THE LUMIERE BLOG
10 Proven Strategies to Boost Revenue and Increase Visits at Your Restaurant
Are you a restaurant owner looking to enhance customer loyalty and drive more revenue from your existing clientele? In today's competitive food industry landscape, it's essential to continually innovate and implement strategies that keep customers coming back for more. Whether you run a cozy cafe, a bustling bistro, or an upscale dining establishment, here are ten proven ways to increase existing customer revenue and visits at your restaurant:
Implement a Loyalty Program: Reward your loyal customers with a structured loyalty program. Offer incentives such as discounts, free meals, or exclusive access to special events. By providing tangible benefits for repeat visits, you can strengthen customer retention and encourage regular patronage.
Enhance Customer Experience: Focus on delivering exceptional customer service and creating memorable dining experiences. Train your staff to be attentive, friendly, and knowledgeable about the menu. Pay attention to details such as ambiance, cleanliness, and presentation to ensure that every visit exceeds customer expectations.
Offer Personalized Recommendations: Leverage customer data and technology to provide personalized recommendations based on past orders and preferences. Use customer feedback to tailor menu suggestions, promotions, and special offers, increasing the likelihood of upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
Host Special Events and Promotions: Spice up your restaurant's calendar with special events, promotions, and themed nights. Whether it's a wine tasting, live music performance, or holiday celebration, these events can attract new customers and entice existing ones to return for a unique experience.
Optimize Online Presence: Invest in a user-friendly website, social media presence, and online ordering platform. Make it easy for customers to find your restaurant, view the menu, make reservations, and place orders for pickup or delivery. Engage with your audience through regular updates, promotions, and mouth-watering food photography.
Introduce Limited-Time Offers: Create a sense of urgency and excitement by introducing limited-time menu items, seasonal specials, or chef's creations. Promote these offerings through various channels to generate buzz and drive traffic to your restaurant.
Partner with Local Businesses: Collaborate with neighboring businesses, hotels, or event venues to cross-promote each other's offerings. Consider offering exclusive discounts or package deals to customers who patronize both establishments, fostering a sense of community and mutual support.
Invest in Online Reviews and Reputation Management: Monitor online review platforms such as Yelp, Google My Business, and TripAdvisor to gauge customer feedback and address any concerns promptly. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and testimonials, which can boost your restaurant's reputation and attract new patrons.
Offer Delivery and Takeout Options: Cater to the growing demand for convenience by offering delivery and takeout options. Partner with third-party delivery services or develop your own in-house delivery system to reach customers who prefer dining at home. Ensure that your packaging is attractive and branded to maintain consistency with the in-restaurant experience.
Continuously Innovate and Refresh Your Menu: Keep your menu fresh and exciting by introducing new dishes, seasonal ingredients, and culinary trends. Experiment with innovative flavors, dietary preferences, and cultural influences to cater to a diverse range of tastes and preferences. Regularly update your menu to give customers a reason to return and explore new offerings.
By implementing these ten strategies, you can effectively increase existing customer revenue and visits at your restaurant while fostering long-term loyalty and satisfaction. Remember to adapt and refine your approach based on customer feedback, market trends, and the unique characteristics of your establishment. With dedication, creativity, and a focus on customer satisfaction, you can achieve sustained growth and success in the competitive restaurant industry.
9 Ways to Dominate Marketing in Less Time
John Rampton, founder of the calendar productivity tool Calendar offers 9 tips on succeeding in marketing without cutting corners. Not surprisingly, outsourcing is towards the top of the list! The remainder of the suggestions are spot on as well.
"A growing business may feel like it doesn't have the bandwidth to accommodate marketing, but without marketing, it will stop growing. By taking a few steps to make marketing an incremental effort, you can ensure you get your company's name out without taking time away from the business itself."
10 Essential Social Media Guidelines
Susan Gunelius, CEO of KeySplash Creative Inc., has authored a dozen books about marketing, branding, social media, copywriting and technology and is the founder and editor in chief of WomenOnBusiness.com, a blog for business women offers 10 essential social media guidelines companies should follow when trying to build engagement.
It’s vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and—perhaps most importantly— your bottom line.
6 Technical SEO Mistakes That Can Reduce Traffic to Your Website
Lalit Sharma is the Founder & CEO of Ranking By SEO. A leading offshore SEO services company, providing services in the SEO market since 2005, describes 6 mistakes that can reduce traffic to your website along with suggestions on solving them.
“Without optimizing your website technically, you cannot achieve your web traffic objective. Everything will fall apart.”
How to Unlock 2X More Engagement by Eliminating Lead Forms
Torrey Dye, a blogger with the Atlanata based firm Terminus whose platform provides an Account Based Marketing (ABM) approach that identifies, prioritizes, and engages target accounts with a multichannel sales outreach, provides empirical evidence to support what we at Lumiere have long suggested - removing lead forms can increase engagement by almost 100%.
Think of it - how often have you navigated away from a site instead of handing over your most precious asset - your email address!
"By removing the friction caused by asking people to fill out a web form, we’ve seen as much as 71% of people who click a link in a marketing email engage with our content. That’s more than a 100% increase in engagement!"
How to Find Photos for Your Blog Posts
Mitt Ray, Founder of the site Social Media Writing provides the reasoning behind, suggestions and a number of resources to use to find quality photos to use in your blog post.
"Adding images can also help your content get more backlinks as found by Moz. This can boost traffic from SEO as backlinks play a key role in your posts’ search engine performance."
5 Crucial Ingredients of a Successful B2B Digital Marketing Strategy
Vikas Chawla, Co-Founder of the offshore agency Social Beat offers 5 great recommendations for companies looking to build a strong reputation online. Delivering effective content that demonstrates thought leadership is obvious but some of the other recommendations are refreshingly simple and fresh compared to most available information.
"Digital marketing represents huge potential for the B2B space to expand their client base and grow their business. With these strategies, your brand can develop a strong and credible online presence to drive greater results"
8 Inbound Marketing Hacks Your B2B Company Should Be Using
Kristen Deyo of Business 2 Community, a business resource site where professionals can establish thought leadership, increase exposure for their business/organization, and network with others.
"The B2B marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years. Digitalization has taken the B2B journey online and empowered buyers to self-educate and collaborate with their peers before ever speaking to a sales or marketing person. This shift has put increased pressure on B2B marketers to execute a strategy focused on demand generation and growing the lead pool."
A Simple Guide to Establishing a Content Strategy
You have a fantastic product or service. Great, that’s step one. Step two is finding a way to effectively tell the world about it, but demonstrating your skills or subject matter expertise to prospective customers is not always easy. You must be persuasive, professional, and methodical with your strategy in order to ensure buyers chose your company over that of your competitors. Our experts have seen that delivering consistent, engaging content through the proper channels offers you the best chance of improving your buyers’ experience and therefore successfully converting those buyers into new clients.
Here we have outlined the steps we recommend to successfully establish a content strategy:
Steps to Establish a Content Strategy
1) Define Your Customer
Determine your ideal client profile by evaluating the problem or pain point buyers are looking to solve and establish how your product or service can offer a solution to their problem. When you know who your ideal clients are you can tailor your marketing campaigns around their specific needs and desires.
2) Create a Campaign
If your content is properly focused and valuable, it will create awareness and attract your target client, but after they consume your content, what's next? Make sure to plan the next step by presenting a call-to-action or an offer that gives your prospects a chance for further engagement and nurturing.
A call-to-action (CTA) is a tactic designed to provoke an immediate response. Such as, “Sign up now,” “Get Started!” or “Learn More.” Call to actions can be displayed in a clickable format that directs your prospects to a form where they enter their contact information.
Offers are a tool for lead generation, without them, businesses have difficulty converting visitors into leads. Offers should be high-quality and valuable to your target audience, enough to convince them to fill out a form and provide their information.
3) Identify Keywords
Identify both broad and long-tail keywords to incorporate into your content to rank for keywords that matter to your Ideal Client. For example, if you own a carpet cleaning business a broad search keyword might be “carpet” but a long-tail keyword is a phrase specific to your prospective clients such as “carpet pet stain removal service” or “pet stain carpet cleaner.” Check out Google Keyword Planner to identify effective keywords relevant to your product or service with high search volume.
4) Establish an Editorial Calendar
Editorial calendars are used by small businesses, publishers, and bloggers to schedule content across different media, such as newspaper, social media, and email or print newsletters. Editorial calendars are more than just a platform for publishing dates. A successful editorial calendar maps content and schedules resources, offers, and channels.
5) Create a Workflow
Now that you have defined your ideal client profile, created a campaign, identified keywords, and established an editorial calendar, you are ready to create a workflow. This involves designing and implementing landing and thank you pages, email workflows (automated responses) and, lead scoring. Workflow tools such as HubSpot or Autopilot offer easy-to-use templates and the ability to create beautiful, personalized workflows--customized to fit your ideal clients in every stage of the buyer’s journey.
6) Measure and Adjust
Now that everything is off and running, you might be wondering how do you ensure your content strategy investment is actually profitable. Not to worry, most workflow tools make it easy to track and measure a multitude of data Including how many people are opening your emails, what offers generate more leads, how many leads are converting to clients, etc. Get together with your team and show them the results of your efforts. Decide what’s working and what’s not, and adjust your workflow accordingly.
Final Thoughts
Creating a Content Strategy and building a campaign may seem like daunting tasks at first, but after doing a little homework you will find it all comes down to figuring out what your ideal client is looking for and then designing your workflow and content around that information. Check out tools such as HubSpot or Autopilot to help you build beautifully customized offers, collaborate with your internal team for campaign ideas, poll your existing clients to see what products or services they are looking for the most, and consult experts for advanced advice if needed. Most importantly, don’t worry that your content strategy won’t attract buyers, like the saying goes, “If you build it, they will come.”
What You're Probably Missing In Your Marketing Plan (And It's Costing You Thousands)
Carrie McKeegan, CEO and co-founder of Greenback Expat Tax Services recommends adding internal staff as you grow for most of your business' needs with one exception, your marketing staff.
"If you're a typical B2C business, your marketing activities will likely cover at least a few of the following areas: partnerships, SEO, Google AdWords, content marketing, advertising, PR, email marketing, sales, and social media. However, if you break down the skill sets needed for the various different marketing activities, you will quickly find that there's little to no overlap in the type of personality and experience you need for each of these functions."