Often I am too busy representing restuarants via Guestfeed or through some other partnership that I take for granted what we do. Then I come across examples of what other people are doing and I feel like they are missing something.
There are some things that Every restaurant should be doing right now. Here they are:
1) Social Media posts about the people and companies that are hosting holiday parties at your establishment daily. This content for your streams serves to reinforce your messages, and add credibility to someone else thinking about hosting an event there. Sure it may be too late to book for 2010 at this point but what about their board meeting coming up in January? One place that I manage social media for Evenfall routinely posted that the likes of Converse, Borrego Solar, Volvo Rents, and Spirit Products were hosting events at Evenfall. This type of credibility is huge.
2) You should be mentioning Gift Certificates three times a day in three different ways. How they can buy them (person, on phone, online), how they can deliver them (mail, email), and the hours that you will be there to sell them. This should be the first thing you do after you finish reading this post.
3) New Years Eve, yeah it is coming up and it has the potential to be one of the three best nights out of the year for your restaurant, do you have a special menu, entertainment, amended hours, freebies, decorations+noise makers, dancing??? If you have any of these things, make sure you get the word out. People typically wait until right after Christmas to start planning it, you want to be the place they mention to friends.
4) Give thanks. True Thanksgiving has passed, but you are finishing up another year in business and in the current economic climate you should be thanking your loyal customers/followers/online friends for their part in making it possible. People don’t get thanked very often and it is easy to make your business one they remember as thankful for their patronage. Do it.
5) Holiday Schedule, many places change their hours, close for Christmas Day etc during this time of year. If you do, remember to share that on Social Media as well. Some of your customers may only keep up with you there, don’t alienate them by having them show up to find you closed.
There are 1,000 other things you could be doing like sharing holiday recipes and new festive drinks on your list etc, but the things above should be a baseline for you. true this is a busy time of year, but in a few weeks the holidays will be passed and now is the time to make sure you have as strong a 2011 as possible.
Thanks for reading, what do you do in addition to this above? I can be found on twitter @spirocks.
Happy holidays and thank you for reading!