What's The Best Marketing Tool For Your Restaurant?

Written by: Sachin Parmar

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Are you struggling to get bums on seats at your restaurant, café or pub? It might be that you’re overlooking a key marketing tool that is guaranteed to increase visitor numbers.

Sachin Parmar, Co-founder and Technical from Graphic Kitchen, London’s leading digital marketing and branding agency for hospitality, delves into the number one way to generate more custom at your eating establishment.

If you own or manage an eatery, whether it’s a high-class restaurant, a local pub or a coffee shop that serves sandwiches, there’s one vital part of your brand that you need to pay particular attention to – your menu. There’s no point investing time and money in building a stylish website, flashy social media profiles and classy interiors, when your menu has been neglected. A menu gives your customers a visual taste of your establishment before they’ve even taken a bite of any food. The majority of customers that are planning a visit to your establishment will look at your menu beforehand. Ensure that they’re hooked from the beginning and lead them salivating through your door, turning those potential customers into paying customers.

Words say it all

On a menu, there’s a fine line between too many words and not enough. You need to tempt your customers with an attention-grabbing selection of food, whilst not overwhelming them with too much information. Try to keep your menu to a one or two-pager that is quick and easy to look through and gives a feel for the theme, price point and style of your food. Choose titles that are clear and easy to understand, but that will stick in people’s minds. Instead of a ‘chicken salad’, perhaps try a ‘roasted chicken salad with a seasonal green salad’. In the description, you can elaborate on what makes this dish special, whether it’s the hand-made sauce or the locally sourced increased. Focus on the key ingredients and keep it short and sweet to improve the chances of your audience reading to the end.

Get taste buds tingling with professional photography

If you’re title and description have been written with care, you shouldn’t need a photo for every dish, as it can sometimes make your menu feel cluttered. However, it’s worth providing some images, perhaps just of your signature dishes, as it’ll cement in your potential customers’ minds the type of eating establishment that you are. Never scrimp on photography, especially when it comes to food, which is notoriously difficult to snap. Hire a professional food photographer, who will know the tricks of the trade to make your dish look its best. It’s also worth getting a stash of images taken, as they can always be used elsewhere, like your website or socials, and if taken by the same photographer will look like they belong to a collection with the same quality, resolution and theme that matches your brand.

Take your restaurant customers on a journey

A menu can be used to educate your potential customers about the experience that they will have at your establishment. From speaking to your team and booking a table to the service they’ll receive when they walk through the door and put the first fork full of food in their mouth. Your menu needs to tell a story so that they know that by visiting your restaurant, café or pub, they’ll be guaranteed a certain standard of food. Your menu is also an easily shareable asset, and if customers are inspired enough, they will send it to friends and family, creating a following for your establishment. As well as the words and pictures, you need to consider the design. Is it in keeping with the rest of your brand and is it projecting the message that you’d like? Employ the skills of an expert, like the specialist hospitality design acumen of Graphic Kitchen. Having helped hundreds of eateries to increase their custom by relaunching their menu, Graphic Kitchen can combine all the elements you need to create a menu that does the hard work for you.

If you’d like to find out more about Sachin and evokeu, please visit here. You can also follow Sachin on LinkedIn, where he frequently posts business advice and inspiring content.

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About the author:

Sachin Parmar is the Co-founder and Creative Director of boutique digital marketing and branding agency, evokeu. With decades of design experience, Sachin has a keen eye for detail and a drive to create consistently superior results. Sachin and his expert team work with big and small brands across many sectors to help clients capture customer attention and create growth. Evokeu also has a vertical brand called Graphic Kitchen, which specialises in the hospitality sector.