Friday, October 9, 2009

Restaurant Marketing Strategy: Modify the Menu

One of the best restaurant marketing tools is your menu. This is a collection of the different dishes you're serving in your restaurant. It will be the basis of your customers when they want to buy or not your meals. If you don't come up with a well-planned menu, it's either the customers won't be able to make a very good decision and will have very terrible customer experience, or they won't eat at all.

It's important therefore that you can spend some time strategizing on how your menu should look and feel like. Here are some great tips to start with:

The menu should reflect the theme of your restaurant.

If you have a theme for your restaurant, it would be great if it can also be presented on the menu. It could be in the shape, color, names of food, or material used for the menu. For example, French restaurants may make use of cursive and elaborately designed letters on the cover and content.

Keep your menu options to a minimum.

There are a lot of reasons why there should only be at most 30 menu choices available. First, it's easier for you to come up with specialties. These are the foods that are salable in your restaurant. Second, you can ensure that you can maintain a small inventory and prevent wastage of a lot of ingredients. Besides, you don't want to exhaust your customers into thinking what food they should eat.

Classify the food.

A good restaurant marketing strategy in designing menu is classifying them. The traditional method is according to when they are served. For instance, appetizers come before soups and entrees, while desserts will always come last. The last page of the menu would also be your beverages and full-set meals, if you have any. This is because the latter offers smaller profits for the business.

If you have specials or best-selling food items, it's better to place them in the first few pages of your menu. If you can no longer edit your menu for some reason, you can include a pamphlet showing your promos. You can also add a star or any symbol beside the name of your hot sellers.

Don't be too creative with food names.

Usually, with your intention of keeping up to the restaurant theme, you tend to overcreate the food name until it's harder to pronounce and more difficult to understand. A rule of thumb is to name your food according to the most special ingredient found in it. For example, "Grilled Chicken with Thyme and Rosemary" gives your customers an idea of what the food could be as well as the name is mouth-watering enough for them to get it.

Describe your food accurately.

Refer to the word "accurately" again. Descriptions are actually not the area where you have to come up with the most number of adjectives just to attract your customers. In fact, it's a lot better to be simple, straight to the point, and precise with them. You don't want to mislead your guests.

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