In order to increase the attendance of a cafe or restaurant, we advise you to introduce digital methods of communication with customers and automated programs, thanks to which you can monitor the work of staff. This will allow quality work on the bugs.
What influences attendance?
Keeping the institution profitable is not an easy task. In this business, you must always analyze the work of competitors in order not to miss your unique selling proposition.
With conceptual things, like the interior design, you will figure out for yourself. But with the little things, we can help.
Identify 3-5 key problems of your institution. If we are talking about reputation, it’s time to make adjustments to the work of the staff, if not to the staff. The complaint book is not a working tool, so try testing your waiters on secret shoppers.
The problem is food – change the menu. Refresh. Seasonality contributes to this.
“Redecorating” is also needed. There is no desire (or understanding why) to spend money on the electronic menu (we will talk about it separately below) – update the paper one.
Only, in this case, the reputation of the cafe and restaurant can change, which will attract an additional stream of customers.
Competitor analysis and target audience determination
An important point to increase the attendance of the institution is to analyze the activities of its main competitors. In this case, the introduction of SWOT analysis will be effective. Its essence lies in the fact that it is worth taking into account not only successful establishments but also those that have problems with the business.
Moreover, internal (human, physical, financial resources), as well as external (market, economic, demographic trends, relations with partners and suppliers) factors are taken into account. Only in this way will it be possible to learn everything useful from the successful ones and not to encounter errors typical of the “losers”.
Another key nuance is the definition of the target audience. Such a step is required to make a more effective advertising campaign. You need to study your visitors, their average age, the field of activity, taste preferences. In the future, this will allow saving finances that would have been spent on reaching a wide audience.
One institution – for all
You have to change. Make it your chip.
Suppose at the weekend – focus on family gatherings with children, birthday parties, theme parties.
Friday – Day of the traveler. Let people come to you for original cocktails or food from different parts of the world, etc.
These are the simplest examples. You yourself know when you have the lowest influx of visitors. These time periods need to be properly used, offering a potential visitor in the form of shares, or create a thematic community.
Closed communities are generally the trend of the near future. An open network has become toxic, and people will also go offline. Take this chance.
Marketing plan
The minimum marketing plan is to buy placement in well-indexed media. Now people trust either reviews or thematic collections. Ask friends of SEOs how popular the query “Where to go for the weekend?” Is. So, the answer is on the first page of Google-issue. And not the fact that you need the pretentious media. It is enough to choose those that are well indexed.
Look for placement in “Tops”, ratings and selections. It is effective. Especially in the case of youth.
Promotions, special offers – you can hardly count them. But you try to find on the web examples of the most successful.
How else to hook customers?
Take a step towards the future. Until it became a general trend, you will definitely stand out. It’s about digital ways of communicating with both customers and potential audiences: electronic menus, a new kind of applications and control over the work of staff.
First, you speed up the customer service process. A large “bandwidth” increases the overall human flow.
For example, thanks to mobile terminals for bartenders, waiters, and cashiers it will turn out:
- Easy to manage orders – create and pay for them. The service process will increase several times, which cannot but rejoice customers.
- Provide a price without restrictions.
- Instantly share data with the kitchen, warehouse, and bar.
- Send automatic reports to the owner.
- Integrate the system with the cash register.
Also recently, many institutions are trying to attract customers with an electronic menu. This is a great way to show visitors that you are keeping up with the times and offer a truly convenient way to place an order in a restaurant or cafe. In this menu, there are high-quality photos and detailed descriptions of dishes, current prices, you can monitor the status of the order and put a mark of the place. As practice shows, such a menu raises the average check up to 40 percent.
Thus, thanks to the Internet and modern technologies, an incredible amount of opportunities appears in order to develop a restaurant, make it a leading and most relevant institution in its field and attract the maximum number of customers. We advise you to follow the latest market trends in order to be the first to introduce innovations and attract maximum customers.
General recommendations
It is recommended to always stay in touch – do not forget about sending emails, developing customer loyalty programs, inventing monthly electronic digests to inform customers about new arrivals, promotions, and news related to the establishment.
Do not forget to work in social networks, because often it also turns out to be incredibly useful. As practice shows, the coverage and effectiveness of channels in social networks in terms of the ratio of costs and final results are considered such that they cannot be ignored. We need to look for many different ways to attract audiences in the institution. For example, the first few people who will celebrate your restaurant or cafe in a social network will be able to get a 50 percent discount on snacks.
No less important is the introduction of the club “Birthday”. All people want to feel special on this day. It is better to offer a free lunch or dessert so that people come to you on their holidays. And do not forget that not only the hero of the occasion will come to dinner, but many of his relatives and friends.
