If you’re thinking ahead with your restaurant marketing, you may already be considering how to take advantage of St. Patrick’s Day. March 17th which is a Friday this year, oh boy!
But even if you’re not, there’s still time to turn your restaurant into an Irish one for the entire month! Spreading your event over the entire month allows you to generate more sales, offers more opportunity for your customers to respond and makes for a better return on your investment.
St. Patrick’s Day Is The Perfect Time To Promote Your Restaurant
Combining marketing with current events is a great way to create customer connections, and that’s precisely what St. Patrick’s Day offers. Your customer base will surely appreciate the creativity and thought put into your restaurant’s holiday strategy. It’s your task to create fun, memorable experiences for your customers that they can’t get elsewhere.
You’ll be more successful if you have fun with your customers and staff. People are getting harder and harder to convince to dine out – so providing something different, fun, and intriguing is a great way to attract their attention.
And it’s all about how many eyeballs you can get on your business.
Using an Irish theme for the month means that your marketing matches what’s already on their mind – they already know about St. Patrick’s Day, so your activities slipstream into their mind.
As with all of your restaurant marketing, it pays to think a couple of weeks out, allowing you time to plan, print and order whatever you need. This helps eliminate stress and gives you more time to be creative.
Embrace The Irish Theme And Go All In
First, come up with some Irish specials – menu items that are traditional or popular in Ireland, special desserts, and drinks.
Second, make sure you have plenty of Guinness and whisky on hand – both for drinking and for cooking!
Third, decorate your restaurant in green and gold, the Irish flag colors; think green shamrocks, sparkly banners, and pots of gold. Create memorable events, like trivia nights, or bring live Celtic music. Market it through all the marketing channels available, email, in-house signage, local newspapers, social media, and print media, direct mail to your existing customers.
Fourth, change your name! Put a O’ or a Mac in front of your restaurant’s name – send out a press release. It’s a holiday that is designed for silliness. If you aren’t convinced that themed items drive sales, consider McDonald’s Shamrock Shakes. They have been a March staple since they were invented in 1970. Its return is highly anticipated before Saint Patrick’s Day every year.
Creating a limited-time, unique opportunity creates interest. People like something exclusive and memorable, and a St. Patrick’s theme lends itself easily to a wide variety of options.
Restaurant Marketing Strategies To Bring Customers Back Again
We are fans of creating marketing for your existing customers to get them to return sooner than they would on their own. To do this, you need to lure them – much as we’d like it to be true, customers don’t spend their days wondering when they can spend more money with you. In most cases, they need to be reminded and influenced to get them to come back more often.
Marketing to existing customers is important because it helps keep them engaged with your restaurant and reminds them of the great experiences they had before. Strategies you can use include:
- Offering an incentive for return visits.
- Creating a strong loyalty program
- Bounceback offers
- special events such as tasting meals or happy hours just for repeat customers.
- Creating unique content just for them that they can’t get elsewhere.
Bounceback marketing is particularly effective in months when you’ve worked to draw a crowd that will encourage a repeat visit again. It “bounces” them back in faster. Bounceback offers boost customer loyalty and encourage repeat business by providing customers with something extra when they make their next purchase. They also help business owners build relationships with customers.
Proven Restaurant Marketing Ideas
Social media and email marketing are great, cost-effective ways to keep existing customers engaged – post interesting content such as recipes or behind-the-scenes photos and videos that give customers an inside look at what your restaurant is planning and celebrating for March.
In-house marketing leading up to your March events is imperative to let people know what’s happening. Table tents, menu inserts, and flyers they can take with them with days and times when relevant are all helpful in communicating your plans and getting customers excited.
One of the most responsive pieces of marketing you can use is print. Even though we are well into the digital age, print campaigns are a very effective resource to remind them of upcoming specials, contests, or events at your restaurant, like your St. Patrick’s day celebrations.
Print media is effective because it allows you to target customers who have already given you money and know and like you. By handing them an actual physical campaign, you increase your chances of getting them to take action and buy more frequently.
A printed campaign is a tangible piece of marketing that people can hold in their hands, pass around, and pin to the fridge. It’s a physical reminder of your business. While digital marketing is an important tool, it’s very easy for an email to get forgotten (or deleted) from the inbox or a social media post to get scrolled past. This is a perfect opportunity for a bounceback offer.
A DFY $$$ Making, Fun, Proven St Paddys Day Promotion
Using print marketing is your chance to differentiate yourself from your competitors. With so many people turning exclusively to digital marketing, it leaves the playing field wide open. It allows you to devise a clever use to “surprise and delight” your customers, provide them with something to talk about, and give them an intriguing reason to return again.
LUCK is a big component of the St. Patrick’s theme that you can cash in on. A contest offering “the luck of the Irish” is a great tie-in. One way to do this is through a scratch-off campaign. This has been proven over and over by our clients.
(FRONT- Pick one big prize and pass this out in March to get customers back quickly!)
One of the most popular bounceback promotions we do for our clients is Spring-related scratch-off promotions. This seasonal campaign allows you to choose a variety of prizes and add curiosity and excitement to your customer experience. Best of all, when you hand out an Irish-themed one in March, they need to bring them back to scratch them in April to see what they have won – which means an additional visit (and spending).
The trick is to offer a variety of prizes and total up their value to create your headline – in our example, they add up to $10,000, a compelling number. The top prizes are exciting to your customers. They see value in them. Most of your prizes will be smaller items but still offer value.
(Back-The ROI for this promotion can be increased by offering one awesome top prize!)
St. Patrick’s Day is the perfect time to have some fun with your marketing and create memorable experiences for your customers. If you need help getting everything ready for the big day, we’ve got you covered. Our team will take care of everything so you can sit back and relax.
Sláinte!
Michael
Michael Thibault
Known as “The Done For You Marketing Guy for Restaurants.” International Speaker on Restaurant Marketing. Published contributing author of 4 Marketing Books. Industry expert on Google Searches and Review Sites. Recovering Independent Restaurant Owner and Caterer of over 21 years. And, all-around good guy.