There are a couple of other trends we think are worthwhile keeping an eye on. Communal dining can be great fun, increases the number of seats that you can have for a given floorplan. Farm to table is becoming increasingly popular and people are liking the experience of trying different parts of the animal prepared in unusual ways. Gluten free will continue to increase in popularity. We saw an increase in the number of people search for GF restaurants this year and we expect that to continue. There weren’t too many people looking for sustainable food options but that may be an idea whose time has come.
(We know we said that there would be 7 trends, but at Marketing4Restaurants, we always try to underpromise and overdeliver)
These are the trends we think we will see more of over the next 12 months. As we have seen this year, restaurant marketing is changing and the old ways of marketing a restaurant are losing their effectiveness and are being replaced with new online means of marketing your restaurant. Despite the tough times out there, some restaurants are getting it right and making good money. Sadly there are too few of them, all across the spectrum from Fine Dining to Food Trucks, but hopefully there are a couple of trends that you can think about and help position your restaurant for success in 2014.
Is Poor SEO Killing Your Restaurant?
Too many times we see customers with websites that are costing restaurants thousands of dollars every month through poor design, poor messaging and poor SEO. If your website could be improved to bring in 200 extra visits per month and just 10% of those made a booking, and each booking was for 2.5 seats on average at $50 a seat, you would have an extra $2,500 in revenue a month. A 30% food cost, that is $1,750 in profit extra a month. This ignores those customers coming back as regulars – which is more profit.
Remember, if these customers aren’t finding your Restaurant, they are finding your competitors.
Get one of our obligation free 7 point website SEO audits to see what you can get your web developer to fix to increase your revenue today.