Three Ways to Boost the Midday and Midweek Lull
When we advertise our businesses we usually focus on general marketing ideas aimed at increasing out foot traffic across the whole week. The majority of guests incentivized by our marketing will try visiting during the times when your restaurant is usually full to capacity. So how do you entice customers to visit you during the midweek? i.e. not on the days that everyone else is visiting, where you have the space and time to accommodate them and provide excellent service.
Plan Midweek Events
There’re many options here and you can really get quite creative! Look around and see what your nearby competition is doing and on which days their offerings are. Plan your new events around theirs so that you’re not competing for customers on the same days. Look far and wide at locations which are of the same theme as yours and see what they’re offering too. It’s highly likely they’re doing so because it suits their venue and that their regulars enjoy it. This means it is even more likely to ring true for your venue too!
Midweek Marketing Emails
Whilst the above more opens you up to new customers this next tip will hopefully bring in some regulars whom are already big fans of your fare. Design an email to be sent out in the middle of the week on a schedule you like i.e: every other week, once a month etc; advertising your happy hour and any midweek customer incentives, like the ones above, that you’ve devised. But don’t send this email out every week because you might push recipients to switch off your marketing emails because they’re too repetitive and irrelevant to them.
Local Partnerships
There’re many businesses and clubs in your area which are not restaurants or bars. Start networking with these business and talk to those in these clubs and see if there’s someway your business can partner with them so that it’s beneficial for all parties involved.
If there’re any activities, such as a mini golf course or a theatre, located near you then partnering with them is a great way to advertise yourself to a larger crowd. Offer a deal where they bring their ticket or receipt into your location and receive something; half off appetizers or a free glass of wine with the purchase of a steak perhaps. You could even purchase advertising space in that venue to further promote you conveniently local location.
You could put on an extended happy hour exclusively for those attending yoga or fitness class at a gym down the street. Perhaps you provide the same offer to the local football or basketball team, or there’s the potential of partnering with the local running club and putting on some carb-loaded running specials for them after they’ve had their regular meet up.
Undertaking the above is going to require some research to ensure that what you’re committing to is right -in both a financial and target market sense- for you business. If done right though, you should steadily see an increase in your business volumes during these usually quiet midweek periods. An extra bonus of this, especially relating to the final partnerships point, is that you could get extra exposure to new potential guests and increase your loyal customer base.
