Restaurants are cropping up like swarms of locusts everywhere, and this has made the restaurant business a highly competitive one. New competitors enter the market quite frequently and steal your clients. Hence, you need to continually find new ways to raise the bar and adopt strategies to beat restaurant competition without lowering your profits. You must craft unique and innovative techniques to promote your restaurant, which will keep yours above others in the market.
Effective Ways To Beat Restaurant Competition And Increase Your Revenues
Try these sure-shot tips that will help you beat the restaurant competition in your area.
1. Know your Competition
To overcome the competition at their own game, you must know them well. Visit their restaurants and find out how tasteful their ambiance is, how their food tastes, and how good their service standards are. You can compare their food quality and service standards with yours, and then take the necessary action. Also, to know their marketing efforts, subscribe to their email list, and follow their brands on social media. This will help you formulate your marketing strategies.
2. Price The Menu Right
Your menu is your most powerful tool. A well-designed and well-executed menu can increase a restaurant’s profits by 10-15%. Hence, give it a lot of thought while designing your menu. While deciding your menu, take a look at what your competitors are charging for the same kind of food items. However, that should not be the deciding factor of your menu. Because trying to match your competitors’ pricing or retaliatory price, slashing might not be profitable and sustainable in the long run.
Keep a tab on your highest-selling and low-selling items. If you think your customers would be willing to pay for your star items, you can increase their prices or push them more, while you can decrease the number of dogs in your menu.
3. Sell Your USP
Once you know your competition well, you can identify what it is you offer that is unique or special. If you do not have a unique selling proposition that separates you from your competition, you need to establish it to stay in business.
Your restaurant’s USP can be a signature dish, award-winning chef, exceptional service, alternative diet menu, etc. Integrate it into your marketing messages and spread the word through your service team such as servers, managers, chefs, etc.
For example, Tabula Cafe in Delhi advertises itself as a pet-friendly place. Given that there are so few eateries that welcome pets, Tabula gets a major thumbs up from the patrons.
Another interesting example is Indian Accent from Delhi, which is the only Indian restaurant to make it to the world’s top 100. Here, chefs, if need be, come to the tables and explain the dishes to the guests. However, its USP lies in its inventiveness shown in the modern Indian dishes, which look like pieces of art. Even MasterChef Australia’s famed judge and chef Gary Mahigan has praised this restaurant.
4. Train Your Staff To Deliver Exceptional Service
In the hospitality business, you can never be polite enough. And, that’s what your staff needs to learn. Make sure your staff, right from the valet to the front doorman, waitpersons, and hosts, are polite and courteous. Take up weekly meetings with your staff to reiterate the rules.
Also, your staff must be trained well enough to answer any patron’s questions about a menu item. It’s very frustrating to talk to a person who doesn’t have an inkling about the menu or looks confused. Allow them to taste the day or night specials so that they can answer all questions pertaining to the menu. Your guests should get the best treatment and be made to feel welcome, special, and essential, and only your staff can ensure that is happening.
5. Make Use Of Technology
Today, technology has become an integral part of and proves to be an essential arsenal in business warfare.
- People like to be connected to the Internet or social media 24/7, so make sure your restaurant provides free Wi-Fi to your guests.
- Build a mobile-friendly website as people like to look up restaurants on their mobile phones.
- Offer digital tablets to order food, and mobile payment options and tableside payment stations for the convenience of payment to your guests and quicker table turns for you.
Installing a state-of-the-art POS system can take care of your inventory management and customer information, helping you make your business more efficient and customer-friendly. For instance, through a good POS system, you can know what your clients are ordering, it can help you run those specials. Or, that a large percentage of your lunch comes from corporate professionals, hence you need to make sure your staff understands that your guests are on a strict timeline; therefore, the service must be quick and efficient.
6. Market Your Restuarant Well
Stay connected with and to your customers. Make use of the right marketing channels to reach your clients. Whether through email or SMS marketing or via cost-efficient social media platforms, stay in touch with your customers by regularly updating them with vital information or any other content you feel will be useful to them. Your informative and friendly messages will help you stay on the top of their minds, and they will repay you by patronizing you.
7. Check The Quality Of Food
You can think of innumerable tweaks to get your restaurant on the top; redesigning the menu, slashing menu prices, polishing your cutlery, giving discounts or installing the right POS, but in the end, whether you can beat the competition largely depends on the quality of food served at your restaurant. The food should be appealing, delicious, and consistent to make your clientele keep coming back to you.
It may take you a while to find the secret recipe that makes your restaurant stand out from the crowd. However, keep the tips mentioned above in mind, and start implementing them to see which one works the best for your restaurant operations and helps you to beat restaurant competition.
Beating restaurant competition is a priority for every restaurant owner. Everyone wishes to beat the competition without giving up on the profit percentage and this article surely helps with that!
It is important to know your competitors well in order to beat the competition at their own game. Try to visit their restaurants and find out how tasteful their ambiance is, their food tastes and how good their service standards are. Great Read.
There is so much competition in the restaurant business. Restaurants lose out on a lot of money in offering heavy discounts to outshine competition. I really like all the tips mentioned here to beat restaurant competition, especially the one about selling your USP.