The Popeyes Family Feast Meal is launching alongside the returning Big Box, which comes in two options for diners to choose from. Both meal options are arriving now at participating locations nationwide, but will only be around for a limited time.

Image Credit: Popeyes. Affordable Family Meal Solutions - There is an opportunity for quick service restaurants to market and innovate affordable family meal solutions for busy and cost-conscious consumers.

Competitive Pricing Strategies - With consumers being more price-sensitive in tough economic times, there is an opportunity for the quick-service restaurant industry to adopt competitive pricing strategies to remain viable and profitable.

Limited Time Offerings - Quick-service restaurants can drive sales growth by promoting time-bound promotions of innovative family meals to create a sense of urgency among consumers.

Quick-service Restaurants - Quick-service restaurants can capitalize on the trend towards affordable family meals by creating innovative meal solutions that cater to the needs of cost-conscious and busy consumers.

This could help to instill greater brand loyalty, while also drawing new fans in to take advantage the cost savings. Value-hungry Consumers - Opportunity to cater to price-conscious consumers looking for affordable meal options. App-only Exclusives - Potential for QSR brands to offer limited-time promotions exclusively through mobile apps to drive customer engagement and app downloads.

Stretching Every Dollar - Potential for QSR brands to introduce promotions and deals to cater to consumers seeking cost savings and value for money. Quick Service Restaurants QSR - Opportunity for QSR brands to revive low-cost promotions and deals to attract and retain customers.

Mobile App Development - Opportunity for app developers to create mobile apps for QSR brands looking to offer exclusive app-only promotions to drive customer engagement. Consumer Savings and Discounts - Opportunity for companies specializing in consumer savings and discounts to collaborate with QSR brands in creating promotional campaigns that appeal to cost-conscious consumers.

This is free advertising from your customers themselves. There is no better advertising than word of mouth, which means new customers guaranteed. Like it or not, food delivery is here to stay. You can add a lot of revenue to your bottom line with a food delivery system.

But that doesn't mean you have to "bend the knee" to the ridiculously high fees of companies like DoorDash and Ubereats. In fact, you can build your very own delivery system with the Owner platform. com restaurant partners:. The Owner. com platform does all of these things automatically through our software, but you can do these manually as well.

When done correctly, great restaurant promotions get people in the door AND keep them coming back. It takes all the hard work you are already putting into your restaurant business — all the branding, marketing, customer service, menu optimization, etc.

com restaurant partners double their monthly revenue within a year by adding in the right promotion strategies. And to be clear, you don't need to implement everything on this list just doing a few of these things can really make a difference for your business!

Most of the ideas in this guide focus on taking simple actions that will result in moderate bumps in attention. Many can be done repeatedly and only take a few minutes to set up. These viral promotion ideas will require a bit more creativity, time, or investment.

Hell Pizza had its biggest sales day of all time during this promotional event and saw an overall increase in sales at a time when the local economy was struggling.

This is a great example of how running a challenge-type event for your customers can grab attention and increase sales. At the same time, these types of accounts tend to grow so quickly that k followers nowadays is considered pretty small.

The rise of food bloggers and micro-influencers has been a mixed bag of experiences for restaurant owners. Every other week, we hear a new story about entitled influencers walking around demanding freebies.

But in reality, the vast majority of these individuals are just regular people who are passionate about food and working hard to create content to build what is essentially a media business.

The key to this type of restaurant marketing is understanding how to align your incentives with the influencers you are trying to work with. One of our partners named Leo Mattias — owner of Cilantro Lime in downtown Los Angeles — has nailed this formula.

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.

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