With more than 56,000 restaurants in the United Kingdom, there’s a lot of pressure to compete for clients. New restaurants, pizzerias and cafes open every day with new ideas, winning menus, and highly skilled chefs. As an established business, how do you keep up with the latest trends in hospitality industry?
Preeya Khagram-Nasim, Founder of Chuck Burger Bar, says “The key is having a strong a management team who are fully hands on in all parts of the business be it kitchen, bar, front of house, reservations. This keeps communication lines open between teams and a greater appreciation of each of the jobs required within the business. When you have a team that communicates well between departments ultimately you ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction… That being, to provide the best possible customer experience.”
At every kind of restaurant — from fast food eateries to the best fine-dining restaurants — clients want to eat local ingredients and support local farmers and their communities. Managers can expect their customers to ask whether the fish is “wild-caught” and if their fruits and vegetables were grown with pesticides. Food sourcing is rapidly becoming a priority for diners, which has a huge impact on their loyalty to restaurants. Make sure you have the right answers and solutions!
2. Loyalty Programs
Partnering up with online food applications must certainly become an integral part of your marketing plan. These kind of partnerships have always encouraged visitors to check out restaurants through various loyalty programs, which offer visitors a discount for visiting a certain number of times. Check out and make good use of Zagat, British Street Food, OpenTable and countless others.
3. Investing in Online Marketing
In our digitalised era most successful companies spend huge sums of money every year on their marketing efforts. Website design, email newsletters, accounts on Yelp, TripAdvisor and Zagat – all these things influence your business reputation online. That is why in order to stand out from the crowd, the majority of restaurants go for the professional photography services.
Splento, for example, provides high quality food photography which could help you to show off your spectacular food menu, as well as headshots photography for your staff. By the way, you can read how professional headshots photography can boost your reputation here.
4. Reasonable Prices
Remember that even great quality photography is no substitute for good price and great service. Price matters, it remains the best indicator and it needs to be reasonable: neither over-priced, nor massively under-priced. You can have the most beautiful food photos in the world, but the real quality is what really matters for your clients.
5. Casual Dining
The emphasis on casual dining will affect the restaurant industry in general, encouraging restaurant owners to offer superior casual options at affordable prices. In particular, nowadays there is a growing interest in relaxed and casual dining experiences. If you run a boutique restaurant, consider a slight change of your concept into a high quality, yet affordable bar menu, that could appeal to the new generation of restaurant-goers.
That sums up our top 5 restaurant management strategies. Hopefully you can put these marketing tips to good use! Do you have any ideas that we didn’t mention in this post? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!
