Know Your Customer Base

Before we dive into specific restaurant promotion ideas, it’s important to call out that no promotion is successful without first identifying, analyzing, and understanding your existing customers and your target customers. Running a promotion that isn’t enticing to your audience is a waste of energy and unfortunately, it happens all the time.

Look at Your Business Challenges

Restaurant promotions exist to help restaurants overcome challenges unique to their business.

While some operational challenges can be identified by chatting with your team members, underlying issues are best discovered by diving into the data and analytics from your restaurant point of sale system.

Revenue vs. Press?

Typically, people think restaurant promotions exist only to increase revenue, but a lot of successful promotions have a more “big-picture” aim: to generate press for the business, which can increase revenue.

Marketing initiatives that exist to drive press can sometimes be more impactful for a business than revenue-focused promotions. This is because the brand awareness they generate extends far beyond the dollars and cents attributed to one promotional campaign.

Know Your Margins

Lastly, as we all know, it’s important to know the margins of every menu item – both food and beverage. This helps you think up creative bundles of offerings that, together, give you the profit margin you’d like to get. For example, you could just give away free fries to all customers for a short timeframe, but it might be more fruitful to offer free fries when they buy a milkshake.

Source: pos.toasttab.com