Last week we gave you a primer on growth hacking for your restaurant business, the 21st century means of marketing and the future of your restaurant. If you haven’t seen it, get over there now. But, as you may have noticed, we’ve saved the best for last. So here’s part two, in which we’ll discuss some exact, proven and effective growth hacks you can implement today that won’t cost you a cent.
Running your restaurant can be surreal, and growing your audience may seem like a timely task that you kind of just want to hand off to someone else. The thing is, though, this restaurant – this love, this passion of yours should market itself. So here’s some comprehensive growth hacks – we’re writing the roadmap to launching and growing your business effectively.
Make Your Restaurant Market Itself, It’s so Good
This can be done in a few ways, but you want (and one of the principles to growth hacking) your product to essentially market itself. The point isn’t to continually implement marketing techniques, but to build a type of product or business than can carry itself marketing wise. You want to build the strengths, benefits and market into itself.
Here’s a few ideas we’ve rounded up:
- Do a certain promotion (see Criniti’s ‘MetroMania’ promotion: eating a metre of pizza in under an hour for free dining for a year) that will essentially market itself. Hashtag everything, get your users involved. Create something so good, people can’t stop from sharing it. It will effectively market your restaurant just by existing.
- Provide free wifi: this creates more shareable moments at the user’s hands, and think of innovative ideas to market via such a simple thing such as your wifi. E.g. using the wifi portal to offer a deal like ‘If you follow us now, quick, you’ll get 10% off of your meal, or a free dessert”.
- Referral schemes: some of the best growth hacks on the market! Dive in to it, we’ll discuss more types of referral schemes below, but referring others is a comprehensive growth hack that can boost your clientele.
Create a Memorable Social Campaign
This growth hack is taking the power of social media and social networking to the next level. Simple growth hacks such as leveraging vanity and curiosity can do this. What we’re talking about, is not the “retweet this to win” approach (does that really ever work?), but rather the Giving user A an undeniable shareability, while exponentially growing through User A’s friends list to reach User B, C, D and Z.
An example of this growth hack is best showcased through the Facebook portal where users are constantly prompted to share their scores for different games. This creates vanity (look at what I got, what did he/her get?) and curiosity (what is that anyway?) simultaneously. For example, have one week a year in which whatever customer can throw the tomatoes closest to a target (if you’re an Italian restaurant) will get a free whatever.
Think of a way you can apply this – create vanity and curiosity about your restaurant – to your business and you’re set. It doesn’t have to be messy and it doesn’t have to be calculated. Growth hacking is creativity measured. So, get creative.
Consider Forcing Your Virality
It may sound a little depressing, but it’s not. You can jazz up your exponential growth easily. There was a game that was once developed with this goal – and developed forced virality by making users ‘invite’ another person before they could progress to the next level. That’s how growth hacking is done. They spanned 10,000+ users in 2 days. It wasn’t so ridiculously annoying, and actually kind of worked for the player and the game.
How can you apply this? Think of implementing this concept in your own way. E.g. making (as kindly as possible) customers invite two friends in order to get their dessert for free. This is a very, very vague example. We’re not spinning actual growth hacks you can use (you’d have to pay us to do that, just joking) but we’re trying to brainstorm some rough starting points so that you grasp what we’re saying.
Take this and run with it – make it as specialized and as unique and compelling as you can. You have an imagination, use it. Referral and forced virality is a very powerful and under-utilized tool.
Get Press by Being in the Press
If you’re a restaurant, no doubt your market is local.
This is why you should totally market and partner with local journalists and publications to get the word out – and no, it doesn’t have to be a feature piece. Be interesting, god. Do something that will get people interested. E.g. If you’re an Italian restaurant, maybe partner with a totally unrelated publication (e.g. A popular local travel publication) and talk about travel hot spots in Italy or what tomatoes are like in each different Italian city, then slowly introduce your business.
It doesn’t have to be about your particular niche – where there’s tons and tons of competition – but it can be as simply as creating converts from totally unrelated niches. People who would previously never have heard of you, but after reaching out and targeting their little piece of heaven, they’ve decided to stop in for a piece of cake. Or two.
Make Your Own Signature
We’re not talking about a signature dish. (Or maybe we are). But, we’re talking about having a growth idea that perfectly frames and signs your restaurant. A case example is hotmail’s ‘P.s. I love you, get your Hotmail Account for free’ signature at the bottom of every email. It worked. And it worked so good.
So what can your signature be? Consider implementing something like this in your signed receipts. Some restaurants are adding cute, finishing touches such as putting “LOVE” for 0.00 on the receipt. It gets attention and creates a buzz. Do this for your restaurant.
Like we discussed about finding your product market fit in our last post, your signature is an extension of this. So, study carefully.
Lastly, Do Whatever Else Will Grow You – That’s a Growth Hack
We can sit here all day and explain clever growth hacks to you, telling you stories of incomparable growth or easily found fame – but that’s not the point. Now that you have a broad scope of what works and what doesn’t and some comprehensive tips, you have a starting point. You’re beginning to explore. And, well, exploring leads to discovery.
Growth hacking is a form of discovery. It was found just as simply and coined just as easily. Nobody told Sean Ellis what he could and couldn’t discover. If you’ve found it, and it works, and it grows you – that’s a growth hack. The sky’s the limit – well almost.
Like all things, learning never stops when you close the book. We urge you to go forward and create, discover and test your own self developed growth hacks. Expand on what we have here, and even test the lengths of your own creativity. Who knows, you could be the next Dropbox of your local restaurant scene.
