The objective of growth hacking (aka. growth marketing) pretty much defines what growth hacking is. It’s the cost-effective tactics of retaining user-base, making your business market itself and gaining traction. Read on for some clever restaurant growth hacking with examples.
1. Focus on the Big Picture for Growth Hacking
It’s not the sales funnel nor the small wins in the Longus run. A wonderful campaign by Criniti was ‘MetroMania’ promotion: eat a meter of pizza in under an hour for free dining for a year. A campaign that publicized the restaurant and effectively kept the Focus Group engaged for a long time. Make sure your campaigns resort to tactical advertising.
2. Find Your Specialty
Sure there are signature dishes, but what does your restaurant specialize in? Do you serve Italian food or middle eastern? We’re talking about developing a growth strategy for your restaurant that properly frames and distinguishes it. Some restaurants add little touches to their receipts, such as writing “LOVE” for 0.00. It grabs people’s attention and creates a buzz. Consider adding fun quirks to your restaurant to set it apart from the rest.
3. The More Growth Hacking Experiments, the More Refined the Data
Conducting many experiments, Uber Eats did what they do best: they started small and listened to their customers. They did, in fact, develop test markets in one city at a time, with Toronto being the first. Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and San Francisco followed later. Uber Eats took the opportunity to target towns one at a time, allowing them to gather real-time feedback and tweak their service to meet local demand.
Uber Eats is an excellent example of how increasing the sectors to target in your growth hacking experiments can prove beneficial. Focusing on a multitude of experiments gets you two things: popularity and data. Every experiment would eventually lead to an increase in customers as you optimize and finetune your efforts.
4. Know Your Customers
Know your customers and give them what they want. Then hook them up with your phenomenal campaign ideas to generate user-generated content and watch your customer base grow like magic. Knowing who you serve and their preferences give you the power to get creative with what you’re offering. Base your blog themes on their preferences, find the angle your product would appeal to them.
Be transparent about your pitfalls and growth to hook the emotions of your TA. Likewise, pay attention to what your customers are looking for. The most ordered food item, the environment reviews, the social media posts, everything can tell you what they are liking and what they are not. Remember that a happy customer is a regular customer!
5. Invest in a Website
An interesting website is what sets the modern restaurants apart from the rest. A customer planning to dine out will first check your website. Nowadays you can think of your restaurant’s website as one of the main attractions to get you more customers. Make sure that when someone searches for restaurants on the internet, your website makes the top page and it’s visually appealing enough and easy to navigate. Customers who get a pleasant experience with the website will build up expectations for the main thing. This will make your restaurant rise in reputation pretty fast. You can also benefit from adding first-party online ordering without having to pay absurd commissions to third-party food delivery aggregator platforms. Food tech startups like Fondoo can eliminate third-party from your operational process, adding efficiency with their menu management and online ordering system. Fondoo can provide you with a website that’s beautiful and comes with online ordering and reservation systems baked in. You can also customize your restaurant’s website for specific events to hype up your customers even more. For example, make the landing page easy to navigate for older audiences, and excite younger audiences with fun and comical interface.
6. Digitize Data for Enabling Growth Hacking Campaigns
Restaurants that store customer info on a digital platform can take date-driven decisions. An impactful component in product launching, data and information is pivotal to a successful business. By collecting a database of order volumes, taste preferences, order frequency, and peak flow across time, all of which is provided by Fondoo, you can continually refine your operational processes and cut down on costs and food waste while still being able to provide a top-notch experience to the customer. Menu digitization makes the operationalizes the flow of orders and customer experience is enhanced, which in turn retains them. It’s a win-win ticket, actually.
7. Campaigns with Lasting Impressions
Burger King, a popular quick-service fast-food restaurant, was named as one of the top mobile marketing campaigns in 2019 by the Clio Awards. The concept was shockingly simple: Burger King offered a 1 cent Whopper to customers who opened their mobile app at McDonald’s. (Burger King and McDonald’s rivalry is also a component of their marketing, as their customers get fun perks out of it!) This rivalry even inspired food channels to feature competitive reviews, earning UGC through their feud.
This sort of campaign leaves a lasting impact on people and they talk about it for ages. This is a very effective way to grow your restaurant. Try to host campaigns frequently that would make people talk about your restaurant a lot and keep wanting for the campaigns to return. Create a surge in demand and the popularity of your restaurant would rise exponentially.
8. Delicious Loyalty Programs
Offering great loyalty programs is one of the ways to make sure a customer keeps coming back. For example, Starbucks introduced reward points that are redeemable on their app. Giving your returning customers a special discount would hook them to keep coming back to you. The better the rewards, the more they’d want to keep returning. This would also turn your loyal customers into marketers as they would recommend your restaurant to others. Making it worth their while is beneficial to your restaurant in the long term with all the potential customers you’d be getting.
9. Special Experience
Safehouse Milwaukee is a spy restaurant, where the visitors are required to give them a password to enter, along with other quirks. This is what majorly markets the restaurant, a constant growth of fans – another growth hack technique that you can employ. Making your restaurant with a theme in mind would make a certain group of people become instant regulars. Moreover, you can decorate your restaurant in a way that fits the recent releases of popular movies, games, anime etc. This way your customers will have a different kind of experience all the time and your restaurant market is bound to grow very fast.
Recapping
Growth hacking helps new and old restaurants to bolster their reputation and see a bloom in the number of customers. The main thing to focus on is to pay attention to the customers and the recent trends and tailor your experiments accordingly. This keeps your restaurant in top demand as a modern and ever-evolving business.
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