As a restaurant owner, you would always be in search of ways to improve your online visibility and grab more business opportunities. Restaurant competition is one such tactic that can help you gain more business opportunities.
Since we all love to win free things with minimal effort, restaurant competitions are the best way to reach a wider audience.
In this blog post, we will share various restaurant contest ideas that will help you drive your brand’s popularity.
Why Conducting Restaurant Contests is a Great Idea?
While developing a marketing strategy, you should think of all the ways that will help you reach a bigger audience and analyze them. By doing so, you’ll be able to make the big step of turning a visitor into a client.
Social media is the right platform to implement restaurant competitions. It has multiple benefits, such as:
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Improved Visibility:
If you’re just starting a restaurant business, you need to boost the number of your social media followers. You can organize contests that make it mandatory to share your posts to drive more follower count. This will also help you reach a bigger audience spectrum within a shorter time frame.
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Attract Potential and New Customers:
When people participate in your competition, they’ll definitely have a look at your restaurant’s social media profile, website, and menu. You should also optimize them with delicious images and attractive descriptions. By doing so, you’ll be encouraging the visitors to order a meal from your restaurant.
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Boosting Client Engagement:
Take your social media presence to the next level with daily restaurant competitions that keep your visitors engaged with your profile.
You can also conduct a contest that directly targets your previous customers to boost the chances of customer retention.
Top 15 Restaurant Contest Ideas That’ll Boost Your Brand’s Online Popularity
Social media is undoubtedly a great medium to organize and implement competitions. However, all that matters is the way you organize and implement a competition on every social media platform.
Hence, here are some ideas that will make every potential customer participate online, starting with Instagram.
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Social Media
- Idea#1: Tag a Friend to Win a Free Dinner for Two
It’s the most common and easiest Instagram contest idea for a diner. All you need to do is share a picture of a delectable meal with the rules in the caption: tag a friend, and only one entry per individual for a free dinner.
Similarly, you can utilize extraction tools to collect data and choose a winner to enjoy a free meal from your restaurant.
- Idea#2: Guess a New Menu Item and Get It for Free
A great way to develop interest around the launch of a new menu item is to share updates regarding the launch of a new menu item. You can do so by sharing a professionally clicked picture of the item with no caption about it.
This will make people guess the new ingredients for the newly added menu item, and select a winner from all the correct responses on your social media profile.
- Idea#3: Provide a Photo Caption and Win a Gift Card
Everybody loves to have fun. That’s why you need to capitalize the fun quotient of your competition with humour and share funny or engaging behind-the-scenes visuals from your restaurant. This could be waiters dropping a mug of cappuccino on the floor or chefs cooking something in a funny manner.
For such posts, you can invite people and encourage them to provide the most amusing captions. You can even reward them with a gift card worth $40-50 to make this competition more exciting.
- Idea#4: Tell Us Your Favourite Dish and Get a Free Training Session With Our Chef
You can consider a unique reward for a competition rather than one that might be outdated in the eyes of your customer. Food is definitely a great prize, but there’s nothing better than a culinary experience, especially for passionate food lovers.
Boost engagement by encouraging people to comment on a post describing their favourite dish on your menu. Afterward, offer a three-hour training session with your head chef. This will further encourage participants to ask chefs for culinary advice and learn to cook a recipe they’ve selected.
- Idea#5: Share the Reasons Why You Love Your Partner and Win a Free Romantic Meal
You should incorporate ideas for restaurant competition in your marketing strategies. Valentine’s Day, New Year’s, etc, are some great occasions when you can get more orders and reservations.
You can encourage individuals to post a story describing their special feeling towards their loved ones and its significance. It will help them win an exemplary meal in romantic surroundings.
- Idea#6: Share a Post to Win a Free Dinner for You and Your Friend
Boost visibility for your diner by sharing an image of a mouth-watering dish. Afterward, encourage people to share it on their profile to win a delicious dinner at your restaurant.
- Idea#7: Leave a Review to Earn a Night Out for a Four-Person Group
People check restaurant reviews before choosing the right place to dine in. This makes the requirement for many positive reviews more important, which will help you appear trustworthy.
That’s why you should request clients to leave reviews and testimonials on your Facebook page by offering an exceptional prize. You can make this contest a periodic ritual, where you select a random winner from the previous week’s testimonials left by them.
- Idea#8: Finish off an Entire Pizza in Two Minutes, and Don’t Pay the Bill
Sounds very tempting, doesn’t it? Well, for Pizza lovers, you can host a competition where the customer has to finish off an entire giant pizza in two minutes and doesn’t have to pay a bill. Make sure that the Pizza you’re serving is giant enough and keep the participants motivated to achieve this goal.
You should also encourage the customer to share their results in social media, which will further drive customers to participate in this competition at your restaurant.
- Idea#9: Share this Post and Win an Invitation to Our Exclusive Tasting Event
If you update your menu quite often, you get an exclusive opportunity to drive audiences to your restaurant. Ask people to share a carefully selected picture to allow them to get an invite to a tasting event where they’ll be able to taste your new offerings and enjoy a great time free of cost.
- Idea#10: Cook With Us and Get a Free Meal Every Friday for a Month
Share a simple recipe for a famous dish from your menu and encourage online users to try cooking it at home. Select a winner from the ones that post a picture of themselves with the final product, i.e. the dish.
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Upsell Ideas
- Idea#11: Encouraging Customers to Share an Image of Their Online Order
If you’ve just incorporated an online ordering system, you can organize competitions to encourage people to find out the level of convenience while placing food orders online.
Create a hashtag like #italianrestaurantonlineordering, and offer people a one-week time to share a picture of themselves with the food they’ve ordered from their restaurants. You can randomly award the users by choosing one of the pictures with the hashtag for the competition.
- Idea#12: Share a Memory and Get a Free Dessert for Every Order for a Month
Get your customers involved in improving your restaurant’s reputation. For that, you can encourage them to post about an exceptional experience with or at your restaurant. Offer these customers a code that is usable with every order to enjoy a dessert of their choice.
- Idea#13: Offering a Full Day of Goodies to the Customer of the Month
For every business to succeed, client retention is the most important aspect. That’s where the idea of rewarding and encouraging repeat customers in your restaurant stands out.
Monitor your sales and recognize the person who frequently orders dishes during the month. Offer such customers a specific day when they can indulge in their favourite dishes from your restaurant. Also, keep sharing posts like these constantly on your social media profiles.
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Restaurant Contest Ideas for Employees
- Idea#14: Employee of the Month
Celebrate your restaurant’s employees for the efforts and good work they put in by organizing a party every few months on your restaurant’s premises.
The employee of the month will be declared through voting. You just have to install a ballot at the back of the restaurant where your employees can vote while ensuring confidentiality.
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Common Restaurant Promotional Ideas to Try Out
- Idea#15: Offer a Bonus for Most Donuts Sold
One of the greatest contest ideas for employees is offering them a goal to achieve. A hearty bonus will definitely motivate them to sell as many donuts as possible. You can change donuts for the menu item that commands the biggest profit margin.
Apart from all these things, you can consider offering free delivery, menu items, etc, to entice your potential customers to your restaurant.
Mistakes to Prevent While Running a Restaurant Contest
Restaurants need to avoid certain mistakes while conducting online contests that may impact their online promotional campaigns. These include:
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Having an Unclear Goal:
This is the most common mistake that many restaurant owners commit while developing a social media strategy for their restaurants. Without a clear goal, you won’t be able to track your campaign’s performance, optimize content, and target your audience.
Whether it’s increasing awareness, generating leads and traffic, or building a loyal customer base, you should have a defined goal before developing your contest idea.
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Posting a Lot or Too Little:
This is another common mistake restaurant owners make during their social media campaigns. Sharing too many posts can leave your followers annoyed, which can lower the value and relevance of your content.
If you’re posting too little, your followers will forget about your restaurant. You’ll further miss opportunities to interact with potential customers too. That’s why it is important to maintain a balance between quality and quantity while organizing contests.
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Not Acknowledging Feedback or Interaction:
Another common mistake while creating a social media strategy for your restaurant is ignoring engagement or feedback from online customers. Engagement and feedback are the key to building trust, loyalty, and relationships with your online followers.
Through feedback and engagement, you get more valuable insights into the customers’ needs, opinions, and preferences. That’s why you need to reply to every comment you get and engage with the online audience.
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Not Implementing Multimedia Content:
If you’re not using videos and visuals in your restaurant campaign, you’re losing out on a chance to capture the attention of potential audiences. An image depicting a delicious pizza will convey emotions that will leave your mouth watering, won’t it?
Well, adding images and videos to your social media contests can further pique the interest of users, compelling them to participate in online contests.
Conclusion
Restaurant competitions provide an exciting opportunity to captivate and engage your audience. By carefully considering key elements, you can design contests that not only draw attention but also foster ongoing interaction and enthusiasm within your online community.
These contests can spark creativity and inspire participants, making the entire experience both memorable and rewarding.
SrveUP offers you the most delicious social media strategies that will leave your potential online customers mouth-watered. We develop strategies that help you attract your target audience and convert them into customers to drive more foot traffic to your restaurants. Contact us now and explore various opportunities with us to drive more conversion rates and foot traffic to your diners.
FAQs
Q1. What are the advantages of conducting a restaurant contest?
A1. By running a restaurant contest, you get to attract potential customers looking for the right place to dine in. It also helps you increase your engagement with customers, which will further increase your restaurant’s value in front of their eyes.
Q2. How can I choose the right contest for my restaurant?
A2. While choosing the right contest to organize at your restaurant, you need to set a goal for the competition, consider your target audience, and the type of competition that resonates with the atmosphere and offerings at your restaurant.
Q3. How can I effectively promote my restaurant contest?
A3. You need to develop an effective marketing strategy that involves social media, email marketing, posters, menu inserts, etc. This will help you ensure you effectively reach your target audience as intended.
Q4. How can I track the success rate of my restaurant contest?
A4. You can track the success rate of your restaurant contest by tracking the total number of contest entries, social media engagement rates, website traffic, and, most importantly, sales. This will further help you optimize your contest campaign for better results.
Q5. How often should I conduct restaurant contests?
A5. You can carry out contests for restaurant promotions on an annual or monthly basis. All you need to do is consider various factors, such as the time of the year or month, to organize the competition that suits the occasion well.
