The competition is tough, challenging, and enormously hectic. Post-pandemic era has a new set of challenges for restaurateurs, eatery or cloud kitchen owners. Then, how to increase restaurant sales online in 2023? Give a read to know more!
In these times of social media, owners agree that “Branded Aggregators” are taking away their hard-earned profits in the form of hefty commissions, which is around 30-40%!
According to a Survey Report of FY 2020 by Statista, Casual Dining Restaurants constitute 52.1% in the market segmentation of organized restaurants and food service industry across India. This is followed by QSR or Quick Service Restaurants with 19.7% and PCBL (Pubs, Clubs, Bars, and Lounges) with 10.6%. Restaurants in hotels, fine dining restaurants, and cafes have 7.4%, 1.7%, and 6% of the industry, respectively. Meanwhile, Ice Cream/Frozen Desserts capture 2.6%.
If you own an eatery and are dependent on big brand aggregators like this, you must be at the receiving end too. An average restaurant owner has to spend a wholesome amount of money in the following:
- Staff cost
- Maintenance cost
- Food cost
- Sales & marketing cost
- Rental cost
With most of them recurring, there’s another challenge of price optimization concerning sales at aggregators app. Some online experts offer menu & price optimization, but owners still face the rejection of consumers, especially in full-fledged markets where big brands also exist. Therefore, an effective way to increase restaurant sales online needs for implementation.
Increase Restaurant Sales Online – Important Methods
Let us highlight various important techniques to increase online sales for your restaurant or cloud kitchen.
1-Google My Business :
The importance of GMB or Google My Business is largely underestimated and ignored. As a brand, you must represent in GMB with a rating of 4.0 & above. Indeed, even 3.5 stars doesn’t look that great if your business isn’t known to many people.
Appreciate your customer’s feedback with a positive reply. Customers who weren’t impressed with your food or services are likely to vent their anger on social media. Instead of getting into an argument with them there itself, handle their complaints carefully and tell them how you are improving your quality of service. Ask them to come again for a review!
Upload latest photographs of your restaurant, such as your pantry section, showcasing hygiene standards being followed, employees, delicious foods, and more. Videos can also do the magic. A good GMB profile can fetch a lot of audience attention.
2-Social Media Platforms:
With a plethora of digital marketing tools available, one can invest money on promoting their brands. You may or may not choose to have a specialist digital marketer onboard, but you, for yourself, can do better things if low on a budget to increase restaurant sales online.
Tips to increase Online Sales:
- Create Posts by Yourself: Create beautiful, engaging, and informative content using free tools like Canva, Adobe Spark, Stencil, Crello, Snappa, Fotor, Piktochart, and more. The only downside is that some of these tools may have watermarked elements and limited downloads.
- Use Free Images: Some sites are designed to help everyone with a pool of free images, such as Freepik, Pixabay, and Pexels, where you can find a lot of free images, PSD files, vector graphics, icons, illustrations, and more.
- Ask a Blogger to Review: This one’s popular these days, wherein eateries call a popular influencer on social media to review their foods. Bloggers may ask for payments for a review & postings, which is affordable and worthy enough. Other Bloggers may ask for discount coupons or any other offers that you might have. Instagram is the most sought after platform to find these food influencers or bloggers. You can also seek help from Facebook & YouTube influencers.
- Make a Digital Menu: How about having a Menu PDF ready for your customers if they are visiting your website or Facebook page? Audiences show interest in learning what you have to offer in your menu.
- Get peer-reviewed: It’s often a good idea to ask a friend or colleague to review your social media accounts and what they perceive. Their opinions matter, whether positive or negative. Request at least 2-3 people who are not modest and are likely to speak their minds for you.
- Ask for Facebook Reviews: Customers with whom you have had a communication for a long time can put up a review for your FB page. This is a good habit to have for collecting reviews and handling them positively.
- Create a group or participate: Creating a group where you can share valuable information about the food services industry, yummy food recipes, food products, statistics, etc. If you do not like to create or maintain a group, then join one! Hundreds of foodie groups are active on Facebook. Share your content there.
3-Create your own platform:
Explore and implement the following methods:
- Build Your Own Website: An E-commerce platform can help you open an avenue for your customers to place orders for their favorite foods and make payments. Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) also offer a way to book orders. The downside is they won’t be able to track their on-demand orders.
- Take Orders from WhatsApp: Open a business account on WhatsApp to take orders from customers directly. However, there are several disadvantages to this, such as no location tracking, no order consistency, ambiguity on data, and so on.
- Own a White Label App: Building an app from scratch could take years and millions of costs. But, you can have your own White Label Food Delivery App for a minimal investment and affordable maintenance costs. With Google Play store and Apple Store registrations, your app will have maximum accountability, reliability, and visibility. The only disadvantage here is only people with Smartphones can use them.
- QR Code Menu Ordering: It’s another way of taking your menu online as a food ordering system for customers. Though it caught popularity immediately, QR security concerns over malicious code are too high. It opens an opportunity for scammers to camouflage themselves as an existing restaurant brand name and commit frauds against innocent customers.
You have the perfect opportunity to consider all the above ideas and methods to discover what’s suitable for your restaurant or eatery or kitchen’s operations.
If you want to have your Food Delivery App with your restaurant(s) branding, then Call/WhatsApp: +91-8456955615.
