Whether it's a seasonal specialty or a permanent addition, revealing a new menu item at your restaurant is always an exciting endeavor. Properly marketing your new dish is the key to driving additional traffic and sales at your location. People have more choices now than ever when it comes to food. A new menu item can generate intrigue and draw a swathe of new customers, but it's up to you to get the word out effectively. Read on for some tips to help you get the most out of your new menu launch.
When you introduce a new item to your menu, consider what type of customer it will appeal to the most. For example, plant-based and vegan food options typically align with the lifestyles of certain cultures and generations. Identify the demographics within your local population to understand who you’re marketing to and the best ways to reach them. Understanding your audience is important because you'll need to design your promotions and campaigns with those customers in mind. Align your marketing message with your audience's lifestyle and you can create a buzz with your new menu item.
New menu promotions can be tricky because you need to maintain your brand while expanding your services to reach new audiences. If you make a sudden, radical shift away from what your brand is known for, your loyal customers may feel betrayed or lose interest. Even a perceived departure from your restaurant’s recognized brand can damage your company’s reputation, so make sure that your marketing materials make the new item feel like a natural extension of your existing menu.
Social media has long been a gold mine for food-related content. People love taking photos of unique, new, or limited food items and posting them on networks like Instagram. Likewise, plenty of people follow their favorite restaurants for news on special menu items, new store openings, or other events. There's no sense in not giving your followers exactly what they subscribed to you for, so post whenever you plan on launching a new dish or seasonal selection. Use your best photos and specify details in your post such as when the featured item will be released–and if it's a limited time offer, when it will be removed from the menu.
You can make use of hashtags to gather and repost user-generated content, including photos of people enjoying your new menu item post-launch. First, you'll need to come up with a unique hashtag, one that is easy to remember and hasn’t already generated high traffic online. Be sure to promote your hashtag across all of your platforms, including inside the restaurant itself. You can do this by printing the hashtag on menus, table tents, receipts, or any of your other signage. As customers use your hashtag, you'll be able to collect large quantities of posts related to your restaurant and repost them as a story reel on your profile, amplifying their reach.
While some people jump at the chance to try something new, others have trouble breaking out of their comfort zone with food. If they don't like what they order, they'll feel like they've wasted their money. If you have a new addition to your menu, you can alleviate some of the risk for less adventurous customers by offering a first-time discount, or a promotion that gifts the item for free with some other purchase. Of course, this is just a temporary measure until the dish has had enough time to gain popularity among your regulars making it another staple of your establishment.
Distribute news of your promotions via all of your available channels. This includes in-store signage that indicates not only what is being offered, but when it's being offered (just like how a bar may have happy hour specials listed on their menus). Utilize your social media profiles to make posts indicating and reiterating the details of your promotion, both up to and during the promotional period. Use a banner or a callout of some kind on your website's homepage and move the item to the top of your menu page if you have one. You'll want to do anything and everything you can to maximize the visibility of your new item and get customers excited about its launch.
Launch parties are a great way to generate some momentum for a new menu. These don't necessarily have to take place in your actual restaurant either; you can drum up hype by selling select items out of a food truck at a local event or through a stall at a pop-up market. These kinds of events are also helpful for attracting new audiences who may not have heard of your restaurant before. In these settings you can reduce the options on your menu to help your new item stand out from your typical offerings. Consider distributing a coupon or some other kind of voucher with the meal, so that customers will have an incentive to visit your brick-and-mortar location at a later date.
There's a plethora of options for hosting events on your own property as well. Live music nights, movie screenings, game nights, trivia nights, karaoke nights, and sports viewing parties are just a few ways to get more customers through your doors. Create a special menu for the event that highlights your new items specifically or offer a discount to attendees. Whether you host these events regularly or not, you can always use them as an opportunity to promote a new menu.
We've already covered adjusting your website page to highlight new menu additions. You should ensure that your website is optimized to run smoothly with fast load times and no error pages, in order to minimize visitor frustration and reduce your site's bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of your website visitors that immediately leave your website without interacting with anything. Make the user experience hassle-free and the site structure easy to navigate in order to minimize your bounce rate. This will increase the likelihood that more of your site visitors will actually make it from the homepage to the menu page.
A mistake that some restaurants still make with their websites is not including a menu page at all. Sometimes they force their website visitors to click something like "Order Online" to view the menu, which may dissuade some customers because they may feel like they have to commit to making a purchase. People enjoy looking at food and reading about food, so you should think of your menu as marketing material. Make it easy to access, preferably via a button that just says "Menu."
Location-based searches on Google such as "Italian restaurants near me" will automatically bring up a module on the search results known as a "local pack." This module will list the businesses that best resemble the conditions that have been searched for and list their details as well as their locations. This information is pulled from your Google My Business profile. Ensure that your GMB profile contains complete and accurate information to enhance your likelihood of appearing in the local pack for relevant queries.
If you haven't interacted with your GMB profile, but you see it indexed, you'll need to claim and verify the associated business. If your restaurant has just opened for business or you'll be opening in the near future, you may need to add your business to Google so that it will be searchable on Maps. You can create your business profile directly through Google Maps by either selecting your physical location or typing in the address and then following the on-screen instructions that follow.
A direct mail campaign is a great way to get pictures of your new menu selections in front of local residents. Postcards make an optimal vehicle for these photos because they aren't obstructed by an envelope, meaning they'll be in the recipient's line of sight from the time they pull them out of the mailbox. With vibrant, professionally-taken photos of your dishes front-and-center, they'll be sure to catch the eye of your audience and entice them to read further.
Within your direct mail postcard, you can even include discount coupons that encourage recipients to come try your new menu options. An expiration date on these coupons will instill a sense of urgency and bring a greater number of customers through your doors within the promotional period. Ensure that the promotional period is not too long as that will fail to create the sense of urgency. Avoid the opposite as well–too short of a promotional period won't give recipients enough time to plan their restaurant outing around other events that may be in their schedule. Plan your promotion in tandem with your item's launch to increase general excitement and buzz as your customers come in to take advantage of your discount offers.
Testimonials from customers who have already tasted your new cuisine can help encourage the less adventurous to try it as well. Gathering this feedback can be as easy as leaving comment cards on the tables at your restaurant for customers to fill out after they've finished their meals. For orders placed online, you can have an automated email or text message ask for a comment about the quality of the food after fulfillment. Gather these testimonials and use them in your marketing materials to show your audience what people generally think about the new dish. This includes your website, postcards, display ads, signage and anywhere else you advertise to customers.
It's typical for new menu items at restaurants to see a surge in sales during the first month after launch due to curiosity from consumers. Over time, sales decline as the novelty of the item wears off and you'll be able to make a more accurate comparison against your other menu items. When you analyze sales and long-term success, you should compare similar items against one another. For example, beverages tend to be cheaper and therefore, less of an investment for customers than an entrée–so comparing sales of a beverage to that of an entrée wouldn't give you a clear picture of how well either is doing. Use sales of items over a period of several months to find your average revenue and use that as your benchmark for comparing similar items within that category.
Investing in the marketing of your new menu items can help generate interest in your restaurant and bring more customers through the door. You'll want to think several steps ahead in terms of optimizing your website and setting up for promotions and collection of feedback. There's a lot to consider and on top of your regular operational activities, it can feel overwhelming. If you want to ensure your marketing success, consider enlisting the help of Cactus Mailing. With more than 22 years of experience, we've helped hundreds of restaurants and other small businesses create their own direct mail postcard campaigns. We can handle every step of the process, leaving you time to focus on running your company.
Connect with one of our direct mail experts today and get your new menu the attention it deserves.