Marketing with Voice and Text Services: Food & Beverage

Owning a restaurant or bar is a major responsibility. It’s a 24/7/365 days a year job. A proprietor carries the weight of the world on their shoulders - in charge of everything from the menu and the quality of the product to the service, the housekeeping, and the bills.

Each and every customer is like gold, and in an increasingly competitive market, restaurateurs are up against more than 616,000 other dining establishments in the US according to a recent census. With that information, it’s essential to supersize your marketing strategy and to be more creative than the next guy.

To stay ahead of the ever changing landscape, the food services industry now has a way to put its name in the palms of customers’ hands. CallFire’s voice and texting services, including SMS texting, Voice Broadcast, IVR, and Call Tracking are the affordable and easy-to-use answers to connect and market to hungry patrons.

Restaurants cater to a more fickle marketplace in their effort to capture customers and their dollars.  Because our world is more portable than ever thanks to cell phones, laptops, and tablets, society has become more passive. What people expect is for the world to be brought to them.

Many restaurants are lunchtime destinations that have great difficulty filling seats during all the other dining times. What if you could get customers for breakfast, happy hour, dinner and weekends? CallFire offers restaurants many tools that give the owner choices on how best to communicate his or her message to their customers.

Use SMS texting to send discount offers or event reminders. Within minutes, hundreds of these text messages can be sent to a list of opted-in customers. Research shows that 95% of all SMS messages are opened in the first 5 minutes, proving these messages are received and read.

You don’t need a commercial to introduce your weekend special - an SMS text or voice broadcast can deliver the same message instantly so you won’t be forgotten.

For any busy establishment, an IVR or Interactive Voice Response system can be incredibly valuable. By creating a touch-tone response system, calls can be routed to the right person or department.  Customers can also leave messages that are automatically forwarded, and IVR can also work with phone take-out and pick-up orders and more.  

If you advertise directly, start saving money with CallFire’s Call Tracking tool. Assign different phone numbers to each campaign and see which one is working best for you through a simple platform that allows you to see which numbers are getting the most calls. Stop wasting money on ads that aren’t getting any traction and put more time into perfecting your signature dish or cocktail.