As a restaurant owner or manager, once the Autumn arrives, it’s time to get focused on your restaurant Christmas marketing ideas but where do you start?
Local businesses and party organisers get busy around this time of year, organising and booking venues for their Christmas parties.
Everyone else, starts thinking about, where they and their families are going to eat over Christmas – and all the ‘fun places’ they need to visit. So, the sooner you get your Christmas marketing campaign organised, the better positioned you’ll be in.
Keep you Christmas restaurant marketing simple and focused
There’s a huge amount of potential business up for grabs. You just have to focus on what will get the most customers through the door, for the minimum amount of effort and cost. So, keep it simple and just focus on the things that will make the biggest difference to your bottom line.
So, how do I promote my Christmas menu?
Just focus on these three things and you will arrive in January, happy…
- #1 Decide on your Christmas Menu and get it printed
- #2 Get some professional Christmas food photography
- #3 How you use your Christmas food photography on your website and social media
Here’s the plan…
#1 Decide on your Christmas menu and get it printed
You’ll need:
- Your Main Christmas menu
- Possibly a Vegetarian option
- And also, possibly a ‘Set menu’ for pre-booking (and pre-payment only) This is your book early ‘offer menu’
Depending upon your customer demographics – If you’re a pub restaurant for example, you might want to also produce a Senior Citizens Menu. This has smaller portions at a lower price point! (Works well for pubs in or near large towns)
Get it designed, printed and out to prospective customers. All local businesses would be a good start. Add an early bird offer to nail your first bookings. Do this before your competitors get to them!
Hand one to all customers that eat at your restaurant leading up to Christmas
Give it to them with the complementary mint or whatever it is you give them with their bill.
Train your waiting staff to pitch your Christmas menu i.e. Here’s our Christmas menu for you to take with you. We’re taking bookings now and as an existing customer, the special offer for you is _ _ _ _ _ _
Consider including ‘special offers’ on festive drinks or a complementary glass of something. Mulled wine is always a good one and it costs very little to produce.
Email your pre-payment menu to your existing customers
If you’ve had the foresight to collect your customer’s email addresses, mailing them your Christmas menu and exclusive offer, is a brilliant way of securing early bookings.
Don’t forget to include some kind of a ‘special offer’ for these very important people. Remember, they are the most valuable customers you have!
Christmas Restaurant Marketing Ideas for a Curry House
What if you run a Curry House or other restaurant that’s not so relevant to Christmas?
I had a conversation along these lines, with one of my Indian Restaurant customers (actually the day before writing this blog article). He said…
“We’re a bit stuck a Christmas because, Indian food is not that relevant to Christmas.”
I said… “Christmas is just another marketing opportunity, make something up!”
Chef’s Special Christmas Curry Menu
Chicken Tikka with cranberry sauce
Lamb Balti with Stuffing
Frozen sorbet ‘in the orange’ with brandy sauce
OK, perhaps not – but you get the idea!
How about something more like this…
Can’t face another Traditional Christmas Lunch?
**Come and blow your taste buds to the moon and back with Chef Raju’s alternative Christmas feast**
Featuring…
Tandoori Portobello Mushrooms
with figs, cashew nuts, raisins and green chili
Goan Style Turkey Curry ~ Turkey breast cooked with goan spices etc
It’s simple… and just one of many Christmas advertising ideas for restaurants
#2 Get some professional Christmas food photography
Professional Christmas food photography is an ABSOLUTE Priority!
At art by chef, I provide professional food photography services for restaurants in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Bristol, in the UK. However, wherever your restaurant or pub is located, there will be local food photographers that will be able to help.
Why is professional restaurant food photography so important?
Over 80% of prospective restaurant customers, now search for ‘new and exciting’ places to eat & drink, via an internet search.
Once these potential customers find your website, the biggest influencer in whether they book or not is the quality of your food photography.
What else could it be? People decide with their eyes.
It works like this…
If YOUR food looks absolutely delicious and ‘seasonally themed’ i.e. relevant to the market expectations (because you invested in professional Christmas food photography)…
and YOUR COMPETITOR’s food (on their website) looks ‘dull and lifeless’ (the way almost all amateur food photography does)…
… YOU will get the Lion’s share of the bookings – GUARANTEED
It’s as simple as that.
It’s the same with Social Media
If your posts feature professional ‘Christmas themed’ food photography, your customers and friends, are more likely to become excited about your restaurant. As the result, they will tend to forward your posts on to their other family and friends. Because of this, your dishes can be under the eyes of thousands of potential customers in no time!
Furthermore… Many of these potential customers have a problem right now – and that problem is…
… “finding somewhere to book for the family to eat over Christmas!”
In contrast, your complacent competitors will be missing out on business
Whilst you ‘pump up’ your marketing to a whole new level, many of your competitors will continue to think it’s a good idea to blast out posts ‘dull looking images’ of their food, taken on their I-Phones.
You already know what their customers and friends will be thinking… “Oh No… Not another dull looking food photo, shot on a phone!” So, no extra business for them!
It’s a trajectory to failure.
#3 How to use your Christmas food photography on your website and Social Media
Feature your best Christmas food photograph on your website’s front page (if you have a featured image option). Accompany it with your Christmas booking form.
Alternatively, get your web developer to build you a Christmas Booking Landing Page containing…
- Your Christmas food photograph (the money shot)
- A 300 word description built around your focus key phrase, covering all the ‘great reasons’ for booking a Christmas lunch or Christmas party with your restaurant. Including, highlights from your menu. a link to your menu and booking form etc
Think what people will be searching for online and write a page to help them out.
Include a strong ‘offer proposition’ for even more bookings i.e. Book before 30 November and get a FREE bottle of Prosecco with your meal.
This type of offer proposition works well at increasing bookings because…
To the customer, this feels like FREE Champagne!
For the restaurant owner, this is cheap wine, that gets people in the mood to spend even more!
- Your booking form – to make it easy for them to book!
The Headline, text and images all need to be Search Engine Optimised SEO. Your web developer should know how to do this.
Get your web developer to add your Christmas menu page.
You can upload the PDF that the printers provided you with ‘as a proof’ for your printed menu. It can be worth doing because it’s a free piece of art, once you’ve paid for the print.
But remember… The Search Engines can’t read the content of PDF menus. Because of this, they have trouble ranking them in the search results. So, potential customers will not be able to find them (unless they are already on your website)
This is why it’s so important to get your web developer to add text menu – it’s for the search engines.
For your Christmas text menu page
Build it around a longtail key phrase that includes your location and the current year.
For example… Christmas 2021 at The Black Duck in Gloucester
And don’t forget to get your web developer to fill out your snippet to work with it.
So, in the serch results, the whole thing should look something like this…
https://www.black-duck-gloucester.co.uk/restaurants/gloucester/christmas-menu
Christmas 2021 at The Black Duck in Gloucester
Table bookings now available for Christmas 2021 at The Black Duck Gloucester. See our decadent Christmas menu, Xmas Day, Boxing Day & NYE menus
How to properly use your food photography on your menu page
On your text menu page, add at least one of your Christmas food photography images.
- Before uploading your Christmas food image, give it a file name that includes your focus key phrase. For example…. christmas-2021-Black-Duck-Gloucester-1
- If you add more than one image, you could use the file name… christmas-2021-Black-Duck-Gloucester-2
- In the image Alt Tag, use your focus key phrase – Christmas 2021 at The Black Duck in Gloucester – image of Christmas Lunch
- If you use more than one image, vary the text in Alt Tags
Setting up a proper text menu web page instead of just uploading a pdf can give you a massive advantage. This is because, ‘almost all’ of your competitors, will upload a PDF menu only and miss out on all that SEO benefits of a text version. So… Your menu will get found – theirs wont!
That’s the basics
To go further, you could produce do a blog post talking about your Christmas menu and the planning behind your Christmas festivities, optimised for all your main Christmas Restaurant Booking ‘key phrase’ variations.
For Social Media
Use your professional Christmas food photography as the basis to drive all of your Social Media posts and tweets leading up to Christmas
Once a week do a post about how Christmas preparations are going, including a decent photograph
Promote your menu with the professional Christmas food photos i.e.
- We’ve just launched our Christmas menu, what do you think?
- Do you think the Christmas lunch looks better on round plates or square plates?
- Question.. If you were coming to a restaurant over Christmas, would you prefer a complementary glass of mulled wine to start the evening or champagne?
Talk about the quality of the food and where it’s sourced. People love the idea of locally sourced produce because it sounds like it will taste better
In your restaurant…
Ask you customers to follow your restaurant on twitter and Facebook so that you can keep them up-to-date with your Christmas offers.
That’s it… Those are my top Restaurant Christmas Marketing Ideas. There are loads of others obviously but these will get customers through the door this Christmas. I know this because it’s tried and tested and works for my clients every year.
So in summary, just focus on three things
#1 Produce a killer menu and offer
#2 Get some professional Christmas food photography
#3 Use the Christmas food photography to turn your website and Social Media channels into customer generating magnets
Just remember…
What you do in the run-up to Christmas, determines how sweet your life will be in January
Don’t stop at Christmas
Remember Christmas is a bigger opportunity than just ‘Christmas’
Over Christmas period you’ll get more new customers through the door than at any other time of the year.
Be remarkable and then these people will remark about you to their friends.
Then, in the New Year, your Christmas customers (and their friends), will come back in January – when your competitor’s restaurants are empty and cold!
Hope that helps
Restaurant Christmas Marketing ideas from art by chef, is the first of a series of articles aimed at helping restaurant owners cut through all the marketing hype and get to where the real money is!