Easter can be one of the most profitable weekends of the year for your restaurant, if you have the right marketing strategy in place to tap into this joyous family-filled holiday, the UK alone spends over £750m every year over the Easter weekend.

As you know, Easter is one of the most heavily marketed holidays of the year, so punching through the noise and attracting new customers through your door can be difficult. Restaurants are all fighting for a slice of the pie, so you’ll need to offer something unique to reach new customers.

With Easter 2020 just around the corner, we wanted to share with you three, proven marketing ideas that we use with our existing restaurant clients to help them stand out and gain new customers during this festive break, so let’s dive straight in!

1. Kids Easter Colouring Competition

As much as us adults do love to indulge in cheeky a chocolate egg, or two, Easter really is for the little ones so hosting a colouring competition is a great way to get the little ones involved, and what kid doesn’t love to colour?

Now, there are a few different ways your restaurant can approach this but what we’ve found that works best is in the run-up to Easter (around 2/3 weeks) you advertise across your social media that from now until Easter every child can participate in your colouring competition at the restaurant. You can print some easter themed colouring sheets and offer the opportunity to all the children who visit the restaurant to take part in the competition, ask that once they’ve completed the colouring they take a selfie with their masterpiece creation and tag your restaurant in the photo on social media (ensure you have the guardians permission).

A few days before Easter Sunday you can go through all the entries online and shortlist some winners to win some prizes (easter eggs etc…) to be collected at the restaurant. 

Just to recap to ensure your competition is successful you’ll want to:

• Pre-promote your competition across your customer database.
• Ask for entries to be posted on social media and to @tag your restaurant.
• Shortlist entries through social media

Turn Your Customers into Your Brand Advocates

By ‘giving something back’ and making this occasssion special for the children, you will win the hearts of your customers. In return, your customers will generate plenty of free advertisement with their friends across social media! Ensuring your brand is active and at the forefront of your local community is essential to maintaining busy trade, and in the run-up to Easter, this competition is a great way to get your customers raving about your restaurant!

2. Offer a ‘freebie’ to your diners

Everyone loves a freebie, it’s a proven marketing technique that we’ve seen for decades, so it must be working, right? Yes, but marketing has evolved so much over the years that you can turn that quick win into long term loyalty.

Let me give you an example of a proven strategy that we use in one of the restaurants we manage. Over Easter, we offered a ‘Free dessert’ to all diners, and on the surface, it seemed a no brainer for their customers. All we asked in exchange was they signed up to their ‘VIP Club’ (email list) in order to claim their unique code, it was a hit.

We promoted it across their social platforms/email and SMS database and had a huge influx of new customers signing up to their ‘VIP Club’ in order to receive the freebie. 

How we turned the quick win into long term loyalty

Now, here’s the beauty about the freebie promotion. Not only were customers visiting the restaurant to claim their free dessert and spend further money on 2 courses and drinks in its self, which was a quick win. But they also were funnelled into an advanced email campaign which worked on building an ongoing relationship with the customer and trickled several other special ‘exclusive’ offers over the coming months.

Two months after we ran this promotion we found that 46% of the restaurant’s customers who claimed the original freebie had returned more than twice, and the likely hood of them becoming a repeat diner is around 70%

Now, not all restaurants will have the technology to convert the quick win into long term loyalty but this is Byte’s mission, so if you’d like to implement a similar strategy into your restaurant get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to help!

3. Easter Themed Photo Frame

Now, this might be our favourite. With the insurgence of social media over recent years, everyone is looking for the next great selfie/photo moment to post to their followers. Having a themed photo frame in your restaurant is pretty much cost less and can really help build a community of brand advocates around your restaurant, it’s pretty much free marketing. You can purchase a photo frame with your branding on Amazon for around £20-£30 and get some funny hats, glasses, bunny ears and any other accessories you can think of, place the frame at the entrance of your restaurant and promote the opportunity get a ‘fun selfie with your group’ in the restaurant. 

You’ve Just Earned Some Free Advertising!

The majority of diners will relish the opportunity to get a fun photo with their family/friends over Easter and do you know what they’ll do with that photo? That’s right, they’ll post it straight on their social media page for all their followers to see how fun it is at your restaurant, this increases your brand’s awareness and will no doubt attract new customers through your door.

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There are so many different ways you can use Easter to market your restaurant to generate new and returning business and we’ve really only scratched the surface with these. If you do decide to use any of the above ideas in your restaurant please tag @byte_uk us and share your results! 

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Happy Easter!🐰🥚