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Restaurant owners are operating in an increasingly competitive market. Diners are more diverse and discerning than ever before, and they’re facing increased economic pressures. When they do choose to spend on meals out, they demand an innovative, quality dining experience, so restaurants must vie for customer loyalty and market share.
That landscape opens the door for business owners to boost their sales with sharper strategies. Whether it’s smarter marketing, better use of data or improved cross-selling techniques, those business owners who deepen their focus on sales, marketing and staff retention will get a greater slice of the market pie.
If you’re looking for ways to help your restaurant thrive, here’s some food for thought:
Menu optimisation and diversification
Secret sauce? Best banh mi in town? From curated tasting menus to seasonal specials, optimising and diversifying your menu is essential for maximising sales, profitability and customer satisfaction.
Your unique or signature dish might feature prominently on your menu, or you might employ dynamic pricing strategies to highlight your most profitable items. Other forms of dynamic pricing include happy hours (which don’t have to just be for drinks) or specials on your less busy days.
You could also consider your descriptions and visuals and entice your customers with descriptive language to highlight the taste, preparation methods or origin of ingredients. Limited-time seasonal offerings are another great way of keeping your menu diverse and fresh.
Square for Restaurants makes it easy to flexibly adjust your menu, so you can highlight high-profit items during peak times or easily create in-season specials.
Effective marketing campaigns
Your tables are set; you have mouth-watering meals ready to go – but how do you get the word out to hungry customers? Without effective marketing campaigns, you might struggle to attract customers and keep them coming back.
Social media is a sure-fire way to get noticed by potential customers. Online channels like Instagram allow you to share what you and your team have been working so hard to make, while email marketing software allows businesses to connect with customers via targeted campaigns. Or, by creating partnerships with other businesses, restaurants can extend their reach to new markets and share the costs associated with marketing. No matter the channel you use to market your business, you should first consider how to successfully build an online marketing strategy for your restaurant.
Enhancing online presence
Today’s marketing campaigns often play out through social media channels. But your website and general online presence are also key to your restaurant’s visibility, customer experience and accessibility. A user-friendly website doesn’t need to cost a fortune; you can build and manage your own with Square Online – it’s free to get started, comes with friendly ready-made restaurant themes, and lets you integrate online and in-person ordering.
Square also integrates with the popular website builder Wix. Check out other restaurant websites for ideas on how to build or improve yours. As a minimum, you should think about including your address and opening hours, an About Us page where you can share your restaurant’s concept, attractive images of your food or your dining experience, your menu (or perhaps a seasonal example if you’re offering fine dining that changes with available produce), links to order online if available, and social media links.
You should also be sure to improve your restaurant’s online visibility. Google Business Profile is a free tool allowing you to manage your online presence across Google’s search engine and maps.
Online reviews are also a key component of your online presence, playing a pivotal role in shaping the perception of your business. Reviews provide valuable feedback on what customers appreciate or dislike about your service or product, helping you make improvements or double down on what’s working. They even contribute to search engine optimisation (SEO), boosting your chances of being found through search engines like Google. You can read and respond to your reviews through Google Business Profile, or invest in an app that lets you send and collect reviews at scale.
Cross-promotions, partnerships and influencers
Cross-promotions and partnerships with other businesses or social media influencers offer your restaurant the potential to reach new markets. You might partner with a winemaker to host a special culinary event, or, through a collaboration with a complementary business, diners at your restaurant might receive discounted tickets to the cinema next door.
Co-branding to offer joint promotions or discounts helps you reach a broader audience while sharing your branding and marketing costs. You might even choose to work with a social media food influencer to leverage your business with their followers. That’s potentially thousands of new social media users being introduced to your brand!
These kinds of collaborative promotions and partnerships add value and convenience for your customers while differentiating your restaurant from your competitors.
Upselling and cross-selling strategies
To boost revenue and expose your customers to more of your offerings, why not educate your staff on upselling and cross-selling techniques? Perhaps that burger would really pop with a slice of cheese. Or maybe a coffee or dessert is the perfect treat to round out a meal.
Greeters, maître d’ and wait staff are prime candidates for sharpening their upselling and cross-selling strategies. But restaurant owners might also consider highlighting premium items strategically on their menus or bundling deals at attractive prices – would you like fries with that?
With upselling and cross-selling, you’re more likely to boost sales, while customers will walk away more satisfied (and more likely to return).
Special events and promotions
Taco Tuesdays? Half-price Halloween? Special events and promotions can help drive immediate sales, but they’re also effective ways of building long-term customer relationships and driving some excitement towards the brand. Piato Restaurant in Sydney, for example, hosts special sittings for certain holidays (like Father’s Day and Christmas), while Sodafish in Victoria’s Lakes Entrance offers a special price for pasta and a local wine on Wednesdays or seasonal events, depending on the time of year.
Some restaurants might consider curated dining experiences, which offer a way for them to differentiate, upsell via specialised packages and attract new customers looking for Instagram-worthy dining experiences. From special dining events and themed nights to holiday promotions and seasonal menus, restaurants have a world of creative options to explore.
Leveraging technology
Technology continues to reshape all industries, and restaurants stand to reap efficiency and productivity rewards because of it. Restaurant owners know that automation can help fill critical business gaps and ensure the customer experience is seamless. For example, Square’s customer relationship management (CRM) software gives you the ability to manage and improve your interactions with customers across channels. From a single customer database, you can view all your customer interactions and transactions, allowing you to personalise and tailor your marketing efforts.
From point-of-sale (POS) terminals to QR codes, improved productivity leads to greater customer satisfaction and, ultimately, sales.
Leveraging technology across all facets of your business – from ordering and POS transactions, to staff and financial management – allows restaurant owners and their staff to work smarter, allowing them to focus on their customers. The staff at No Bones in Byron Bay regularly receive comments from customers about how seamless their payment process is with their portable Square Terminals.
Square’s POS integrates seamlessly with our Square KDS (kitchen display system). This makes it a breeze to put through orders with modifiers or variations – and these screens are also prompts for upsell/cross-sell. Plus, with Square KDS, you don’t have to deal with dockets, so you’ll never lose an order.
Streamlined POS transactions are one obvious innovation as a result of digitisation. But the opportunities for restaurants to digitise are endless. You might like to expand your reach through online ordering and delivery services, or even launch your own app. Some apps power many restaurant functions, allowing you to manage everything from one source.
Loyalty programs: Reward loyal customers
Whether it’s a free coffee for buying 10 in a row, or rewards and discounts for customers who refer their family and friends, restaurant loyalty programs boost customer retention, increase revenue through repeat visits and encourage word-of-mouth marketing. In fact, Square Loyalty customers spend 46% more and visit food and drink businesses 57% more often.
With the use of loyalty apps and software such as Square Loyalty, restaurants can also collect valuable customer data for personalised engagement. They can even be linked to your existing Square POS systems, so you’ll never miss a beat.
Improve operational efficiency
From management of restaurant inventory to team management and scheduling, making your back-of-house operations more efficient will free up time for you to focus on your customers and your product.
Square Shifts can help you optimise your staff scheduling. Take the hassle out of rostering with a centralised roster sent out digitally to the entire team. Let staff know about open shifts and allow them to arrange swaps based on job positions you’ve created (baristas can swap for other barista shifts, but waiters can’t, for example).
Tracking revenue against labour costs will help you make smarter management decisions. Square for Restaurants makes it easy to compare sales and labour costs in the same report, so you can make sure you’ve got the right number of employees working in your busy and less busy times. Team reports allow you to identify top employees and see who might benefit from a little coaching. Read more about how you can simplify your employee management workflow with Square.
Smart restaurant inventory management tools like MarketMan can help you reduce waste and optimise stock levels. Some platforms even let you do it all in the one place. Restoke helps with cost control, inventory, team management and ordering, allowing you to manage your back-of-house with more flexibility. Connecting Square to Restoke gives you the visibility and power to update prices based on the invoices you receive for all your ingredients and produce, and it will send alerts regarding menu costing issues to your managers. You’ll see your restaurant’s revenue and cost of goods sold (COGS) in real time, so you can immediately understand your margins on every item across your menu.
Community engagement
Restaurants are places where we meet, celebrate and unwind. As such, they’re an important part of a thriving community, and successful restaurants often play an active role in their local communities. That’s why many restaurants choose to give back to the communities that support them. This might be through hosting or sponsoring community events or sporting groups, or it could be by supporting local charitable causes.
Community engagement not only provides an opportunity for restaurants to establish a feedback loop with their customers – inviting them to share what’s working and what isn’t so businesses can act on the feedback – but also helps restaurants build local loyalty, enhance their brand visibility and differentiate themselves. In our 2023 Square survey of Australian restaurants, 51% of owners said that community support has been instrumental to their success.
Take Canberra’s Fricken Fried Chicken, which has gone from food truck to restaurant and remained resilient in part thanks to strong community bonds and participation at local events.
Staff incentives and motivation
Staff incentives and motivation are essential for restaurants to foster a positive work environment, improve performance, retain talent and ultimately deliver a better experience for customers. You could consider incentive programs where staff are rewarded for sales performance. You might also invest in ongoing staff education and training as a means of keeping employees engaged and productive, and demonstrating your commitment to their career development. Whatever programs and incentives you choose, it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate achievements. That (metaphorical or literal) ‘employee of the month’ wall helps employees feel valued for their contributions.
Data-driven decision making
The use of analytics and reporting can empower restaurant owners with customer insights that enhance efficiency, improve customer satisfaction and drive business growth. The owners of Fishbowl put some of their most important business decisions down to data and information they gathered through their analytics and reporting. Co-owner Nic Pestalozzi says Square allows the business to track different menu items’ performance in real time across 30 locations. They can see how sales are tracking minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, week-on-week, month-on-month or year-on-year. Nic says it has empowered Fishbowl to scale with the same attention to detail as if they still had only one store.
Square’s analytics and reporting track almost every area of your business, including your transactions, customers, loyalty programs and marketing campaigns, across multiple locations if you have more than one venue. By accessing this information, you’ll be able to identify your most popular items, average spend per customer, peak dining times and more. You can then use this data to help you analyse trends and give your business an edge when it comes to planning and forecasting.
Bonus tip: Customer feedback and adaptation
Gone are the days of the feedback box (too often connected directly to a paper shredder). Customer feedback and data are assets that businesses must learn to leverage.
There are many ways to collect feedback. Online surveys, social media and in-person interactions are all effective methods of capturing customer opinions. Square Feedback even allows customers to leave feedback directly through their digital receipts.
But collecting it is only part of the story. Feedback should be analysed to identify recurring themes or issues, prioritise areas for improvement and implement changes to enhance the customers’ dining experience.
By effectively harnessing customer feedback, you can improve your service quality and products and help prevent any brand damage. Feedback might be positive, or it might be negative. But the aim should be the continuous improvement of your product, service and customer experience.
