How to attract new customers with restaurant competitions

Looking for innovative strategies to attract new diners to your restaurant? You've come to the right place! Competitions have become an effective and exciting way of arousing customer interest and encouraging them to enter your establishment!

Let's take a look at why you too should try your hand at competition games to attract new guests. We'll provide you with a variety of tried-and-tested game ideas, as well as tips on how to implement them successfully!

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Why use competitions to attract new customers to your restaurant?

What are the benefits of restaurant competitions? We tell you all about it!

1. Attract and retain

The use of competitions is a winning strategy for attracting new customers to your establishment. By offering the chance to take part in attractive contests, you create a sense of excitement and interest around your restaurant!

 Here are some of the advantages of contests:

• Attract new customers: Competitions act like a magnet, attracting the attention of people who might otherwise have passed your restaurant by. Enticing prizes and opportunities to win free meals or exclusive discounts encourage people to enter and discover your cuisine.

• Retain existing customers: Competitions are not only designed to attract new guests, they also strengthen ties with existing ones.

👉 To find out more: The best tips for building customer loyalty in your restaurant

2. Increase visibility and engagement

Competitions are also an effective way of increasing your restaurant's visibility and generating active engagement from diners: 

• Increased visibility on social networks: By offering contests on popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, you benefit from wider exposure. Participants share their entries and interact with your content, increasing your restaurant's organic reach and reaching new audiences.

• Creating engagement and virality: Competitions engage participants, who actively share their experiences and invite their friends to take part.
  

• Gathering valuable data: Competitions enable you to gather valuable information about your potential customers, such as their food preferences, contact details and consumption habits.

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What's the budget?

There are two types of competition:

• those that require a financial investment on your part (offering your customers a meal, a drink, a dessert)

• and those that simply require an investment of time (discovery of your kitchens, a cooking class with your team).

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Where to broadcast contests?

Instagram: captivating food lovers with mouth-watering photos

Instagram is an ideal platform for attracting food lovers and piquing their interest with creative competitions.

Here's how to leverage Instagram to attract new customers:

• Culinary photo contest: Encourage participants to share their best photos of dishes taken in your restaurant, using a specific hashtag. Organize a contest to select the best photo, offering an attractive reward such as a free dish or a discount voucher to the winner.

• Influencer partnerships: Collaborating with culinary influencers on Instagram can help you increase your visibility. Organize sweepstakes contests in partnership with these influencers, where they invite their followers to enter to win unique dining experiences at your restaurant!
  

👉 Going further: 11 Instagram post ideas for your restaurant.

Attract new customers with interactive contests on Facebook

Facebook offers a multitude of options for organizing interactive contests and attracting new customers.

Here are a few ideas:

• Comment contest: Post a culinary question or challenge on your Facebook page and encourage participants to answer it in the comments. Select a winner from among the most creative or relevant answers, and offer an attractive reward linked to your restaurant.
  

• Culinary quizzes: Why not organize fun culinary quizzes on Facebook, with questions about gastronomy, famous dishes or your restaurant's specialities! 

Use TikTok to attract a younger audience with culinary challenges

TikTok is a very popular platform with young people, and offers unique opportunities to attract new customers through culinary challenges.

Here's how to use TikTok to promote your restaurant:

• Recipe challenges: Launch recipe challenges on TikTok, inviting users to recreate iconic dishes from your restaurant. Encourage them to share their videos using a specific hashtag, and offer attractive prizes to the most creative or popular participants.
  

• Entertaining content: Create entertaining and engaging content on TikTok, showcasing your restaurant's atmosphere, behind-the-scenes cooking or your chef's talents. Use popular music, creative transitions and visual effects to grab users' attention!

In your restaurant: communicate as much as possible

You can also tell your customers about your competitions directly at the checkout.

If you ever have an order-taking solution such as a kiosk, why not offer your competition directly on it? It's an excellent way of building customer loyalty, encouraging them to use the kiosk and promoting you on social networks!

Here are some ideas for your terminal:

• Guess the secret ingredient in a dish, guess the new dish on the menu, or guess any other changes that have occurred in the restaurant.
• Quizzes: test your customers with a few questions related to your establishment, your region or your specialities.
• Co-creation: involve your customers in the creation of a new drink or dessert. The winner will be the one who comes up with the winning name.

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Competitions for special occasions

Valentine's Day competitions

Valentine's Day is the perfect occasion to organize contests in your restaurant and attract couples looking for a romantic experience. Hold a romantic dinner contest (for example, the couple who shares their most beautiful love story wins).

You can also hold a creative table decorating competition, where guests share photos of their staged tables.

Attract holiday bookings with Christmas competitions

As you know, the festive season is a key time of year. Christmas competitions can help you attract customers and encourage bookings for the festive celebrations. Here too, you can create quizzes or play the originality card with Christmas recipe contests, for example, where customers share their best Christmas recipes on the networks, tagging your establishment!

👉 Going further: 9 ideas to improve your restaurant's communication and marketing!

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Did you like these tips? Don't hesitate to consult our other articles on our blog to help you develop your business!

Innovorder is the leader in digital solutions for commercial and institutional foodservice. Our team supports restaurateurs in their digital transformation with a complete ecosystem.