understand the psychology, habits, ideals and goals of your target audience. Furthermore, it gives your brand a look of credibility and status while simultaneously providing your customers with an easy mode of communication.

There’s nothing more attractive than staying up to date with trends and employing that trend to promote your restaurant. For instance, the term ‘Foodstagramming’ holds significant popularity and the use of the same can make more audience aware of your brand and it also effectively reaches the right audience. The advantage of hashtags minimizes your promotion activities and makes sure to find the audience you need it to find. And it’s a huge plus to have a wonderful promotional platform that’s completely free.

Your restaurant grows an identity that looks approachable and active around the clock and avails you to promote your business anywhere and anytime.

2) Free Wi-Fi

It’s universal truth world without the internet comes to a pause, and the last thing you want your customers to feel is non-liveliness. Offer free wi-fi to your customers as it attracts multiple kinds of customers and gives them a reason to stay longer and visit often. This feature gives the people a sense of comfort and a welcoming environment. By adhering to their pathos and effectively aiding them creates a good brand image and often stands out of the crowd in the customers’ mind. This factor makes your restaurant stand out from the thousands of restaurants out there and effectively drives your business. Additionally, the people who visit are provided with the facility to post about the food and the environment of your restaurant on social media which boosts favorability and popularity along with free promotions,

The internet also encourages different payment methods for the variety of customers that will engage with your restaurant. With the popularity of modes such as GPay, PayTM and similar outlets, it would be a smart way to show pathos. Not to leave behind the lone diners who visit to spend long hours hoping to get work done. Adherence to these will prove that your restaurant provides good value for their money and thereby attracting more customers.

3) Menu Engineering

A menu is also something that closely connects with the restaurant and therefore giving more time, effort and importance can stir the audience. It’s calculated that an average customer spends about 109 seconds on the menu; thereby the menu becomes a space where you can execute the best of your brand’s quality and adapting to menu engineering effectively helps the execution. Menu engineering fundamentally involves categorizing your menu items into four engineering categories. They are:

➢ Stars: High Profitability and High Popularity; These refer to the menu items that are cost efficient to produce yet are accepted well by the consumers. Such products are best to be kept consistent without further exploration and rather spend time on the different promotion methodologies that can be employed.

➢ Puzzles: High Profitability and Low Popularity; Menu items that are easy to produce but aren’t sold easily fall under the category. To navigate the situation to a better state, you can explore the reasons for its low popularity. Adapting different promotion techniques such as giving it more prominence in your menu or posting about the same on social media platforms can aid the process. Contrastingly, lowering the price of the product can increase popularity thereby increasing your overall profit rate.

➢ Plowhorses: Low Profitability and High Popularity; When a menu item dwells in popularity among the consumers but bends towards the expensive side of production, they fall under this category. Trying to attain profit can be hard with these items, however developing a more profitable version of the same item or pairing the item with a low popularity item can tick two things off your checklist at once. Additionally, decreasing the portion size can also aid the profit factor.

➢ Dogs: Low Profitability and Low Popularity; And at last the items that are both expensive to produce and yet are poorly accepted by the crowd are called Dogs. This simply indicates that they need to be kicked off the menu. The profit along with time and effort you’ll be saving from this can be used to better the other occupants of your menu. However there are options to de-emphasize them or brainstorm with rebranding ideas to put the better foot of the product forward.

4) Live-Music

Music is a very important aspect to restaurants, no one wants to dine with a monotonous background. Having a playlist that best suits your restaurant’s vibe and playing it around the clock excites the customers to enter and helps them to enjoy their meal better. Additional to this, you can also mask any defects in their mood along with any background noises - helping you provide a professional setting conveniently. No matter what the mood the customers were in initially when they entered the restaurant, your music can help set the atmosphere for them to comfortably dine and enjoy their meal.

Additionally, the volume and the frequency of the music affects the quality of the food that’s being had. It helps create a more flavorful edge to the meal and helps both the customer enjoy it better and the restaurant to gain a look of quality. However it is important to understand that the volume needs to be kept just right, not too low to fail to execute any effect or too loud to disrupt the dining experience. You can also use the tempo of music to your advantage. Since people often match their eating rhythm with the music, playing a faster or slower tempo will influence their visiting period - which can be employed according to your restaurant’s ideals.

5) Provide Online Deliveries

Not everyone has the time and energy to visit restaurants to sit and have a neat meal, and as a restaurant it’s important to aid all kinds of people. In order to consistently grow your market, it’s important to make your restaurant accessible through multiple outlets. It also gives you the quality of being upto date and adaptive, considering the digital face of the food industry that’s evolving by the day. Signing up with food delivery companies and promoting through those platforms will also further aid your business.

Considering the current pandemic situation, it’s smart to have an online presence that still keeps the business and running and doesn’t leave your regular customers high and dry. It makes the process of ordering food much more efficient and easier for both the customers and the restaurants. It provides an easy order management system that helps you carry out the order at comfort. Additionally, it also helps in promotion and creation of attractive brand image. One is through your innovative and quality packaging methodologies; putting effort into these can impress the customers and help you stand out more. Secondly, having an online delivery outlet provides you with another face on the internet that helps with cost free promotion and marketing.

Furthermore, it gives you a boost in the competition with other restaurants. Surprisingly, only 2-3% of the restaurants provide online deliveries, thereby the employment of the same makes you more favorable and puts you ahead in the game. Not to mention the endless amount of customers you can serve without the requirement of a huge and attractive diner and other bills that tag along with that.

6) Coupons and Deals

There’s nothing more attractive than offers and discounts. Giving out coupons and special offers to your customers can encourage them to visit again and simultaneously profits both, the growth of your business and customers. This again serves as a feature that enables trust and credibility to your brand and helps create a bond with your customers. It helps with building regular customers and attracts new ones with the exposure of the advantage.

The quality of limitedness serves as a very influential factor for any consumer. Providing your consumers with deals that highlight the uniqueness or the rarity of the products intrigue them to try and experience the food. It’s a great way to also attract new customers, since it shows itself as a highly attractive and tempting product.

Furthermore, when a product is offered at a cheaper rate than before, consumers are more willing to spend , sometimes even irrespective of whether they have a want or liking towards it. Unsurprisingly, employing the effects of capitalism in a beneficial way always works best with the society we engage with today.

7) Unique Experience

Among the thousands of restaurants that swim in the cities, it’s a constant struggle to stand out from the crowd and explorations with the menu alone won’t cut it. What you offer additional to the food and the services you employ to provide the same helps you create a unique brand identity. Exploring the different dimensions of your restaurants such as the infrastructure, the cutlery, the plating are just starters. You can dive into an ocean of possibilities that offers additional activities or services that will aid you effectively. Think about things that blend with food such as board games, allow the customers the liberty of creating their own food, provide photo booths, explore serving techniques that match with the vibe of your restaurant such as using robots as waiters. The addition of technology always serves as a credible and attractive quality.

Furthermore, having a space where your customers can interact with animals has always been in favour with the audience. It shows the restaurant with a pet-friendly look and creates a comforting atmosphere. Don’t forget to use the trends that’s floating around outside the online space. Employ famously known icons, TV shows, movies and other social media personalities to attract the crowd that favor them.

There are a million ways to switch up your diner and make it stand out, but it comes of importance to keep the image or the essence of your restaurant and select your uniqueness based on the flow of that vibe. The last thing you want is people to find inconsistency and absence of correlation in your service.

Fundamental for these hacks to work effectively, it's necessary for the representatives of the restaurant to work collaboratively with each other. Additionally, the brand needs to provide quality products and an experience that's long lasting in order to guarantee customers to come back while simultaneously attracting more.