Parma Pizza-Manchester. Manchester Casey Jones' Restaurant. Presto Fast Italian-South Queen Street. The Heart of Sicily Pizzeria. Emigsville Ephrata Domino's Pizza.
El Milagro. Quarryville Top Markets. Albany, NY. Allentown, PA. Atlanta, GA. Binghamton, NY. Birmingham, AL. Bradenton, FL. Chandler, AZ. Charlotte, NC. Chattanooga, TN. Cincinnati, OH. Clifton Park, NY. Columbia, SC. Dayton, OH. Escondido, CA. Fort Lauderdale, FL. Franklin, TN.
Frederick, MD. Gilbert, AZ. Hanover, PA. Harrisburg, PA. Jacksonville Beach, FL. Jacksonville, FL. All you have to do is look around to see what gets people excited.
Hundreds of brands like Epic Meal Time have created multimillion-dollar media empires with over-the-top, showstopper meal creations that are more about the spectacle than the meal itself. Is there a showstopper dish you could create in-house that could really get people talking? Sit down with your chef and see what you can come up with to make a splash on social media.
This restaurant promotion idea can potentially combine the benefits of both a showstopper meal and a micro-influencer. Today, thanks to sites like Youtube, Tiktok, and Instagram, there are millions of amateur, semi-pro, and professional chefs with large online followings. A large percentage of these chefs are solely online content creators and have never worked for a restaurant.
They are struggling to monetize their following, and many of them are looking for ways to establish their cooking legitimacy offline.
This is a great opportunity for local restaurants to partner with popular online chefs who are looking to make offline moves that build their brand. This type of promotion has a ton of upside and very little downside, and I could see it being a staple strategy for restaurants five years from now.
In a low-margin industry like restaurants, the best promotions maximize perceived value while minimizing cost. This is a concept the gambling industry has perfected, and we can take a page out of their book with a promotion where the house always wins.
Promotions like this are fun, funny, and endearing, and they provide some buzz and entertainment value rather than feeling like a sales technique.
If you check your wallet right now, you probably have a handful of loyalty cards from various restaurants, cafes, or other businesses. All you have to do is offer a low-cost freebie — for example, coffee — in exchange for loyalty cards from local companies.
You could even offer better freebies for cards that have been marked with points. This is a fun way to steal even loyal customers from your competitors while making the customer feel like you are trading them high-value food items rather than low-cost freebies.
There are a wide variety of motivations behind this, but if you can facilitate this documentation as a restaurant, you are going to get thousands of dollars worth of free advertising from the people who visit your restaurant. A selfie station is an aesthetically pleasing backdrop designed and placed in a way that people can easily sit or stand in front of and take pictures of themselves or have others take pictures of them.
These photos and hundreds more if you keep scrolling were all taken and published by customers on their own individual Instagram accounts. This is for a very small, local cafe with just over 4, Instagram followers, and this one little wall is generating hundreds of free advertisements for their business.
A food truck is the perfect way to show up wherever the action is and put your brand and food in front of new people in your local area. Food trucks are also relatively low cost, extremely lucrative, and double as an ongoing, mobile source of promotion for your restaurant.
Imagine bringing in that extreme income while ALSO getting a bunch of those customers as repeat business at your restaurant.
Perhaps most importantly, they are an example of a brand that leveraged a strong local fan base into becoming a national chain. This is how you make a secret menu feel special.
You can also make this part of a loyalty program, where secret menu items are announced to and even decided by VIP members only. One of the best ways to turn a local fan base into brand ambassadors is to create branded merchandise that they then wear wherever they go.
Well, Chick-fil-A grew to be one of the largest privately held companies in the world by offering a full year of free food to the first visitors to each new location. Every time a new location opened, people would camp out in the nights leading up to the opening, hoping to be one of the winners.
This phenomenon was frequently covered by local press and resulted in millions of dollars in free advertising over the years.
You can do just one winner instead. Nearly half of all workers are employed by small businesses. This includes thousands of potential customers in your local area. A great way to get in front of these customers and generate some viral buzz is to simply show up and provide food for free. You could provide lunch for the entire staff of most small businesses at a very low cost.
Try just showing up with enough food for 20 people, or if that results in some problems, try calling ahead and arranging things with the owner or office manager. Start with small businesses, but you can also aim to give back to the community while gaining more attention when you provide food for teachers, nurses, and other employee groups that are highly regarded in the community.
On the topic of giving back, one of the best ways to gain attention in your community is to give something to that community. Regularly and visibly giving to the community and well-regarded groups in the community is a great way to make people feel like you are on their team rather than simply attempting to profit from their patronage.
The key here is being genuine and offering something that feels meaningful. Just like marketers, journalists are always looking for a good story. Give your local newspaper or TV station a call and see what sort of stories they might be looking for.
Sometimes the simplest things work the best. These promotion strategies are simple, proven, and can be used over and over again. This is as simple as it gets, but percentage discount promotions are consistently the most profitable campaigns for our restaurant partners here at Owner.
You also want to create some urgency by saying the quantity of offers is limited and on a first come, first serve basis, AND the promotion will only run for a limited time. com platform. For our restaurant partners on the Owner.
Our platform then automatically sends out periodic offers to each customer based on their order history. At this restaurant, people who order Chicken Parmigiana often order the Creamy Garlic Chicken Pasta as well.
Our software will take note of that and then automatically send the customer a discount offer for the Creamy Garlic Chicken Pasta about two weeks after their Chicken Parmigiana order.
com was built specifically to address these frustrations and help grow your restaurant business. Promotions are all about getting customers to take action, and few things motivate action quite like a deadline.
Regularly offering limited run items also opens the doors for additional promotions down the road. You can run polls allowing customers to vote on which items to bring back and possibly make voting a perk of your loyalty program , or you can simply take popular items and give them an encore.
Happy hour specials are a niche staple that should be a near-universal practice for restaurants open during the afternoon. They provide an affordable first-contact point for new customers, and they provide an easy focal point for ongoing promotion on social media. When done correctly, Happy Hour ticket prices often average out higher than lunch tickets.
The key is being strategic about the food you offer in addition to the drinks. If you run a more upscale restaurant, try offering scaled-down versions of your dinner menu at an enticing price point while keeping drink prices close to retail. While BOGO buy one, get one free offers tend to be associated more with fast and casual restaurants, they can be used effectively by virtually any restaurant.
The restaurant now has 2, people to reach out to with additional offers, AND a large chunk of those customers are very likely to return. The reach you get from offering a compelling promotion goes far beyond the actual people who walk in and redeem the deal.
These menus and any little freebies or specials you attach with them make for an evergreen source of promotion as well. Check out this great example from Shake Shack:.
Free appetizer campaigns are another type of promotion that work really well for our Owner. com partners but require a bit more effort and intentionality. The key is finding a menu item that has a low cost and brings in a high margin — think chips and queso, fried pickles, fried onions, mozzarella sticks, salads, desserts, breadsticks, egg rolls, etc.
If you can find something that can be given away sustainably, that allows you to consider the campaign for an ongoing promotion. You can also limit the quantity of the free items given out, creating urgency to take advantage of the offer before it runs out.
Business card giveaways are an old strategy, but just like many of the strategies in this category, they remain effective today. The process is simple: offer customers a chance to win a free meal in exchange for dropping their business card in a bowl.
Make the prize a free meal for TWO and then advertise that you select a new card from the bowl every single week. We want as many cards as possible because our modern twist takes advantage of every card we get. Family-sized meals have been a staple tool in the fast and fast-casual eatery toolbox for decades, but this concept remains underutilized elsewhere on the restaurant spectrum.
As we talked about earlier, people care a lot about the experience of eating out, and that experience is often deeply connected to the people they are eating out with. When a person sees a meal-for-two-offer, they think about sharing that meal with someone they know. Offering shareable meals and preset, multi-course menus for specific group sizes is a great way to get people thinking about the experience they want to create and envisioning themselves having a great time with people they love at your restaurant.
Offering samples is a great way to drive sales. According to The Atlantic, free samples at stores like Costco can help boost sales considerably. If you have one or two dishes that always score big with customers, have a staff member outside the restaurant offering bite-sized samples to passersby.
If someone is in the mood for Indian food, they are usually going to choose their favorite Indian place. Your real competitors have the same or similar cuisine, the same or similar mood appeal, and the same or similar location. Local ingredients, foods, and craft drinks tend to be more expensive, but they also tend to be very well received by local customers.
Choosing local suppliers, loudly advertising that fact, and collaborating with them provides a great focal point for ongoing promotion. If you are already sourcing local ingredients, foods, or drinks, reach out to the supplier and invite them to collaborate.
Pro tip: it will be a lot easier to set something up if you have a clear game plan to propose from the beginning.
In addition to non-competing restaurants, there are tons of non-competing local businesses in your area that would love to cross-promote with you in order to mutually grow both businesses. One creative idea is to partner with businesses and organizations that need meeting space during your non-service or even low-service hours.
This gets people in the door who will likely be interested in coming back later to try your food. You could also arrange to serve food to the group as part of the agreement, either as a promotion or a paid service. The point here is to be conscious of your assets and how you can use those assets to grab attention to your core business.
Despite all that focus on non-competing businesses, sometimes it even makes sense to partner with your direct competitors. Restaurant Week and similar local events are a great time to put competition aside and celebrate all the restaurants in your local area.
Restaurant Weeks are very popular and tend to get coverage from both social media and local media. Hand out flyers, offer discounts, and encourage people to come in and try a dish made by the people in their own community.
If your restaurant is a great place to work, the entire service staff network in your city, plus all their friends and family, is going to know about it. Get your staff involved in providing ideas for improving the restaurant, and then use those ideas.
Offer individual and team bonuses when possible. Be conscientious with scheduling and allow added flexibility for longtime performers. If you want to really go above and beyond, find out what would be personally meaningful to your top staff and try to give them that as best you can.
Holidays can be a massive source of new business, but they also bring their fair share of competition. Every restaurant in your area is going to be running promotions and specials to compete for that holiday dining dash.
This is a day to pull out all the stops and celebrate someone incredibly important and special. Feb 08, AM MST. Feb 07, PM MST. Feb 06, AM MST. Get Ready. Feb 04, PM MST. Feb 03, AM MST.
Feb 02, PM MST. Feb 02, AM MST. Feb 01, PM MST. Jan 31, AM MST. you'll definitely want to download the restaurant apps below. These restaurants may be cheap, but the food is still really good. Auntie Anne's - Get a FREE pretzel! We love this cheap restaurant promo!
Baskin-Robbins - Get a FREE scoop of ice cream! Get a FREE scoop of ice cream when you download the Baskin-Robbins app iOS or Android and sign up for their mobile deals! With this app, you'll also get access to mobile pay as well as updates regarding new flavors and promotions.
Think about it. Ice cream that's both cheap and delicious from a popular restaurant you know and trust.
Looking for food deals near you? Look no further. We've rounded up all the current restaurant specials, including free food, weekday food Discounts at over , restaurants and retailers nationwide. Save money on everyday items - visit your favorite restaurants, attractions, clothing shops Here's 15 restaurant promotion ideas that work to increase your food sales and boost your profits. Get the full list of restaurant and food promotion ideas
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