Introduction:

There are four levers that you could pull in your restaurant to increase sales and profits at any given time. In the past I’ve shown that there’s three ways to increase revenue in your restaurant, it’s still TRUE. In business there are only three ways to increase revenue: more customers, more customers coming in more often and your current customers spending more per visit.

The Four Levers:

In any business no matter how you break it down those are the only three ways to increase revenue in a business but I like to call these levers. These are slightly different but very similar. Those four growth levers are:

1. Acquisition – getting more new customers.
2. Activation – it’s turning the people in your sphere of influence that know who you are or have heard of you or your restaurant into customers.
3. Retention – getting your current customers to come back more often.
4. Monetization – that’s getting your current customers to spend more money per visit.

At any moment in time you could pull on any these levers to increase your sales and therefore hopefully increase your profits.

If your restaurant feels stuck, instead of thinking about some new marketing campaign or instead of thinking about some new idea or trying to figure out what the solution is to your problems ask yourself these questions first: What growth lever should I be pulling right now? Should it be the acquisition growth lever, the activation lever, retention or should it be monetization?

Promotions and Campaigns

A promotion is a one-time event while a campaign pulls all of these different levers at different points. A campaign works to acquire new customers, keep them active, retain them by coming back more often and then fully monetize them. Getting them to go through your whole cycle of products, not just coming into the restaurant once for lunch but also coming back for dinner, breakfast or maybe doing some catering with you.

When we think about a full marketing campaign it’s a series of promotions that are designed to pull all four of these levers.

I hope you enjoyed today’s video and I look forward to bringing you another one just like this next week have a wonderful day.