Easy Restaurant Marketing Tips: Increasing Beverage Profits

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. But with a busy staff it’s hard to encourage them to take the extra time to present this to your customers, thus missing an opportunity to take advantage of this powerful restaurant marketing tip. And incentivizing your restaurant staff to sell, while effective when applied as an overall technique, can create a ‘hard sell’ mentality when applied to an isolated restaurant marketing program that can put your customers off. So how to 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.