How to Increase Restaurant Sales in 2024? [14 Ways Inside]

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The restaurant industry is dauntingly competitive, making it challenging for restaurants to stay ahead of the curve.

But that doesn’t mean your restaurant cannot stand out and become profitable.

You just need to incorporate the

right strategies and execute them in the right way.

So, if you are looking for ways to increase restaurant sales, you’re in the right place. In this article, we will discuss plenty of easy ways to help you attract more customers and increase sales for your restaurant.

14 Ways to Increase Restaurant Sales

When a restaurant goes about tweaking or creating new strategies, it needs a robust roadmap. And now that you’re in the game too, you need an action plan to increase sales in a restaurant. 

Here are some of the proven strategies and ideas to improve your restaurant business:

1. Be available on all food delivery apps

It’s no secret that online food ordering apps brought an impeccable revolution in the F&B industry. Food delivery companies like Swiggy, Zomato, GrubHub, and many other portals have given opportunity to various small and local eateries to reach out to the audience right on their mobile phones. 

Just with a simple search on these apps, one can find different kinds of cuisines to give their taste buds a treat. Moreover, the home delivery option is like a cherry on the cake. 

Every day, these portals see a plethora of orders coming in; benefiting the restaurants with much-needed exposure. Having said that, if you want to increase restaurant sales in 2024, you should definitely BE ON THESE PORTALS to serve your customers.

#Protip: You should have a restaurant POS software that is integrated with these portals. So you can manage your online orders effortlessly. 

Ensure that your restaurant has an amazing profile on these portals. All your menus should be listed accurately (with categorization as per cuisines). By doing this, your dishes will appear in the results when your customers search for similar delicacies. 

Have a safety badge enabled

Safety badge is a new necessity in the hospitality industry. It is a certification denoting that you follow all the safety protocols as per government guidelines.

It includes regular sanitization of premises, use of gloves during food preparation, wearing a mask, and so on. This safety badge is one aspect that customers look for in restaurants while ordering food or dining in. It is an additional customer faith retention factor. 

Online food ordering platforms such as Swiggy and Zomato have started this trend. If you are missing this badge on your listing or website, you need to get one now.

With these portals, you become open to accepting orders from a wider audience without much effort. Of course, these orders will come to you with some commission. But, they are definitely worth it. 

2. Have a Google My Business listing

When it comes to increasing footfall in a restaurant, Google My Business is one of those areas that can never be overlooked.

As per the facts,

Google now processes over 99,000 search queries every second on average which translates to over 8.5 billion searches per day.

–SEO.AI

Apart from these facts, let me tell you, why having your restaurant listed on Google My Business (GMB) is important:

1. Your audience’s first preference is Google. A majority of them would search the restaurants on this platform only, whenever they are looking for a new place to eat.

2. The advancing technology has benefited your savvy customers with voice search assistants like Google, Alexa, and many more. Here’s an example that tells you how having a GMB listing helps these assistants find you:

Your customer: “Ok Google, which are the best Chinese restaurants near me?

Google: “Here’s the list of famous Chinese restaurants near your home”
1. Asia Town
2. Joey’s Shanghai
3. Noodle Box

Your customer: Ok Google, check the opening hours of Noodle Box

Google: Sure, The opening hours of the Noodle Box is from 10 AM to 11 PM. 

3. Moreover, people also locate restaurants on Google Maps while they are on the move. 

So for all these reasons, you NEED TO HAVE a GMB listing. 

Believe me, having your restaurant listed on Google is literally a no-brainer. Simply, give all the details such as an address, phone number, directions, hours, menu, links to images, and even a provision to book a table. 

A well-optimized GMB listing can portray all the important information to your audience before they've even reached your website. 

And the best part is it is FREE! So you can easily reach out to your audience in a better way, get more customers and increase restaurant sales. 

3. Have a website and create blogs

Even in this technical era, most restaurateurs don’t consider websites important enough. Mainly because they are already getting enough customers. 

I won’t even begin talking about the myths revolving around brand websites.

These days, no business can refrain from having an online presence. And you won’t realize the impact of having a website for your restaurant unless you experience it yourself. For instance, if any of your guests recommend your restaurant to their friends or family, their very first step would be to search for you online and look at your website.

Actually, 89% of consumers research for a restaurant online prior to dining.

214eats 

So if you don’t have a website for your restaurant, then it’s really uncertain whether he’ll visit you or not.

Through your website, you can provide the basic information your customers may need to know such as hours of operation, directions, cuisines you offer, payment methods, and more.

You can also keep customers aware of any promotions, such as special festive menus, lunch deals or combo packs, and even happy hours. (If you’re not setting up such dynamic menus at your restaurant, then now’s the right time to do that using a restaurant POS software.)

Providing such ready information answers a lot of questions customers may have; thereby saving the time and efforts of your staff members. 

So, this was all about why you need a brand website. And, there is a sure-shot way to get traffic to your website – creating more content. 

Producing more content will drive your target audience to your website frequently and eventually will come to your restaurant doorstep too; thus helping you increase restaurant sales.

4. Organize events and workshops

One of the underrated ideas to increase restaurant sales is through events and workshops.

Either you can partner with events and food festivals, or you can host your own events. In both ways, you can expand your reach to a great extent.  

Some famous food festivals like the Bacon Festival in California or Pizza Fest in Italy, have enormous crowds visiting them. 

These are international food festivals and you don’t need to participate in these festivals only. You can also consider local, state-level, or country-level events. 

Such events are golden opportunities to showcase your delicacies and attract more customers. 

Other than that, if you are a bakery or a patisserie, you can organize events as cupcake workshops for kids as “Little Baker” or you can have an event in which you let your customers taste your new dishes for FREE as “Taste the Newbie”. 

Also, some fund-raising or charity events will bring you into the limelight and can bring more customers to your table.

5. Try promoting with virtual media

Whenever I go to any restaurant or order online, I choose my food based on photos. If I find a dish that looks good with an explanation of its contents, I’ll order it immediately. 

Visuals are a critical aspect of decision-making. As there is an old saying

What you see is what you get.

This strategy could improve your restaurant’s sales in 2024. The most amazing part is that it is easy to implement and free of cost.

All it requires is for you to click some high-quality pictures and enhance them a bit, to make them look good. Once done, all you need to do is upload them across all your social media pages and websites. 

Food bloggers on Instagram consistently monitor socially active restaurants. They visit such restaurants and share their experience with the audience. So it’s a win-win situation for you; a free promotion across social platforms and good visibility too. 

Another way of visual approach is to produce videos. With the pandemic in effect, winning the customers’ trust has become more difficult. You can be a step ahead with video content.

6. Apply strong marketing strategies 

Marketing for your restaurant business is as important as daily bread. Certainly, at present, you must be running several marketing strategies. But have you checked, whether they are giving you desired results or not?

Over the time, you cannot expect old marketing strategies to work! You need to innovate them.

Adopt modern ways to market your restaurant such as running Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and so on. (By the way, you can also run ads on food-ordering portals!) Gear up your social media marketing. Run contests. 

Must-read: 8 Effective Ways To Do Social Media Marketing For Restaurants

Also, you can get your hands on email and SMS marketing. 

We have listed the best restaurant marketing strategies that would help you to get better visibility leading to increased sales. 

7. Try different menus

Regardless of anything, it is an undeniable fact that,

Food is the heart of any restaurant. 

No matter how hard you try or put in solid marketing efforts if your food is not up to the mark, your business is out of luck! You cannot afford to compromise this important aspect of your business. 

We are not asking you to have a 5-star chef at your eatery. But you can try to figure out what your audience prefers from your restaurant’s menu.

See if you can include more dishes for your audience to provide them with maximum options.

Other than that, don’t make your restaurant boring by offering the same menu. Refurbish your menu from time to time by including new dishes and renaming your existing menu items. You can also have seasonal menus to improve your restaurant sales every season. 

These days, when most of your audience is hit by the ‘HEALTH WAVE’, you can consider including healthy options in your menu (or have a separate Keto menu at your restaurant).

This is really a small step, but it will be quite helpful in boosting restaurant sales. The reason is, fresh seasonal menus encourage your existing customers to try different dishes and attract some new customers as well.

8. Rethink your loyalty programs

Even today, loyalty programs have not lost their charm. 

If devised smartly, then loyalty programs can still help you hit a home run. 

Keep a record of the customers who visit your restaurant frequently and ask them to get enrolled in your loyalty programs. Loyalty programs work best to increase repeat customers. 

Ensure that your loyalty program has something of real value to your customers such as:

1. 3-year membership, in which customers can get a 10% discount on the net bill
2. 1-year membership, in which customers can get a free beverage on any order. 
3. Give them exciting food coupons, discounts, and reward points when they revisit your restaurant. 

The repeat customers account for as much as 15% of your total customer base, but that 15% totals about 1/3 of your entire revenue.

GloriaFood 

In addition to these facts, loyalty programs work like real magic for filling the slow periods in restaurants. 

Include gift vouchers in your loyalty program

You can also launch gift vouchers for your customers. Many restaurants opt for these vouchers, to increase sales during festive seasons. Restaurants having buffet meal systems tend to reap maximum benefits from them. 

The gift vouchers can be inclusive of various offers such as a free 2nd meal, a buffet dinner free for couples, and special discounting on bills during any special occasion such as birthdays, anniversaries, and so on. This strategy also helps in retaining customers.

You can also opt for launching these vouchers in association with other vendors, such as a payment gateway to provide discounts for customers ordering food online, as a reward for customers participating in a local event, and so on.

Try some fund-raising or charity events and it’ll bring you in a good light and can bring more customers to your table. 

PROTIP: In this tech era, get rid of physical loyalty cards. Go cashless with digital loyalty membership cards. If managing your loyalty programs is a major concern for you then you can go with any restaurant loyalty program software.

With loyalty programs, you can increase your brand value, repeat customers, and eventually your restaurant business too.

9. Run promotions for festivals and seasons

Promotions, discounts, and offers are undisputed ways to attract more customers to your restaurant. 

It is a proven way to increase sales at your restaurant in any season.

To grow your restaurant business smartly, you can run two types of promotions: 

• Festivals, seasons, or special days promotion: You must be running promotions in past years too, but try giving them a makeover this year by picking regional holidays, and special days and running a discount offer on those days. 
  
  Also, try your hands on some new promotions on unusual days such as International Food Day (16th October) or International Mother’s Day (the Second Sunday of May). You can even make your own days, for instance – today my restaurant celebrates a Desserts day – get a 20% off on all desserts.~

For example, On this International Women's Day, we are giving a 30% discount to all the powerful women out there. 

• Regular days promotions: Another idea is to run any sort of promotions during slow times to get more customers when your restaurant stays near-empty. 
  
  Also, have frequent happy hours at your restaurant. Set some really interesting and easy-to-attract promotions that will actually bring the visitors back to your restaurant.

10. Have a good ambiance

The new-age customers not only take food into account while going to a restaurant, but they also consider the overall experience. And in this experience, your restaurant’s ambience plays an important role. 

Now when I talk about ambience, I don’t mean to spend thousands of dollars on your restaurant’s interior and make it more of a photography place rather than a restaurant’s dining place. 

But instead, ensure cleanliness. None of your guests would appreciate eating food in a shabby place.

Your ambience plays an important role in growing your restaurant sales. After cleanliness, you can arrange good music, or live music in your dine-in area. Also, you have to see that your dine-in area is spacious and the seating area is comfortable. You can also work around the lights of your restaurant. 

These days many restaurants have adopted the theme of famous TV series like Friends, Game of Thrones, and Stranger Things. 

For example, You can have a ‘Game of Thrones’ theme, where different areas of your restaurant can be named as ‘House Stark’, ‘House Dragons’, ‘House Lannister’, ‘House Baratheon’. On the same lines you can have menus accordingly as ‘Mother of Dragons Spicy Onion Rings’, ‘Winterfell Green Salad’.

Whatever changes you make, don’t forget to highlight them on your website and social media platforms. An appealing ambience can attract more guests. 

Redesign your restaurant seating

Social distancing is quite necessary these days. If I talk about restaurants, they are one of the most crowded places in the city.

The need of the hour for in-house dining restaurants is, redesigning their restaurant’s seating arrangements as per distancing norms. There’s a possibility that you might have to cut out some seats. However, this step will be an add-on benefit in addressing customers’ safety concerns. 

It will give you an edge over your competitors, and increase your restaurant sales. You can share this with your customers while doing your restaurant’s marketing. It’ll bring you to the limelight among customers looking for a safe place to dine in. 

These days many restaurants are also opting for an open kitchen. An open kitchen enables customers to have a direct insight into any restaurant’s food preparation facility.

It boosts the trust of customers as they can see how hygienically and safely the food is being prepared. However, there’s a con to it. 

Some customers may not approve of your food preparation methods. You need to keep checking on kitchen practices. One wrong step and you may lose a customer.

11. Go the cloud kitchen way

Cloud kitchens are the talk of the town in the hospitality industry. They are also known as delivery-only restaurants or ghost kitchens.

It’s a licensed cooking facility setup with no dining option, for restaurants to prepare food for delivery only. 

It is the best cost-saving strategy for standalone restaurants mainly because it cuts down operational and maintenance costs for dine-in facilities. Moreover, you can create a cloud kitchen in collaboration with other restaurants. 

This will help you in accepting bulk orders and sharing your expenses. As a dine-in restaurant, if you are optimizing your seating arrangements to maintain social distance, you can approach the majority of your customers with this step. 

The best part is, that cloud kitchens don’t need a lot of space. You can set them up at your home and get help from voluntary staff members as and when you need it. 

Cloud kitchens receive bulk orders from multiple online food ordering platforms and prepare them in one place. Ranging from catering orders to daily food delivery orders, cloud kitchens are the NEW NORMAL of the industry; and a practical approach to increasing restaurant sales.  

12. Offer DIY meal kits

These are new types of instant foods in the market. Years ago, various companies rolled out a concept of frozen foods; where you purchase a serving of frozen nuggets or fries, cook them at home, and eat them. 

The infamous ramen noodles also come with this concept. Restaurants during the COVID-19 pandemic resorted to these approaches to make money by introducing DIY meal kits. These kits comprise ready ingredients that are partially cooked or raw and a step-by-step process on how to prepare the whole dish. 

During the lockdowns, people were trying to enhance their cooking skills. From Dalgona Coffee, and Pasta Arrabiata to cakes at home, everyone was becoming a chef across social media. 

These DIY meal kits came to their rescue and provided them with tasty restaurant-like food, prepared safely at home. These kits became an instant hit among customers, thereby making them order more. This helped in increasing the revenue of the restaurants.

If you are serving such food items at your eatery, consider breaking the ingredients down and preparing DIY meal kits, at least for customer-favourite dishes. This can prove to be an effective strategy to increase restaurant sales.  

13. Take and manage reviews 

Reviews for your restaurant are CRUCIAL. They are silent yet salient players.

Reviews presently are a decisive parameter for your customers. Your reviews on Google, Yelp, and Zomato play an important role in bringing business. 

Yet, most restaurants fail to manage their reviews. 

In 2024, try reaching out to your customers to share their feedback and then respond to all the reviews regularly.

Take your time to respond to each of them (especially the negative ones). You can even highlight a few on your restaurant’s website. This will show that you care about the people giving you reviews. By observing your reviews, your customers are more likely to choose your restaurant over the others. 

You can also send them a link to give you feedback via SMS or email.  

Moreover, by analyzing the reviews you can find out which things are being appreciated by your customers and which are not. Based on the review analysis, you can work on your weak points and strengthen them. 

In this way, reviews single-handedly can increase restaurant sales.

14. Partner with local businesses

To increase restaurant sales, it’s important to stay in touch with the local food community or other government associations that endorse your business.  

Partnerships can help grow and promote your business by tapping the customers of another business. 

First, find out what kind of clientele will your food be best suited to. 

If you’re into healthy low-calorie food like salads and smoothies, you can reach out to gyms and health clubs for partnerships

Otherwise, if your restaurant is located in the city centre or near corporate offices, then reach out for corporate partnerships. 

You can offer your menu to them at a discounted price, and in return, they will always choose you as your food supplier. 

Doesn’t this sound like a great deal to have better profits?