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Jukebox
Restaurants
January 5, 2024
7 min read

6 ways to boost restaurant sales without advertising

boost-restaurant-sales

In the challenging food and beverage landscape, restaurants need to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. While building relationships with potential and existing clients is vital to restaurant success, the primary goal for any business is to bring revenue. Hence, sales is key to growth. 

It is important to always try out different strategies to boost restaurant sales. This enables public venues to identify what methods work for them and what don’t, saving costs later on. However, some tactics tend to provide results most of the time and don’t require significant investments.

We’ve already considered the top 10 strategies to increase sales for a restaurant in one of our recent posts. In this article, you will find out other effective ways to drive restaurant sales without advertising. Let’s get started.

Top 6 ideas to boost restaurant sales

1. Implement strategic pricing

If you are wondering how to boost restaurant sales as fast as possible, a simple way is to implement strategic pricing, which often affects customer decision-making. 

Consider the following pricing strategies for your restaurant:

To establish effective pricing, you should conduct a thorough analysis of your current costs, competitors, and market demand. Having a clear understanding of the target audience’s needs and preferences is always key to restaurant success.

2. Provide an exceptional customer experience

An awesome customer experience (CX) is vital to increasing restaurant sales. PwC reports that a positive CX has a considerable impact on purchasing decisions in almost every industry, but is particularly influential in healthcare (78%), banking (75%), restaurants (74%) and hotels (74%). 

The experts revealed that even if clients love a brand, 59% of US respondents will stop interacting with it after several bad experiences. Furthermore, 17% of US consumers are likely to leave a company after just one bad experience while 32% of all consumers globally would stop doing business without giving into a second chance.

So, what makes an excellent customer experience? According to PwC, the main components are speed, convenience, consistency, and friendliness. And one big connector between the attributes: human touch. 

In the restaurant sector, however, providing a delightful guest experience is even more difficult. No one will return to your restaurant if, for example, background music is awful and interior design is totally tasteless.

Therefore, it is essential to focus on every detail that affects CX. Train your staff to be friendly and productive. Your employees also have to be knowledgeable of aspects such as the menu, cooking processes, and unique selling points.

To ensure speed and overall service quality, it is advisable to use digital solutions for restaurants, for instance, integrated POS systems. 

With the view to offer the best CX, you also need to play background music tailored to restaurants and licensed for commercial use. In fact, streaming music via B2C applications (Spotify, YouTube Music, etc.) is illegal and may lead to fines. 

Using a SaaS music management service like Moodby Play is a sure way to create a delightful experience with ease. The platform has millions of licensed songs, over 500 stations, and numerous playlists composed by professional DJs. 

Moodby Play has a lot of features to automate and simplify music curation, involving playlist scheduling, centralized control, remote access from any device, and explicit lyrics filter. Set up your restaurant’s profile in 2 minutes and start a 30-day free trial!

3. Offer unique guest entertainment with a jukebox

A mobile jukebox app enables visitors to request their favorite songs from a large music catalog when having a rest at the venue. In fact, using a jukebox at public places such as bars, restaurants, gyms, and sports centers is among the emerging trends targeted at creating an entertaining atmosphere and boosting interactiveness. 

Providing a digital jukebox like Moodby is an effective way to appeal to clients, boost restaurant sales, and minimize churn. While it is quite difficult to provide an accurate income growth estimate from a jukebox due to various factors, some studies suggest that it can contribute to a 10%–30% revenue increase.

What’s more, not all establishments can hold live performances to engage the audience due to high costs, not enough space, or other circumstances.

Additionally, sometimes all musicians may be too busy to come. In this context, a mobile jukebox application can become a great substitute that helps not only drive restaurant sales but reduce expenses. 

4. Boost restaurant social media presence

Menu Tiger reports that nearly 80% of respondents expect restaurants to have profiles on social networks. Analysts revealed that social media is the second most trusted source of information for customers when deciding what restaurant to dine in.

Social media is a powerful tool for marketing and branding. It allows restaurants to showcase their menu, atmosphere, promotions, and customer reviews. On top of that, social networks are another channel to communicate with potential and existing clients, for example, responding to their comments and messages. 

Here you can also take reservations. Thanks to social media presence on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, it is possible to build loyalty and generate word-of-mouth referrals, thereby pushing sales up.

In order to maximize value of this strategy, you should:

By increasing social media presence and interacting with your audience, you will manage to attract more customers, build loyalty, and boost restaurant sales.  

5. Upsell with upgrades and add-ons

Restaurant upselling is another tactic to boost restaurant sales. To encourage people to order more, you can suggest upgrades or add-ons either by listing the recommended drinks or dishes on the menu or by a server mentioning them to the guest.

Knowing how to upsell effectively is an important skill that requires a clear understanding of what food and beverages go well with each other. For instance, waiters can freely offer visitors a side of gravy with a steak and fries.

6. Sell gift cards

Gift cards are a simple, yet effective way to boost restaurant sales, consumer satisfaction, and retention. They enable customers to purchase a meal or service for themselves or their friends or families online or in-store. 

To generate a higher profit from gift cards, it is advisable to:

You can also suggest gift cards for leaving positive reviews, creating a story on Instagram with the link to your restaurant’s social media channels, or creating a funny TikTok video about your hospitality place.

Conclusion 

There are plenty of ideas and strategies to boost restaurant sales, from implementing strategic pricing to using a jukebox application. Remember that maximizing revenue goes hand in hand with improving client service and ensuring an awesome dining experience. 

For this purpose, it is crucial to make every detail ideal or nearly ideal while assuring all aspects—background music, interior design, food, etc.—fall into place. 

Good luck on your way to increasing profit and achieving success!

Diana Maltseva