The holiday season is a time of year when any F&B business receives a higher amount of traffic than usual. In three months, bulk food orders dominate many established F&B establishments’ everyday operations. While your company stretches itself beyond its limits to achieve its goals, it’s no surprise you’re getting more profits and satisfaction in rendering services.
However, if it has been the third Holiday season after two years of seasonal slumps, it’s best to make sure you get your brand out in the open to ensure you’re getting huge bulk food orders during the holidays. Just follow these five ideas to cement your success this season.
Create Big Group Packages
This season, people will want to spend big for huge food group orders. If your culinary team can handle it, then your customers can definitely enjoy amazing and memorable dining experience where you can profit hugely. While it sounds tempting, keep in mind that huge group package servings mean more ingredients, which can be a big logistical problem if you lack ingredients and supplies to cook them
The best way to go about this is simple. Assess your ongoing food orders lined up and restaurant opening dates. Then, check if you have dishes that are compatible with big group packages.
For example, a huge serving of specialised kebabs isn’t exactly cost-effective. However, a party serving of biryani rice sets — about 6-12 — and packaged into a single group deal with other dishes and drinks is definitely worth the price. Alternatively, it allows your company to gauge how much time does it take to serve 12 dishes, package, and deliver them to customers. In doing so, you can create effective logistics where you can gauge your customer traffic and maximise your profits too.
Keep Your Marketing Efforts At Full Throttle
You’ve got your hands full with all your dish preparations and logistics. However, you’ll still need to use some of your managers and experienced personnel to keep your marketing efforts at full strength. Without word-of-mouth and promotions, it’s most likely your efforts to prepare and gain more profits could be shot down prematurely.
Whether you decide to do your online marketing in house or with the help of an experienced F&B marketing company, you’ll need to keep your digital marketing and brand development at its best. Here are a few ways to help you get bulk food orders during the holidays.
Holiday-Themed Email Newsletters
Nothing guarantees exceptional brand value upgrades than email newsletters. If you haven’t been inviting your customers to sign up for your newsletter, now is the time to do so. Holiday-themed newsletters inclusive of your latest holiday-inspired dishes and deals inform your dedicated customers about your latest dishes. And, because they confirmed that they want to receive news from you through emails, they will definitely read and consider purchasing them.
However, make sure to use the best practices of using email newsletters each time you send them out. For F&B companies, that means using more images and less text (about 2-3 sentences of descriptions) underneath topics you’d like to discuss. It’s not brand-appropriate for F&B restaurants to never include a delectable photo of their dishes and only use text and graphics in their newsletters.
Promotions on Huge Batch Orders
Let’s say you’ve prepared all the resources you’ll need to prepare and deliver big group bulk food orders en masse. However, during the first week, only a few people picked up on the group orders for the holidays. It’s possible that you’ve been lacking in the promotions department when it comes to your new dishes and group-oriented packages.
With your marketing efforts in full swing, your offer’s visibility will increase your audience reach. In doing so, you can encourage old brand fans to consider your huge group orders and reach new fans who want to try something new at an affordable price.
PPC and Social Media Paid Advertising
The best and quickest way to reach more audiences during the holidays is to use the pay-per-click or paid advertising services that search engines, social networks, and other services offer. In doing so, you can advertise your offers and gain top visibility that can pique your audience’s interest and turn over profits in no time.
You might ask, “why would I need traditional marketing if there’s paid advertising available?” PPC and paid advertising are only useful if you need to reach more audiences to help establish your brand and promote your newest offers to interested target audiences. However, depending solely on these services is not only expensive, but will not help you gain useful insight about your defined target audiences too.
Contests and Rewards
Promotions aren’t the only thing that you should focus on. To maximise free advertising, consider making a contest for your customers. It could be someone taking the best photo of themselves with the dishes they prefer consuming. Alternatively, it can be a raffle with a different type of highly-valuable prize such as gift certificates to your restaurant, free food, or others.
Most social networks allow you to sponsor contests that increase the visibility of your content through shares. However, make sure to review their guidelines to avoid possible contest banning. Cancelled contests can have a huge detrimental effect on your brand.
A safer approach is to offer rewards. For example, customers who buy three or more dishes in the same price tier can get a discount or additional dessert of their choice. This can encourage customers to buy more than they normally would.
Ensure Your Online Facilities Are Working At Their Best
We’ve been talking about your digital marketing efforts, but we’ve never discussed your online facilities in-depth. Your website, online ordering platform, social media channels, and other parts of your omnichannel network should be working well during the holidays. The most important aspect to focus on is accommodating a significantly increased website traffic thanks to your marketing efforts.
Here are areas that you should ensure are working properly and effectively. Many customers will definitely want to order bulk from you. But if your facilities are always offline or congested, you will be losing profits from your marketing and food preparation efforts.
Website Loading Speed and Overall Performance
In this section, you might notice that we’ll be citing many of Google’s optimal website expectations, which many search engine optimisation specialists and companies use to improve their client website’s ranking. The most important aspect of search marketing is your website. If it works well to serve the information and services the customer needs, the more satisfying their experience with your brand.
Some of the best search engine practices include improving your website loading speed. True enough, site loading speed greatly influences the first bout of increased bounce rates. This is the rate of customers leaving your website in favour of faster-loading, easy-to-navigate, and ultimately informative and accessible website results.
As you’ve read, by optimising your website to avoid slowdowns and confusing interfaces, you’ll guarantee bulk food orders because the page transitions are smooth, there’s less clicking involved, and your design is just plain intuitive. If you’ve got zero ideas, you can call on a reliable F&B marketing company or try your hand at it — here’s how to get you started!
Accuracy of Online Ordering Facilities
What customers dislike the most is if an online ordering app does not nail their address properly. When they’ve specified in your app that your deliverymen should leave their bulk orders by their door but end up asking more neighbors, it can get on their nerves sometimes. Unfortunately, F&B online ordering apps can only do so much about this because Google Maps and Apple Maps address registration is 100% responsible for pinpointing customer locations.
However, you can always make sure to deliver the food on time or within 30 minutes. In addition, make sure your deliverymen are mindful of the address and delivery specifications your customers have. For example, if they’ve indicated that their food be delivered at a specified room and floor number, make sure that knocking at a neighbour’s door to know about it is their last resort.
Capability To Accept Enormous Order Volumes
Lastly, make sure the back-end of your website and online ordering systems are well enough to take on huge bulk orders and volumes of orders. As we’ve mentioned before, website downtime drives customers away.
While your website, digital menu display, and online ordering systems are good to go, if your hosting can’t accommodate the huge number of connections simultaneously communicating with your website, it can mean trouble. So make sure that once your promotions go out and orders are incoming, you’re ready at all fronts — including the rear!
Up Your Upselling Game
In the old days of non-digital marketing, upselling is about adding more value to a customer who has accepted to buy a product. Sales personnel achieve this by presenting discounts, add-ons, and other special offers that they can receive as an “introductory,” “bonus,” or “celebratory” gesture from the brand. In the digital age, this is still a feasible and effective strategy that increases sales and improves brand recognition and authority. Here are a few ways to go about it.
Introduce New Dishes In Marketing
Holiday-inspired dishes coupled with your best sellers is the best way to introduce something new and exciting to your brand. Make sure you partner them with your top-tier dishes to make them exciting and delectable to your patrons and new customers. Low introductory prices — which are great especially if bundled with group-oriented orders — can definitely encourage customers to consider buying the package including this new dish.
Innovative Add-Ons and Sides
If your dishes are perfect with add-ons and sides, you can introduce complete dishes to function in this manner for less the price of both.
For example, partnering your best-selling main dish with another best-seller that can effectively become its a side dish (which can be smaller in serving amounts or size) is one way to upsell two products and increase your profits while simultaneously adding value to your brand’s capabilities and the dish’s best-selling features.
However, keep in mind that this requires some in-depth taste testing and mixing, but the payoff is definitely worth the trouble.
Improve Value Perception Through Effective Use of Content and Social Media Updates
Frequently broadcasting about your dishes, discounts, and promotions will always put your brand in the spotlight. Aside from informing customers about these items, make sure to insert something about your brand that adds value to your entire restaurant and its dishes as a whole.
For example, you can state in your newsletters that you’re serving discount best-selling group-oriented meals and contributing a percentage of your profits to charity as a Christmas objective. You can motivate people to make a purchase because they believe they’re doing something good while enjoying something worthwhile.
Measure, Measure, Measure!
Lastly, each detail of your online and offline holiday campaign’s performance is measurable. With figures and data, you can learn more about your customer’s holiday ordering and dining activities, preferences, and your top-selling holiday food.
First, make sure your remarketing facilities are on point. This pertains to your abandoned cart features — cookies can inform advertising bots to target customers who have left their carts without checking out. By showing them dishes they once viewed, they might find it pleasing to order once again conveniently.
In addition, inform your F&B marketing team to calibrate and check up on your website cookies that measure customer activity on your website. You won’t want to miss out on opportunities you can make your dishes attractive by learning about and predicting customer behaviour accurately.
You’re All Set For Big Holiday Orders!
Now, you’re all set to get bulk food orders during the holidays. The preparation and execution period of this magnitude during the holidays will feel daunting for sure. However, if you follow each of these steps, you’ll definitely get all the orders you need without fail.
If you’d like to learn more about F&B marketing and having your own digital ordering interface and management system, drop us a line at sales@ninjaos.com today!
