As a restaurateur, you’re probably trying to find new ways to increase your profit margins. With new chain restaurants popping up all the time, your small restaurant needs to be able to compete. To help you find success, here are 8 ways to improve your small restaurant business:
Focus on the Quality of Your Food
If you want your small restaurant business to thrive, you need to focus on the quality of your food instead of the quantity. Having dozens of items on your menu may seem like a good idea, but you’ll probably find that you buy too much stock that doesn’t sell and the quality of your food isn’t up to par. Focus on having fewer things on the menu that your chef can cook well. When condensing down your menu, look at the things that are selling well. To improve the quality of your food, you should consider adopting seasonal menus.
Set Up a Website
If you don’t already have a website, then you need to set one up. Look up “seo in toronto” if you need help with optimising your website. Your website should be a place where people can go to check out the menu, look at pictures of the delicious food, and check your opening times before they decide to eat at your restaurant. Having a website for your restaurant has other advantages, such as giving your patrons the option of making online reservations and subscribing to your newsletter. Make sure you have a contact form on your site so people can reach out easily. You can also encourage people to leave reviews on your site so that everyone can see how much they enjoyed their meal and the service. This is especially important if you’ve used a movers long beach company to help you move your business to a new place where you don’t already have a reputation.
Offer Delivery and Takeout
Not everyone has time to dine-in, which is why you should be offering takeout and delivery. Instead of having people order their food over the phone, you can add an online ordering system to your website to enable people to put in orders more easily. They can decide what they want from the menu and choose whether to pick it up or have it delivered. When it comes to delivery, you can choose to hire a dedicated delivery driver or partner with a delivery service.
Take Advantage of Local Marketing
Most small restaurant businesses rely on word of mouth to promote their businesses. You should be encouraging your customers to not only leave online reviews, but to recommend your restaurant to their family and friends. Ask a local food critic to stop by and write a review your food. Concentrate your marketing efforts into promoting your restaurant locally and look into seo services toronto for some advertising guidance.
Upsell Items on the Menu
You can make more sales by upselling other things on the menu. You can do this by strategically placing items on the menu to entice customers to buy them, by offering meal deals, or by having your serving staff make recommendations or suggest upgrades when taking your customers’ orders. You can even set up your online ordering system to recommend appetisers, sides, drinks, and desserts when people order main dishes for delivery and takeout.
Host Events
You can offer your restaurant as a place for customers to hold private parties such as birthday parties, anniversaries, and retirement parties. For larger parties that book out the whole restaurant, you can charge a booking fee and negotiate a price per head.
Your restaurant can also host themed events for major holidays, such as romantic Valentine’s Day dinners, traditional Christmas dinners, and a unique dining experience on Halloween. You can also attract customers by hosting live music and having themed nights.
Get to Know the Customers
People return to the same restaurants again-and-again not just for the food, but for the great dining experience. Teach your waitstaff to get to know your customers and treat them well. Make sure they ask what the customers’ names are and how their week has been, and familiarise themselves with each customers’ preferences. People become regulars of dining establishments because as soon as they walk through the door, they know that they’ll be treated like a part of the family and have an exceptional meal.
Set Up a Loyalty Programme
Another way to keep customers coming back is to adopt a loyalty programme. There are many different ways you could implement this. You could offer a free dessert for a certain number of drinks bought or offer customers points based on what they sped, which they can redeem later. You can also encourage people to go online and subscribe to your email newsletter for excusive offers and discounts.
Image Credits: Cátia Matos
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