3 Easy and cheap tricks to make your restaurant (or delivery spot) stand out
It has never been easy to compete in such an essential industry like the food industry. For as long as we can remember, restaurants, taverns, pubs, bars, pizzerias and burger joints have been around, in a crowded market in which standing out is a challenge.
But recently this challenge was taken to the next level as the number of new food venues and delivery spots are rapidly increasing. That is because since the COVID-19 outbreak that hit the world in 2020, many people who have lost their jobs resorted to opening up their own food business in order to make a living.
If the market wasn’t already crowded enough, now it is spilling over the brim, and there is only one way to ensure that your business is the one that people will choose to buy from: STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD!
In this article I will show you 3 quick, cheap, and easy tricks you can make to have your business noticed by the hungry people out there!
1 — Find something to stand for (and something to stand against)
What do you stand for?
And what do you stand against?
These are tricky questions to answer, but you can do it with some time and thought, and for free. The goal here is to find a core idea on which you can build your brand.
Let’s take for instance one of my former clients, Dan’s Munchies.
Dan was a man who really loved burgers.
He opened his food truck 15 years ago, and the business grew so much that at his peak he had 4 locations in 3 different cities, but unfortunately Dan’s health was not so good, and one sad day he had a heart attack.
After he left the hospital he had a hard time selling burgers, afterall, would you be comfortable selling the things that almost killed you to your family and friends? Dan struggled with this for a year before getting in touch with me, and by then he had alredy lost over 50kg (100 pounds) on his diet.
We talked and we found out that Dan really loved hot, tasty sandwiches, but he was now a victim of the dangers of fast-food.
So there we have it: Dan stands for a good sandwich and all the pleasure that comes with it, and he stands AGAINST a harmful eating habit.
Finding something to stand for helps you clearly define your niche, specialty, lead product and marketing voice.
Finding something to stand AGAINST puts you in a more privileged position among the competition (afterall, how many brands out there position themselves against something?) and makes it difficult for them to copy your brand.
Dan’s Munchies is now a place for you to grab a delicious, healthy burger while enjoy the many flavours of his sweet sparkling water or fruit smoothies! His sales went up by 600% in six months, by the way.
2 — Brand your Products
Imagine this: your customer opens up the local food delivery app in search for something different, something he does not even know he wants, but all the restaurants have the same things in their menu: Cheeseburger, Pepperoni Pizza, Meat Tacos, Spaghetti with Meatballs…
Believe it or not, it happens much more often than you’d think, but the good news is that this is an opportunity to make things differently with what you already have.
Do you know that dish that you almost never sell but still buy the ingredients either way? Kill that, and instead use those ingredients to build something else, something that only you can offer, and that only you can name.
Do you think that the Big Mac would have had the same success if it was called “Double Salad Cheeseburger?” Of course not! So put your creativity to good use and turn your regular dishes into something of your own.
You can make it work by replacing the standard dish with:
- A childhood/family recipe (always a good idea)
- A crazy recipe you found on Pinterest
- Something you make for yourself at home
Let’s use Dan’s Munchies as an example again.
He used to have this deep fried chicken sandwich with cream cheese and bacon (fatty as f*ck).
He used the very same ingredients to create Dan’s Crock Chick, consisting of a grilled chicken fillet, a cream of white cheese and spinach, and a crunchy leaf salad. The product was marketed as the cheap option on Fridays, and it quickly became his best seller!
Brand a product so you can have it as your best seller, like Dan did!
3 — Get intimate with your customers
How many times you have had a terrible experience with brands and felt absolutely powerless to do something about it?
In these cases what really bothers the customer is not that a mistake was made, but that the brand does not seem to hear them, or give them a position about it.
So in order to better manage crisis and gain consumer’s trust you should give them a channel to speak their minds, but first you must open a dialogue.
To do this you can try:
- A custom message on the delivery bag
- Hearing their opinions on social media (and responding to it)
- Surprising them with a freebie in exchange for opinions or an Instagram post (a small chocolate bar, a new sauce you’re experimenting with, a pin with your brand on it, etc…)
Make them feel like they can speak to you directly, and that you are hearing them. This builds trust and loaylty, and when the hard times come (and they will) you will have a more solid base of customers and a leverage to deal with potential crisis.
Getting your customers goes a loooooooooong way, and in the near future it might be a competitive advantage to better surf the tides of this ever changing market.
Recap:
- Find something to stand for (and against)
- Brand your products
- Get intimate with your customers
I hope you find this helpful, and if you do, please comment below and subscribe to this newsletter!
If you are looking for a more permanent solution to your brand, please consider hiring me to create yoru visuals and your brand strategy. All you have to do is go to my Website and send me an e-mail.
Thanks!
