he Food & Beverage (F&B) Industry is a lucrative and growing one, especially in Singapore with its melting pot of various cultures. Nevertheless, competition is fierce. Even though F&B was badly hit by the pandemic, there was a 96% net increase by the end of mid-2020.
As the more food entrepreneurs turn to social media as the main marketing strategy, a well-designed Food Instagram Account is no longer enough. F&B businesses need to do more to stand out. F&B businesses need strong marketing strategies to constantly gain new customers and grow their loyal fans. In this article, we look at a few simple and effective marketing strategies that can boost F&B Business such as:
· Special offers from time to time
· Birthday Treats
· Loyalty Program to reward your customers
· Customer Relationship Management
· Social Media Promotions
· Gifting or Cash Vouchers
Lets look at these strategies one by one:
1. Special Offers
One of the most common strategy is 1-for-1 Special Offers. In fact, it is so frequently implemented that some Singaporeans expect it and actively search for a F&B’s available offer. When executed well, Special Offers offered at the right time can help drive sales and footfall.
For instance, offering 1-for-1 during off-peak hours can attract deal-seekers and help to increase sales during the off-peak hours. Further, this deal encourages customers to come in pairs, which can potentially help F&B gain new customers.
2. Birthday Treats!
Going out for meals is one of the most popular ways people choose to celebrate birthdays. A simple birthday wish, a gift voucher or a free meal from you creates a positive image of your brand in their minds. A personal touch like this helps you show that you care about your customers, that they matter to you. In return, happy customers tend to revisit your business. This is one of the best opportunities to grow loyal customers.
Birthday meals typically involve huge groups of people. Not only does this help to drive sales during this particular birthday event, it is a great chance for your brand to enrol new customers and turn them into your loyal customers. A simple birthday treat can bring you numerous benefits!
Tip! Use a good CRM system to automate this process. This saves you precious time spent on manually keeping track and sending out wishes.
3. Loyalty Program
Loyalty Programs are designed to help build, retain and grow loyalty amongst your returning customers. Having a reward system in place makes your customers feel important, acknowledged, and cared for, and in return, they tend to return for more.
A popular loyalty program suitable for F&B businesses is a voucher system. This can be done in a various way, depending on your objectives.
For instance, rewarding your customers with vouchers each time they make a purchase can encourage them to visit again. A good strategy would be to offer free membership along with vouchers so that you can have a better understanding of who your customers are.
Tip! To reduce queue-time and enrol customers quickly within seconds, learn more here.
4. CRM
How awesome would it be if you knew your loyal customers’ frequent orders and preferences? You don’t have to manually memorise it for every single customer. With a good CRM system, the tech does the heavy lifting for you to care better for your customers.
A well-implemented CRM System helps to record all your customers’ information and past interactions with your brand. This allows you to better understand your customers’ behaviour, so that you can make better recommendations to your precious customers.
5. Social Media Promotion
Of course, we cannot forget promotions on social media. One of the best ways to attract new customers is by posting mouth-watering photos of your food online. With how widespread social media is, having delicious looking food online is essential in spreading word of mouth.
You can consider hiring professionals to take high-quality photographs. Or, you can also work with food bloggers to push out visual images of your food to huge number of viewers. A cheaper and more organic way to grow is to re-post or share good photos taken by your customers.
6. Gifting or Cash Vouchers
Another amazing strategy is through the power of sharing. This is an excellent opportunity for your customers to send a birthday gift to their loved ones, or simply express a thank you. You can do this by allowing customers to purchase vouchers and then helping them send it to the recipients. Through this, you deliver more value to your customers while growing prepaid revenue.
Tip! A good CRM system can help you easily implement this. Learn more here.
7. Improve customer retention and revenue
According to Harvard Business School, if your customer defection rate decreases by 5%, you can experience 25 to 85% increase in your sales or profit. Using CRM solutions enable your business to improve the retention rate of your customers, and it often translates to increased revenue. Your business can use CRM to address at-risk accounts and encourage satisfied customers to purchase again at the right time.
Read here to learn about effective ways to retain your customers.
Case Study
Let us tell you the story of our amazing customer COCA. COCA is a 3-outlet Thai-Chinese hotpot restaurant located in shopping malls. We are sure many of you reading this must have had delicious meals at there.
COCA offered return vouchers to the customers. Their challenges were:
- High printing costs.
- No way to track which customers have the vouchers.
- It was stressful for the staff to give vouchers to every customer.
- Less than 5% customers revisit from return vouchers
To manage these vouchers more effectively, they decided to take up a Loyalty-CRM. They started using Advocado, and just within 6 months of the usage, they saw following results:
- COCA enrolled 8000+ new members in their loyalty program just within 6 months.
- They saw a 14% increase in new customers on a regular basis.
- All the vouchers given to the customers were tracked. The system also sends automated reminders to those who haven’t used their vouchers.
- They now have a more comprehensive loyalty program with a mix of membership, cashback, voucher and special deal.
- It became easier for the staff to just enrol a customer with their mobile number, and the system takes care of everything else.
Take a look at their membership program that brought in these results:
