small business marketing

A Guide to Building a Sunday Dinner Program

Sunday dinner at your restaurant can bring in extra weekend revenue and ensure your regulars keep coming back. So, how do you create the perfect Sunday dinner experience?

Let’s get started with a few tips:

➡️ Create a unique menu: Your Sunday dinner menu needs to offer choices that make customers keep coming back. You should focus on classic comfort foods with a modern spin or classic dishes from around the world. Think about menus that will attract multi-generation families as Sunday is frequently a family day.

➡️ Set an attractive ambiance: Warm lighting, high tables, and comfortable seating help create a cozy atmosphere ideal for Sunday dinner.

➡️ Offer attractive service: Unleash your customer service teams’ creativity – provide excellent service with a friendly, personal touch. What can you do differently within your concept on Sundays? A special Sunday-only touch will distinguish the service and make those who join you appreciate the Sunday effort.

➡️ Develop an attractive marketing strategy: Promote your Sunday dinner program on social media and websites. Utilize word-of-mouth and reviews to engage with your customers. Invite VIPs and regular guests to get the new service style started.

➡️ Pay attention to customer feedback: Guests’ feedback should always be considered when creating your Sunday dinner menu. Ask guests what would make Sunday dinner at your restaurant attractive.

➡️ Keep your price point attractive: Make your Sunday dinner affordable and appealing. A great price point can help you attract more guests and increase revenue. Larger family parties will be more likely to attend if they have an affordable way to do so.

➡️ Keep up with trends: Research trending topics and flavors to keep your Sunday dinner program fresh and appealing. Incorporate seasonal adjustments, make special menus for Holidays and try to include viral recipes (http://spirop.us/viral) in special one-off menus.

For more inspiration, check out a few ideas for successful Sunday dinner programs:

• An Italian restaurant with special Sunday hand-made pasta dishes and affordable wine bottles from a rotating Italian region.

• A Spanish restaurant offering a Sunday family-style paella and sangria pitcher dinner party.

• A Tavern serving hearty Prime Rib and potatoes anna on Sunday night only.

Now that you have a better idea of what could make a successful Sunday dinner program, it’s time to plan your menu! Get creative, and don’t forget to monitor customer feedback for guidance.

#Restaurant #SundayDinner #Marketing #Food #foodanddrink #lifestyleandleisure #MarketingStrategy #RestaurantManagement #RestaurantBusiness

How the NFL Playoffs Impact Restaurants

Spiro Pappadopoulos

selective focus close up photo of brown wilson pigskin football on green grass

With the NFL Playoffs upon us, it’s important for restaurant owners to understand how the demand for catering, reservations, and the influx of customers can directly affect their business.

The volume of reservations at restaurants across the US typically see a spike during the NFL playoffs, especially when a local team is in contention. This means restaurants should plan accordingly and make sure they are properly staffed and have adequate supplies and food on hand.

In addition to the spike in reservations, restaurant owners should also stay prepared for what customers will be expecting. Popular dishes for NFL playoffs include classic comfort food, fried favorites, and all the usual suspects such as buffalo wings, pizza and burgers. Catering can be a huge revenue source for gametime.

Here are a few tips on turning catering orders into opportunities to maximize revenue:

🍗 Tailor a special menu that plays to the crowd. Having a game-day themed menu helps capture attention and adds a specialized touch.

💰 Offer party packages for large orders. This encourages customers to buy in bulk, increasing both your revenue and order volume.

🌐 Utilize online delivery services. These facilitate order and delivery, making the process easy and flexible.

🥣 Items like buffalo wings, pizza, burgers, chili, jambalaya, and salads are great options, as they require less maintenance and travel well.

💬 Reach out to customers in different ways. This can include emailing customers, hosting giveaways like catering gift cards or featured dishes on social media, or offering loyalty rewards.

Make sure to implement the right strategies to boost your catering business this NFL Playoff season and win customers’ business!

#restaurants #catering #foodbusiness #NFLPlayoffs

Restaurant Marketing Tools to Out-Perform in 2023

Spiro Pappadopoulos

According to Statista, in 2021, it was estimated that there were 32,027 full-service restaurant franchise establishments in the United States. This doesn’t include the many quick-service establishments, which are also sure to see a rise in numbers in the coming years.

With so many restaurants competing for customers, it’s essential to have a solid marketing strategy to stand out from the crowd. Modern marketing tools, such as social media marketing, can be incredibly useful for restaurants, helping to build brand awareness and making it easier for customers to find and access your establishment.

Other strategies, such as loyalty programs, special discounts and promotions, and creative content marketing, can also be great ways to ensure your restaurant stays competitive. It’s essential to keep up with trends and experiment with new ideas to see what works best for your business.

An effective social media marketing strategy starts with setting goals and attaching metrics to them. It is essential to research your target audience and conduct competitor research to determine the best channels to focus on. Unique and engaging content should be created to capture the attention of your target audience, and a content calendar should be designed to track your strategy’s performance.

Social media marketing can be challenging for small restaurant operations due to the time, resources, and effort it takes to do it well. However, the right tools can make the process much easier. Data analytics tools can help track the performance of your strategy, market research software can make researching your target audience simpler, social listening tools can help you research your competitors, and AI-powered content creation tools can assist with generating new content. All restaurants should build an online presence using social media and other digital marketing channels. By understanding the resources available and viewing it as a long-term project, the process can be achieved.

woman holding set of liquor drinks — Photo by ELEVATE on Pexels.com

Sell Yes? Hell Yes.

Spiro Pappadopoulos

What is a special request?

Its a momentary fork in the road, something that jumps up unpredicted, and can catch any of us off guard. That can scare, vex, and distract you, which is precisely why so many react with a negative emotion that is best indicated by a single two letter word. NO.

That’s the temptation which envelops and holds back so many, the magnetism of the ability to say no.

Let’s teach them a lesson. Who do they think they are? Who would want it that way?

Chefs do you recognize this emotion? Who else literally works in front of fire, dealing with randomly placed and unpredictable orders, some of which have at best half-witted requests on them?

Sell Yes.

That’s right, if you can say yes, just say yes. Then turn someone else’s weird taste, relative ignorance about flavors and combinations, or just boring preference into a profit for you and your co-workers.

It is literally just as hard if you say no, in fact, the tension it creates actually makes it worse when you refuse.

Now, I get it, sometimes it comes at the worst most stressful time. Here is what the best Chef’s I know do, they laugh at the absurdity, or post it on the wall with a collection of absurd requests, etc.

We open the door, we don’t control who walks through it.

When we sell yes, we enjoy our lives more, and make someone’s weird cravings go away.

Win. Win. Win.

Embracing Change to Improve Your Restaurant’s Business

Spiro Pappadopoulos

You don’t read about marketing to gain insight on maintaining your status quo, you read to learn how to improve your restaurant’s business. All of us seek out ideas, strategies, and technologies that can affect change on the success of our business. That success could be the bottom line, the well being of our employees, or the satisfaction of our customers. In any light it is improved success that we are after.

To get there we seek change, and must lead our teams to accept, embrace, and crave it.

This change after all is not change for change’s sake, it is based on several analytical studies, among them:

Our Organization’s Data from successful sales and failed leads.
Interpretation of Market Opportunities and unfulfilled demand.
Employee and Customer feedback from the POS interactions.

So the change I speak of is another way of saying improvement or strategic positioning.

Am I supposed to do all this for my restaurant?

If you want to improve, yes you are.

You should be using the sales data on menu items to sort through the winners and losers, you should be tieing that data into the food cost of each menu item so you can emphasize the winners and work on the losers. Also how many private dining requests came in last month, how many did you book, what was the reason that those that did not book decided to go elsewhere?
You should be looking at your city like a consumer; to decide if there is a market opportunity. Like a town that had lines out the door for Sunday breakfast might cry out for an affordable brunch.
You should be constantly getting feedback from employees about what the customers are asking for, what they are loving, and what they were not so keen on.

Yes, these things will guide you to the points of change that you need to make, to keep your business getting better, growing, and becoming more successful.

Employees often resist Change, your job is to lead them through it.

One of the hardest parts of doing something new is that it is unproven, and those who rely on a paycheck based on the current way of doing things often resist and/or subconsciously sabotage the new process. An entrepreneurial leader is one who will face the unknown, take a leap of faith in the decision that was made, and have earned the faith of the company’s employees so that they too believe and will work toward a successful change.

You must build an environment that allows you and your employees to connect with each other over the opportunity ahead of you, an environment that is sustained by trust.

Your employees are your most valuable resource, the genesis of your organization’s strength, and the greatest determinator of your success. You should engage them in the changes you make, let them take part in the determination of what ultimately is the final change, and also reap some of the benefits of the success you foster together.

In this way you are not their Boss, you are investing in them as a partner, and you engage with them on a level of mutual dignity. That should be the goal.

Next: Explain the Change to Your Audience.

Your audience, in truth, is a combination of the following groups:

Your current customers
The potential customers that exist in your market
Your employees

Some of your current customers may be adverse to change and the unknown that it brings. They may be attached to something that is changing or taken out of their comfort zone for another reason by the change. It is important to be clear and direct, avoiding ambiguities and outlining the positives of the change.

On the other hand your potential customers first need to hear about the change so that they know about this new offering that is aimed at them. When they hear about it, you should have the reasons outlined why they will love it, told from their perspective. Why is this what is missing from their lifestyle?

The employees are your ambassadors, they will be face to face with customers when they are asked what the Change is all about. If you do not give them the information they need, your change will be a muddled mess of interpretations not based on anything other than speculation. This is a major fail on your part.

Here is an example of how I addressed a major Change at my Restaurant to all these groups: http://andolinisrestaurant.com/brunch/

In Short, Change is a Challenge which when conquered results in Success.

What does your business need? I would love to talk about it.

Tip: Consistently Communicate with Customers

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Marketing a restaurant is a game of consistency, you can’t post/email thirty two things in the next 15 minutes and then take two months off. You know that. Yet it is still likely the case that you find yourself with gaps in your communications, lapses in the connection with your customers that helps drive business through your door. What you need is a plan, a system that helps you simplify, and I have one for you.

See What I do on Instagram and Twitter by following @spirocks on both.

Restaurant Marketing Simplification System:

First you need a base that you control, a place where you can guarantee the rules won’t change and affect all the work you have put in. That is your website/blog, and I spelled out the reasons here: ( Don’t Just Rent Your Friends ) If your restaurant website does not have a blog section, you should make that project number 1.

Create a Blog on your website: Your blog is going to be the place where you create the content that is spread throughout your social networks and email lists.
Create a Mailchimp Account. Great news; they are free up to 2000 contacts so you can try this out with no risk. Mailchimp allows you to send RSS campaigns, which means that once you publish a blog post you have Mailchimp automatically create an email from it and email it out when you want, like say 10am on Friday. That’s it, email campaign done.
Decide the frequency with which you wish to contact your email list. Once you have that plan, all you need to do is create a post before the date and time (give it an hour early) you set in Mailchimp and you are done. Most people find creating a blog post a less cumbersome process than creating an email and best of all you kill two birds with one stone.
Social Network integration via Mailchimp allows you to connect your restaurant social accounts and post to them at the same time.

So there you have it a simple way to create great content once, on a platform you control, and get it distributed free to everywhere it needs to be.

How frequently to post to your social networks:

In addition to the above, I suggest having a plan for social media only posts, as you should post to them more frequently than you email. So say you have a new special every Tuesday, share a picture of that with a simple one line description.

One great place to do this is through instagram, where you can take a photo of a special appetizer for example and share it to not only instagram, but also facebook, twitter, flickr, and tumblr all at the same time. Maybe I will write another post on that if you are interested.

Got any tips on how you streamline your restaurant’s online marketing? I would love to hear.

Don’t just rent your friends from Facebook

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Too many business owners have an online strategy which relies on garnering as many likes as possible for their Facebook page. This is wrought with peril and here is why:

At any time, and they do it often, Facebook alters how you connect with these people to further their goals. Which all revolve around making money off of these connections. They want you to rent your friends, plain and simple.

So as time changes, the investment you have made in those connections is adjusted, filtered, and rearranged to become more profitable for Facebook. Recently they altered how many of your business posts people who liked your page see if you don’t pay to promote them. Its time to focus on making connections with these friends and followers as permanent as possible.

The answer for most of you: Build your email list. Start today, make it worth their while. How much should you invest in time and money? Answer one question: What is a permanent connection to your customers worth to you?

Social Networks (Share on Them) But Host Your Own Website

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Why Host Your Own Website, Social Networks Host a Page for You for Free?

Today Posterous got bought by Twitter, and likely will fade away and be shut down in the not too distant future. It follows a long line of other social networks, some alive but irrelevant like MySpace, and others that have been shut down completely.

The image above is from The Next Web delivering the news today, and those who have built their web presence around a Posterous space are now left to either try and move it or start anew. I am here to explain why you cshould choose a wordpress sefl hosted site over other social networks.

This moving around could all be avoided, and should be avoided at all costs, by any business who wants an online presence. You need to create and host your own content, on your own website, and it is easy and not that much money either.

I host all my sites (15+) on one Bluehost account which runs about $5.95 a month, then I build them on wordpress using the genesis framework of amazing WordPress themes. You can check them out here: StudioPress Themes for WordPress, by using wordpress I can log in from any browser and post/edit/manage my website without needing any software on whichever computer or device I am using. I can also use the wordpress app on any iOS or Android device to make the edits. It truly is as simple as can be imagined for a self hosted website. I am an affiliate of both of these companies and you can see them in action here on spirocks.com, I love using them.

But You Want to Be on these Social Networks

You can be, in fact you will get more out of social networks this way. Here is how the workflow goes:

Create Content for your blog. Video, Text, Photos, etc.
Share the link to that post on your Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr, Pinterest, Etc…
When people click on those posts they are led back to your website/blog and you get a chance to show them more.

Now in this scenario if Posterous is gone, all you lose is the links from your blog that you shared there, not the actual content that you spent time, effort, and money creating.

It is clearly the way to go, and sooner or later there is always a new popular site, and a fading older one, so why not be a part of them while they are vibrant and not lose anything when they fade away?

What are your thoughts?

Find me on Twitter and say HI here: @Spirocks and be sure to subscribe to my updates above.