As a restaurateur, a great way to attract new customers and pique the interest of your regulars is by sprucing up your drinks menu. In an age where social sharing is the norm, the more intriguing your drinks are, the more exposure your brand will get, resulting in more people learning about your restaurant.
Review your current menu
You could start off by having a look at your existing menu and seeing how you can play around with the ingredients. This will serve as a starting point for creating unique drink options, which may become signature cocktails for your restaurant. For instance, you could add a new ingredient to a Mojito and give it a new name, associated with your brand. Take note of which fruits are available in each season and create alternative cocktails to accommodate the seasonal changes.
Be unique
Another way you can make the drinks more appealing is by adding local ingredients. This will also serve to attract tourists, who may be keen to try a new version of their favourite cocktail.
You could try ingredients not commonly used in cocktails, such as avocados for a creamy taste. To attract customers who are health and beauty conscious, you could add goji berries which are believed to have anti-ageing properties. This calls on you to know your customers and serve drinks that would be appealing to them.
For the adventurous and daring restaurateur, you can come up with your own signature cocktail. As a way of getting your customers involved, you could have a cocktail tasting promotion, where your customers try different signature cocktails. In this way, they would get a chance to pick the best cocktails for inclusion in your menu. Not only will this serve to build brand loyalty among regular customers, but it will also help to spread the word about your restaurant among your customers’ network, resulting in more of their friends knowing about what you have to offer.
Create conversations
Once you’ve created the cocktails, invest in a professional photography session, to ensure your cocktail imagery is appealing. Sharing the images on social media, your website, as well as branding inside and outside your restaurant, will help people know that you have something they should try. You should also bear in mind that your customers will be taking pictures of the drinks, to share with their friends. The presentation of the drink is thus important, a lot of people are attracted to food and drinks because of the way they look in photographs, especially if it is the food they have never tried before.
Video is another great medium to use in showcasing your cocktails. You could share videos of your bartender mixing the drinks or showing how the drink looks as it gets poured into the glass. These can serve to pique the interest of customers and should be shared on your digital channels.
As you create interesting cocktails for your restaurant and share your updated menu through various media channels, you will create interest and conversations around your brand. This may help to get more people coming in, to dine at your restaurant.
