I’m Nick Fosberg, and you’re watching Bar Restaurant Success, the place bar and restaurant owners visit to discover how to get ahead in business and in life.
Today I’m going to give you 3 outrageous restaurant marketing ideas you should try this year to stand out from the competition and win over brand new customers. As a bonus, I’m going to tell you how to get thousands of dollars in free advertising with these promotions too!
The first restaurant marketing idea is a food eating competition. Now you might be saying, Nick, this isn’t a marketing idea, it’s a restaurant promotion. Yes, you are right but soon you’ll see how all these promotions are going to tie into one key strategy to bring you hundreds of new customers based around one simple tactic.
So, why run a food eating competition? Because people love to be entertained, it’s different, and nobody else is probably doing one of these right now in your area! You can go to any bar or restaurant and eat and drink and watch the game, but how many are doing fun crazy things like this.
I run a pizza eating competition, a one pound burger eating competition, and a taco eating competition every year and my customers love it! I tried hot dogs but nobody wanted to get in it because nobody wanted to eat hot dogs!
If you’re going to try this out, ask your customers what they’d want first.
The second outrageous restaurant marketing idea is running a contest and giving away a free meal per day for an entire year. Why do this? Because it’s an amazing offer, it grabs attention, and who doesn’t want to sign up for a free meal, per day, for an entire year?
Are you going to lose money running this competition? Nope not a penny.
Here’s how I run this promotion. Set up a one page, lead capture website to collect people’s information in order to sign them up. Drive traffic there using Facebook ads and getting your staff to sign people up. To make this really profitable for you, make everyone a winner by giving them some kind of discount when they sign up and give them 7 days to use it to create some quick sales.
What I do for the winner who wins the free meal for a year is the free meal is tied to a restriction that it’s dine in only and they must either purchase 2 beverages with it or buy another full priced meal. I make this clear before they sign up so there is no confusion. By adding in these restrictions you at the very least break even on each meal.
The third outrageous restaurant marketing idea is to get a celebrity chef to come in. Why? Because everyone wants to meet a celebrity and this helps you build instant credibility!
The way to start looking for someone who isn’t take expensive is look up the chefs that are on Bar Rescue or one of the other food tv shows and contact them to see what they’d charge to come in. Maybe get some of the beer, liquor, and food vendors to help sponsor it.
Here’s the big bonus I wanted to fill you in on. When you run outrageous restaurant marketing ideas like this, you don’t have to come out of pocket to promote them. You can use the press. All you have to do is send out a press release about the event and if don’t know how to write one, google it and get a template. You can write one in 30 minutes at most.
Take that press release and send it out to your tv, radio, and news stations. They will interview you before the event and you’ll get exposure that way. Then most likely they will show up the day of the event to get more footage and you’ll get exposure again, absolutely free!
This brings me to my conclusion. In today’s competitive market, you have to run promotions and marketing strategies like this. You have to be different then everyone else. You have to stand out. Because if you don’t, you’ll never reach the success you’re really looking for.
Stay with me each week and I promise to keep delivering you with new strategies and promotions to keep you one step ahead of the competition. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below and I’d be happy to answer them!
