Starting a small restaurant or brewery is a great way to build an enterprise that represents your passions and your perspectives on hospitality. Indeed, once you’ve started to generate some custom, taking steps to grow, expand, and retain loyal customers is a natural part of progress. You’re transforming your small enterprise into a genuine local brand.
Effectively achieving these ambitions is by no means simple. Nevertheless, with a strategic approach, you can implement techniques designed to engage your target audience and grow your consumer base. Let’s look at some tips to boost the profile of your brewery or restaurant.
Enhancing the Customer Experience
Achieving sustainable growth in any industry is challenging. There is, of course, a range of effective tips and tricks when you’re scaling your beer business, from effective brand building to strengthening logistics. Even the growing trend for automated practices plays a role. Among the most critical steps to support growth in a way that boosts long-term loyalty, though, is finding fresh ways to enhance the customer experience. After all, your consumers’ engagement will be what makes your company a success.
So, what can you do to boost customer experience?
Prioritize consistent quality
A high-quality product is central to a good customer experience. Even when a few other elements of the overall service occasionally slip, ensuring the core product standard is consistently excellent influences what customers take away from their time with you. It can encourage them to return, leading to recommendations to their friends. Therefore, put strong quality control measures into your processes. These must include ensuring high standards of raw ingredients, thereby prioritizing freshness and safety. You must also commit to testing, including fermentation and taste checks for each batch of your beer and sampling new dishes in your restaurant.
Strengthen your workforce
Your workers — whether management, service, or back-of-house — have a direct impact on the customer experience. Comprehensive strategic workplace planning can ensure you have employees with the right skill sets, can recruit effectively, and can retain workers who interact positively with your consumers. This is particularly vital in the hospitality industry, where understaffing is prevalent.
Your plan should involve regularly assessing your workforce capabilities, asking supervisors and employees about their skills, and identifying gaps. You must also assess turnover rates and what contributes to these. From here, you can take targeted action, such as making development programs and using rewards to ensure your staff are not only able to enhance customer experience but are as committed to it as you are.
Using Localized Marketing
Marketing is a vital part of your brewery or restaurant growth. After all, if people don’t know your business exists, how will they spend money there? Yet, it’s important not to just focus your efforts on the general market or try to compete with big chains. The national and international consumer bases aren’t your business. Locals are. Those who live nearby will make your space their regular haunt and tell their friends about you. Therefore, focus your efforts and budget on localized techniques.
Your website is your handiest tool for localization. Even your small brick-and-mortar business needs a website to represent your brand identity and help customers find you easily. It’s also a valuable platform for showcasing your brewery or restaurant’s local story, boosting customers’ engagement with your brand. Wherever possible, make your landing pages highly localized. Ensure that the location is mentioned throughout the text and highlight how your services represent what’s exciting about the area of the country you’re in.
Localized search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are another way to draw traffic to your website and onward to your in-person business. This can involve opening and verifying a Google My Business page for your restaurant or brewery. Customers can leave reviews and you can respond to them while incorporating keywords about your business, directly influencing results rankings. I
It’s also helpful to create localized online content both on your website and in guest posts on industry websites. These should reflect your expertise specifically within the geographical area of your business. For instance, you can make blog posts exploring regional ingredients to present local flavors. These tools enhance your visibility and credibility when customers search for restaurants and breweries in your area.
Leveraging Social Media
Social media is an increasingly powerful tool for community engagement. It’s more than just another avenue for marketing efforts. When done well, your social channels are a forum to make genuine connections with consumers, provide excellent customer service, and boost your growth.
Your first step is cultivating a strong social media presence in your community. Open accounts on the major platforms — such as Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook — and make certain that your profile images and text are consistent across all of these. A social media presence helps to boost brand recognition and confirms that posts are genuinely from your business. You should then start being active on the platform, not just following other local businesses and organizations but commenting on and sharing their posts. Not only is this seen by locals who may be following these accounts, but it also shows that your company is an active part of the community.
It’s also important to regularly post content advertising your brand that is relevant to the area. Social media videos have an exceptionally high level of engagement. You can make behind-the-scenes videos showcasing your brewing process, focusing on the talented workers on your team. This type of content helps to humanize your marketing with figures locals may see regularly about town. You can also post images of your company reps appearing at local events or engaging in community initiatives.
Don’t forget to have interactions with local customers on these channels. Even if they have a complaint about your services, engage with them positively and publicly. This not only gives you a chance to find solutions for dissatisfied customers, but it also shows your other followers that your business is committed to providing great service, which can, in turn, lead to new consumers.
Conclusion
With a little strategy and commitment, you can put your brewery or restaurant in a strong position for growth and customer loyalty. There are various routes to take, from leveraging social media channels to improving the experiences of your consumers. Always take an informed approach. Keep reviewing what engages your customers and what they aren’t so happy about. Adjusting in relevant and mindful ways ensures you’re creating a business that’s an excellent fit for locals and allows you to expand into new markets.
⸻ Author Bio ⸻
Sam Bowman enjoys writing about people, tech, business, and how they merge. He enjoys getting to utilize the internet for the community without actually having to leave his house. In his spare time, he likes running, reading, and combining the two in a run to his local bookstore.
