While your focus within a restaurant business is naturally going to be on your food, there is so much more that goes into a successful restaurant business; restaurant branding — before consumers have even tasted your menu offering. How you brand your restaurant can be the difference between new customers willing to try your food or going elsewhere to a different restaurant brand.
Here are four tips for branding your restaurant to drive more customers through your doors.
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1. Decide Who You Are
Before you get down to any specific points of branding your restaurant, you need to know what your brand is, your design, brand message, tone of voice, and the main driving force behind your restaurant business. Answering all of these questions will allow you to incorporate all of this into your restaurant branding so that customers easily know who you are, too.
Restaurant branding is so important that many big brand restaurants have a very specific story, tone of voice, and food style. To create a clear brand, make sure to be clear about who you are first.
2. Be Cohesive
A restaurant experience is a very physical one, and one which plays into all the senses for a customer. That’s why it’s so important to be cohesive with everything you’re offering, from the beginning to the end of your customer’s journey.
Some ideas include:
- Have your interior design match your brand identity and color scheme
- Music is another important aspect of restaurant branding. Have the restaurant music or background noise match your brand’s tone and vibe
- Ensure that your table setups match your brand tone, for example, casual booths for a casual eatry.
- Have your menu and meal names match your brand; if you’re a highly informal restaurant, you want your menu to match with that by avoiding offering highly formal meals or formal names
3. Menu Design Can Make a Huge Difference
No matter how extensive or simple your menu is, how you choose to display it will make a difference to the customer experience. Especially if your menu has plenty on offer, you need to make sure customers aren’t overwhelmed by information.
Your menu design should always fit your restaurant brand’s aesthetic, such as font, typography, and color scheme. Importantly, however, your menu should be easy to read more than anything else. Customers should be able to browse your menu without it being a stressful experience.
You should also think about digital menu boards, as these can work to draw in customers by showing what’s on offer on a board outside your restaurant or in your window — and if they see something they like, they’re going to want to come in.
4. Learn About Your Customers
The strength of a restaurant’s branding depends on its customers, and this isn’t just the initial interest in your new restaurant. Brand loyalty, just like restaurant branding, is extremely important for restaurants, so doing all you can to learn more about your target customers will help to strengthen your brand. Of course, you should always try to learn from reviews regarding your restaurant, whether it’s about the food, the customer service, or the décor, and make sure to do competitor research, too.