How to Improve the Sales of Restaurants Located Deep inside Alleys without an Advertisement Budget!
It is well-known that location is vital to restaurant businesses. Restaurants at crowded locations have better sales opportunities than restaurants in poorly-trafficked locations. In reality, however, it might be impossible for us to pick great locations as we want. That’s because locations with greater sales opportunities also come with correspondingly high rent.
That’s why many restaurant owners have to choose a place that’s convenient for them such as alleys far away from a main road or communities. In addition, some restaurants have been open for a long time and can’t just move to a new location, due to not having enough funds. Otherwise, some restaurants are those opened using the leftover spaces of homes to sell to customers nearby or customers who pass by when chance permits and they want to increase their sales volume but suffer from budget problems.
As there is not enough money to even purchase social media advertisements, it sounds difficult to improve restaurant sales. However, this doesn’t mean that there are no options. Today MHA will recommend some guidelines on how to easily increase the sales volume of restaurants located in faraway alleys without an advertisement budget as follows:
- Sell far(ther) away with flyers.
This is something very basic, but it’s still effective. Try examine your own restaurant. In addition to putting up a sign in front of the restaurant so that passersby notice you, have you ever tried advertising yourself through other channels? If not, take a broader look at customers. Try first with customers in a radius of 5-8 kilometers. Let’s say your restaurant is originally known by only other people in the same alley or just one or two alleys over at the most or within a maximum radius of 3 kilometers. In this case, there might only be no more than about 100 houses or homes in the area.
However, if you are able to distribute your flyers to introduce your restaurant farther than before, perhaps to a radius of about 5 kilometers, you will be able to attract more customers than the 100 households. Moreover, flyers are not very expensive to create. The right size is A5 (half the size of A4). You can give them a simple design and make 100-200 copies. If you have some capital, may be you can hire someone to create them in four colors to make them more interesting. However, if you want to save money, black and white ones will still be reasonably effective.
The flyers need to clearly show the details about the restaurant such as the restaurant’s location, telephone number, LINE ID or other contact channels. Some restaurants also include their menu in their flyers, which can also be effective because customers will be able to order from you directly. If you made colored flyers, you can also add appetizing pictures of your food menu items to make them more appealing. And don’t forget about promotions. Perhaps if customers show a flyer at your restaurant, they will receive discounts or a little bit of extra food or beverages; it’s also a good way to measure the effectiveness of the flyers you hand out. This strategy is a way to have customers help collect our flyers rather than throw them away as soon as they receive them.
In distributing flyers, you don’t have to distribute them all yourself. You can try leaving them at the guard booth of the village, condominium juristic person or a security checkpoint of an office building. You can make a box and put it near motorcycle taxis, for example, where a lot of people pass by and the chances your flyers will be picked up are better.
2, Distance is not a problem if you offer delivery services.
Many people are thinking about how food delivery apps deduct a certain amount of your income for the services you use. In reality, you can cut this cost if you deliver in person over fairly short distances such as 2-5 kilometers from the restaurant or if you collect 10-20 baht delivery fees for longer distances. In any case, you need to make additional plans for your work as follows:
– You need to plan publishing your food menu on social media or LINE OA or even the flyers we previously mentioned.
– You need to make additional packaging plans. You have to buy food boxes along with disposable forks and spoons along with seasonings and bags. You need to consider customer dining convenience and delivery convenience.
– The vehicle used to make deliveries might be a care, bicycle or motorcycle you already have. You might have to add a food bag so you can deliver food more safely and in larger quantities.
– You need to make delivery plans. You might deliver foods in cycles to save on travel expenses. However, you can’t have customers wait too long such as by delivering an order submitted at 11:00 a.m. at 12:00 p.m. along with all of your other orders. Doing that makes your customers wait too long, and they won’t order again.
However, don’t forget that you will also have delivery and time costs that you also have to plan for. If it is not convenient for you to make deliveries in person, or else there will be no one cooking at the restaurant, consider hiring a motorcycle to do the job or connecting delivery services with food delivery apps, which is another interesting possibility.
3. Prescheduled regular deliveries establish the main customer base for the restaurant.
How good will it be if your restaurant receives orders every day? It will be like having income waiting for you every day. Prescheduling is when customers order food from you by having you cook to deliver every day or on days specified by customers. You can view it as an extension of delivery services. As a result, you should also specify the food items that you offer prescheduling services for in your flyers and social media.
For prescheduling, customers often order foods in sets such as rice plus two or three other foods to go with it, perhaps for the entire family to eat when cooking is inconvenient or perhaps because they are company employees faraway from restaurants and have trouble finding breakfast and lunch to eat.
A good principle for pre-scheduling is to pay a lot of attention to your customers. You need to ask questions or observes which foods customers like or do not like. For example, can customers eat spicy foods? What do they avoid? It’s appropriate to prepare meals in daily sets that aren’t too repetitive. Otherwise, you can use your LINE OA to ask customers each time.
For long-term pre-scheduling, perhaps you can include reusable food packaging or boxes for holding food in order to cut down on plastic-bag-type packaging and permit reuse when you deliver food on subsequent days. Otherwise, you can use food bags made from cloth printed with the name of your restaurant to make it easier for your customers to remember your restaurant. As for food payments, that can depend on whether the restaurant agrees with customers to take place weekly or monthly. Maybe you can offer discounts to incentivize monthly advance payments.
Additional Advice: With the current Covid-19 pandemic, a lot of people are using pre-scheduling to avoid having to buy food or they order restaurants to deliver foods at temples to feed monks so as to make merit without having to travel to the temple in person.
4. Broaden your world by studying and experimenting with online social media.
You can start by using free tools. This is because social media platforms can increase your visibility without requiring heavy investment. They are also easy to upgrade accessibility and allow customers to see your products online, making unnecessary for them to look for attractive or great locations like the past. For this, MHA recommends simple and free online marketing tools that are suitable for restaurants as follows:
LINE OA – This is a marketing tool very suitable for restaurants and shops today. It has many features such as texting customers either in private or group broadcasts. Certainly, the ability to communicate with customers in private LINE OA makes it possible to look up past conversation history for review to identify what customers want. LINE allows you to directly send SMS-like messages to customers. Along with these features, you can also attach coupons to effectively promote repeat buying and product testing.
LINE Group – This is another easy and simple tool to use today. Just give customers or service users its QR code. Group chats can enable customers to see the feedback of other customers who previously used LINE group services. It’s also easy to interact with old and new customers. In addition to promoting good restaurant-customer interactions, customers can also interact with each other, making it like building a social group of people who used to visit your restaurant and who can recommend your restaurant to new customers.
Facebook Page – These days, over 90% of customers have private Facebook accounts. Facebook pages can turn into shops in the online world without having to invest much. In addition, having a shop front for both customers passing by and regular customers to easily see your restaurant, menu or promotions can allow you to take that information to the back of the shop and make even better sales plans.
Google My Business – This is the latest marketing tool in this category we are discussing. However, it is capable of producing exceeding good results in many businesses. It works by you entering your restaurant’s information. Do just that and your restaurant’s name will appear on various Google services such as Google Maps, Google+ and Google Search. All of these things are useful and make it easy for customers to access you, such as in regards to time spent on searching for products related to your business. By having your business be on Google Maps, customers will be able to easily find your restaurant without getting lost.
There are many other methods you can use to increase your visibility and attract more customers, even if your restaurant is located in a deep alley somewhere. However, MHA would like to conclude with one final food for thought: While it’s important to increase your customers, making sure that customers are satisfied in the flavors of your food, in service quality or even in how you attractively decorated your restaurant is what gives customers a great impression that will lead to them telling their families and friends or even to social media reviews, which will be like advertisement by word of mouth. This is a very important way to attract more customers regardless of your distant location. You can learn more about great restaurant marketing tips with MHA next time.
Image Credits: Penguin Eat Shabu Facebook – Penguin Shabu
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