An easy restaurant marketing strategy to increase your intake per customer is having your staff suggest an appropriate drink to accompany their meal, whether it is a special ‘house’ cocktail, a perfectly suited wine, or an after dinner drink. Drinks and cocktails for a restaurant should be an important part of your restaurant marketing strategy.
How to create cocktails for a restaurant?
With a busy staff it’s hard to encourage them to take the extra time to present drinks to your customers, thus missing an opportunity to take advantage of this powerful restaurant profit maker. And incentivizing your restaurant staff to sell, while effective when applied as an overall technique, can create a ‘hard sell’ mentality when used by itself that can put your customers off.
So how can you encourage your restaurant staff to upsell without having them push just to make a commission? At our own restaurant we have found that if we concentrate on proposing these additional beverages because they really will make the dining experience a better for our restaurant customers, then it really is a win win restaurant marketing strategy. And how do we do that? Well, we involve our restaurant staff in creating the customer experience. We take a few minutes either before or after the service to discuss the next week’s beverage propositions. We break out the bar and start mixing and tasting. This serves as a great team building activity, but what is more important is that the staff is implicated in the creative process. And they take pride in it. So when it comes time to propose a beverage at the restaurant they really do become animated and are passionate about their proposal. They even have a story to tell about how it was created. Make your staff passionate about what they are selling and they’ll sell more, you can be sure of that. Making drinks a part of your restaurant staff on-boarding and ongoing training is essential.
Speciality restaurant drinks menu
We also supply a list of popular and restaurant friendly cocktails for the staff to refer to so they have some suggestions ready and waiting. Many times just the mention of a forgotten drink will inspire customers to order, while giving them a great experience at your restaurant.
Take the time to create a special drinks menu for your restaurant. You will want it to be both fit your restaurant persona (theme, register, brand qualities) and be profitable (make sure to manage margins properly and price drinks with high end ingredients accordingly).
