Nov 12th, 2022

Written by: Chase Schlachter

Intro

This is a long blog and while there is no shortage of blogs that cover high level marketing strategies for restaurant growth, our intention here is to be more tactical and creative in our recommendations so you can easily apply these restaurant marketing tools and experience growth first hand.

It goes without saying that growing your restaurant business is challenging and what works at one place might not work at another, but that’s why we have five recommendations instead of just one. So when you find yourself wondering “how to grow my restaurant business”, remember to think of how you might apply below recommendations to your unique situation.

1. Become a vendor for local festivals and events

Without stating too much of the obvious, local events are a great way to grow your customer base as they give you access to a captive audience. By doing this, you’ve got the opportunity to share your food with a cohort of people who have potentially never tried your restaurant before. This is a good thing.

Most cities have regular events over the course of the year with a variety of different vendors, the trick is identifying those events ahead of time to ensure you’re one of the vendors on the list. A great starting point is to think of the events you’re already aware of and reach out to the company who puts on the event and see what it takes to get on their list of approved vendors.

For example, I am in Austin, TX and over the course of the year we have several big festivals… Austin City Limits music festival, the Food and Wine festival, the Pecan Festival, etc.
The great thing is every single event is published on a government run website containing a comprehensive list of what to expect over the course of the year.

It’s likely that your municipality has something similar as every event has to be registered with the fire marshal. Find yours, find the events that align with your business, and reach out to the event management company.

You could try calling or emailing out to their general inbox (should be available under the “Contact Us” portion of their website) but I would recommend being a little more targeted since these are high-value opportunities (we’ll get into more generic outreach below). The best way to do that would be using LinkedIn to see who is responsible for the event – look for “event planner” or “event producer” in their job description and find their email address (here’s a great blog on how to guess email addresses and here’s another on how to write cold outreach emails).

Reach out to them – let them know why you would be interested in participating, that you’re local, and make an ask to see if there’s some sort of RFP or pre-qualification process you would need to go through to be officially considered. That way even if they’re not going to book you for their next event, you’re in their system for future events.

Another good way to accomplish this is your local event production agencies. Googling “Austin events production agencies”, for example, gives me several local event planners who routinely need to provide food at events. Getting in with them early is a good way to keep you top of mind for the next time they need your style of food at an event.

Send them an email, outline your restaurant, the type of food you make and the style of event you think would best suit your food (eg., if you do exclusively breakfast food an evening event wouldn’t be ideal). It should be a soft outreach just introducing yourself but also include an ask similar to above so they know you’re serious about getting involved.

How Syndesi can help
Events are all potential new customers so setup a QR promotion at your station to capture emails of customers which you can use to drive them to your restaurant after the event is over

2. Holiday parties (catering)

Holiday parties could fall into the “event” bucket but I wanted to also call out another strategy in this section so I have it separated as its own…

Almost every company in your town is going to host a holiday party. Think about that. And while many of them will be small and possibly hosted at somebody’s house, there are plenty others that need some sort of food. And some even need space to serve that food.

At the time of publishing this, it’s mid November so it might be a little too late for you to be the caterer for some of the bigger company holiday parties in town but that’s okay because you should start small anyway. Think about smaller insurance companies or tiny startups that usually do this type of thing on a whim - that’s your target audience.

I will show you how to search LinkedIn without including a company but–oddly enough–to start we have to enter something for company name (we will end up removing this).

Go to the LinkedIn search bar and type in “insurance” (as an example) to get started.

Once the results pop up, change the “Location” to your city/town and the “Company Size” to something smaller, I’m going to choose 1-10 for this example:

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the differThis will have narrowed our company size and location results but we want to back out the company name search for “insurance” so it shows all local companies under 10 employees regardless of name. To do this, click into the url at the top and you’re going to remove part of the string that looks like “&keywords=insurance&origin=FACETED_SEARCH”, then hit enter and the search will refresh.
For example, I’ve highlighted in **bold** the part of the url I’m going to delete. https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/companies/?companyHqGeo=%5B%2290000064%22%5D&companySize=%5B%22B%22%5D&keywords=insurance&origin=FACETED_SEARCH&sid=ktWence.

Now we’ve got a list of all companies locally that might fit our criteria for needing a holiday party caterer. I would play around with the LinkedIn “industry” filter and prioritize “Technology, Information and Media” companies but do what feels best for your restaurant business.

Then create a templated email offering your services for a company holiday party, the ability to host as a private event at your restaurant (more on this below), and they can also keep you top of mind for any events in the new year if they’ve already made arrangements for their holiday party.

This type of note can go to their general inbox. You can quickly get to their website by pressing ctrl (or command if you’re on a mac) and then clicking the company name or logo on LinkedIn to open the page in a new window (so we don’t lose our search). From there, go to the “About” section of their LinkedIn page, click the link for their website, and from there get the general contact us inbox info.

*Note

Finding the list of companies and their general email inbox is very manual work that can take a lot of time. Because it’s very task-oriented, I would recommend going to upwork or fiverr and paying a pro $5-15 to grab contact info for 300 companies and then all you have to do is send the emails.

3. Google maps ads

This is the only pure advertising recommendation in the list but did you know you can promote your restaurant business on google maps? Not many people do this, however, google maps is a huge resource for consumers when they’re having a hard time thinking where to eat (I personally like it better than Apple maps because the images are all within google whereas Apple maps tries to redirect users to Yelp).

The first thing you have to do–if you haven’t done this already–is setup your google business profile. Once that’s done, you can buy keywords to help drive traffic (on maps) to your business. Here’s a blog on how to do that.

I would recommend using the $400 in free promotion credits google gives you when you open your account (if you haven’t already used them) on ads. After burning through your free credits, I would recommend transitioning to a local SEO optimization strategy (another blog on what that means) because it’s both better and free.

The challenge with organic is it’s harder to generate traffic but backlinks (when your website is linked on other webpages like local media publications or festival vendor lists) and cell phone clustering (ie., foot traffic) push your business to the top of the results.

If you’d like to continue spending on ads, you can, but I would use it as a shot in the arm to help jumpstart a longer, organic campaign.

4. Host private events at your space

This is another way to get new customers to your restaurant… yes you can (and should) try to open your place up for company holiday parties but you should also reach out to the folks in your town who are regularly looking for new ways to entertain clients.

I would recommend going to the client-facing financial services industry in your town and offering your restaurant as a place to host private parties. Why? Because they’re frequently entertaining clients.

If your place is more casual, go to the credit unions and retail banks (physically), give them your card and tell them a little about your space. Yes, it’s weird at first but trust me it’s worth it. If your restaurant is higher-end, go to the private wealth offices and money managers. It’s possible you know some of these folks already so plant the bug with them.

These folks are regularly doing these private events for clients so by throwing your hat in the ring you’re cutting off a piece of the already-existing pie to help grow your restaurant business.

Again, the goal here is to get new foot traffic in your restaurant so you can impress with your food and ambiance. It’s up to you to bring them back but half the battle is getting them there so I hope you can find some use in the recommendations above. Best of luck on your growth and remember to use Syndesi to help build your marketing list during these unique growth opportunities!

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