To make the promotion irresistible, give guests something they consider valuable for free. The trick is making sure the tactic boosts sales instead of cutting into revenue.

For a fine dining Italian restaurant, it could be that fresh truffle supplements are available at a premium price for a limited time. For a family restaurant, it could be a kid-friendly event happening in the parking lot. Your customer base likely has many categories of guests. You could focus on:.

Picturing a specific regular who falls into the group you want to target with your promotion will help you brainstorm the kind of promotion ideas most likely to delight them. Every promotion must have a goal. Other reasons to run a promotion include:.

Crunching the numbers can reveal the best promotion ideas. This is good information, too. Look at shift occupancy reports to find the less busy times. Target promotions to these lulls. It could be a happy hour, a late-night special, or a coffee break promotion, depending on the time of day.

These ideas and examples can help get your creative juices flowing. Every restaurant prizes its loyal customers. Show them how much they mean to you with a loyalty program. Try something traditional by giving guests every 10th burger on the house, or throw a thank-you cocktail party every quarter for your biggest spending regulars.

Whatever type of promotion you choose, rewarding customer loyalty builds connections with regulars. You can even create a secret loyalty program to make it effortless for guests.

People are so crazy about online ordering that it makes sense to promote heavily if you have it. The promotion can be as straightforward as sharing the links through social media and emails.

If you want to sweeten the deal, throw in a free menu item or a small percentage off the delivery charge to entice people to order. Both national holidays and tiny local festivals bring opportunities for creative and profitable restaurant promotions.

This classic promotion works better for casual spots than fine dining restaurants. Some classic combos are a free order of fries with a pub burger or a free ice cream with an entree. However, discounts can also erode profits if they are not properly managed. Restaurant discounts are a great way to attract new customers and reward loyal patrons.

But before you offer any discounts, you should know a few things. This section will answer some of the most commonly asked questions about restaurant discounts.

A coupon in a restaurant is a voucher that can be redeemed for a discount on your total bill. The coupons may be for a specific dish, a certain amount off the total bill, or a free item with purchase.

Many restaurants provide coupons to attract new customers or reward loyal patrons. Discounts are a typical marketing tactic restaurants use to attract new customers and boost sales.

There are several reasons why restaurants offer discounts, such as:. There are four main types of promotion: advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing. There are many ways to promote your restaurant locally. Some of the most effective methods include:.

Order One. Advanced third-party marketplace solution, integrating marketplace-originated orders directly into restaurant POS systems. Group Reservations. Directly book group events at your favorite restaurants, banquet halls, events centers, and venues.

In-Room Dining. Request a Demo. Revolution Demo Request. December 6, Restaurant Discounts: 13 Types of Restaurant Discounts. Limited-time offer! With limited-time offers, you can promote new or seasonal products, drive traffic to your restaurant, and bring in new customers.

Limited-time offers, sometimes referred to as LTOs, are promotional offers that run for a clearly defined period. In restaurants, these might include offering a discount on specific menu items or certain days for a set time.

Limited-time offers differ from other promotional offers because they only run for a short period. An LTO might include promoting, or offering discounts on, seasonal menu items for a month or a single weekend of deals.

A classic example of a limited-time offer is the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. First introduced in , the Pumpkin Spice Latte is a seasonal beverage sold at Starbucks during the fall.

Pumpkin Spice Lattes taste great — but they also have a specific marketing tactic based on their limited-time availability.

An article on Pumpkin Spice Lattes in Forbes noted the following:. products that are available only for a limited-time have a kind of built-in marketing that can grow in impact over time.

LTOs are essential to small business management and marketing and can help your restaurant drive sales in several ways.

The main reason limited-time offers are so effective is that they create a sense of urgency and scarcity. If a menu item is only on sale or discounted for a short period, customers are encouraged to visit the restaurant sooner rather than later.

As a result, owners must work hard to encourage customers to visit them for the first time. A limited-time offer will encourage them to give your restaurant a try. It could convert them from a first-time customer into a regular.

Loyal customers are arguably even more important than new ones in the restaurant industry. Delicious food and excellent service are, of course, essential if you want to bring customers back again and again, but limited-time offers help too.

Limited-time offers encourage your loyal customers to return and make the most of them. This will keep your customers loyal by rewarding them with special discounts and new menu items. A benefit of limited-time offers that can also help drive sales in your restaurant is that they allow you to test and promote new products.

Adding new menu items to your restaurant can be costly, especially if those products turn out not to be popular. You can also get feedback before adding them to the menu permanently and at full price.

A sense of urgency is part of what makes limited-time offers work so well. The wording is a big part of this. Make it clear that this offer is limited. If you create a strong enough sense of urgency, customers will be eager to book a table at your restaurant or place an order right away.

Not everyone works 9 — 5 anymore. If your business is usually empty between 3 and 5pm, offer discounted food at this point. You will entice new customers keen on an early dinner and a bargain. Setting up a time-based discount can sometimes be an exercise in administration.

By downloading the Snappmeal app, everything that you need will be set up at the touch of a button. Making your restaurant discounts percentage-based is a quick and simple way to accommodate discounts into your menu.

You can also build this into your estimated bottom line. Some suggestions could be:. Survey your customer base and build your business model around this.

Offer your discounts to people that will benefit most. They will then inform their friends, colleagues and family of your offering. This means more people arriving through your doors! Everybody knows the common holidays of the calendar. What you may not be aware of is the many and varied foodie holidays that fall throughout the year.

Here, you will find a wide range of holidays that can be used to run restaurant promotions. Some examples of foodie holiday days include:. By discussing these holidays, you can create social media buzz.

After all, a good burger is for life — not just for May 28th. Restaurant discounts are a critical part of your business model. Do not think of promotions as losing money. Think about the new customers you will attract instead.

By implementing loss-leading tactics, you have the opportunity to turn strangers into regular patrons. The classic example of this is free peanuts and beer but this could also work for other menu or drink items.

Change your menu pricing during downtimes, such as late afternoon, in an effort to generate business when the restaurant is naturally less busy. Choose an online reservation system that provides you with a widget to take booking though your website.

If your website receives a lot of traffic this is a must. Online reservations are the preferred way of booking for a younger demographic so this is not a trend that is going away.

Diners will make split second decisions about whether to eat at your restaurant based on your website. Therefore it's important your website is easy to navigate, gives enough information and is well presented.

Blogging is one little used restaurant promotion idea, when done properly can generate buzz about your restaurant. When thinking about starting a blog the best advice is to ask yourself - "what would the customers who come to my restaurant find entertaining? Effectively managing Local SEO involves various online marketing techniques to make sure people in your area can find you via Google.

With people searching for local places to eat thousands of times a day, local SEO is way of grabbing extra reservations from Google.

Get a primer here. Monitoring Twitter for publicity opportunities is one way of generating buzz. Here's an example from Morton's Steakhouse. For the cost of a steak, the restaurant received a large amount retweets and media coverage.

With organic reach almost non-existent on Facebook use 'like and share' promotions to increase awareness for your restaurant. Like and share campaigns revolve around giving something away if people like and share the post on Facebook. Invite bloggers or people with large Instagram followings to your restaurant in exchange for coverage or a review.

Visit local companies - introduce yourself and make them an offer. This is good one for lunch service and happy hours. Find local companies near your restaurant and visit them in person with an offer.

Diners will often choose a restaurant they perceive to have a high food quality. As long as you do use high quality ingredients it's worth highlighting this across your communications - whether it be on social media, your website or directly on your menu. The preparation of many traditional dishes has changed over the years, much to the annoyance of diners.

Make people happy and run a campaign that brings back a traditional dish. An example is a restaurant in the UK which ran a 'Campaign for traditional gravy' to get people excited about their restaurant again. To improve lunch time traffic, give a money back guarantee for service within a suitable time frame.

Whilst expensive, a food truck can be a way of getting your brand into places people don't usually see. On top of that if you run a successful truck you'll also have a second revenue stream. For many restaurants, even fine dining, delivery is becoming growing slice of their revenue.

Technology has enabled the growth in delivery services and delivery is becoming essential for many restaurants.

Building an email list is an essential marketing activity for restaurants. Using a restaurant reservation system that automatically builds your list from reservations is a must have tool for today's restaurants. Restaurants can also ask walk-ins for an email address when they arrive or use feedback forms with the cheque.

Use your email list to send promotional emails and newsletters to previous guests about upcoming events and promotions you have running. Online customer reviews can make all the difference in someone dining with you - especially for younger people. Keeping a high review rating is largely down to giving diners a consistently good service but you can also actively encourage people to leave reviews.

SMS typically has a much higher open rate and any other digital communication method. Sending discounts or reminders at key times via SMS is a marketing channel worth exploring. However make sure to not to spam people. A landing page is a page on your website about a single topic such as an event you have upcoming.

He reaches out to micro-influencers like Mexi Papa and offers to name a new menu item after them while inviting them for a fully filmed, behind-the-scenes tour. In many cases, these types of collaborations only cost the restaurant some time and effort.

What can we learn from 33 million people watching a video of random guys turning fast food into a giant lasagna? One of the great things about social media is you no longer have to guess about what draws attention.

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.