Millennial Marketing Tips for Restaurants
Tips from our webinar with Toast
Reaching millennials online can drive real results for your restaurant. Millennials (18–34 year olds) are the largest and most influential group of consumers. There are 70 million millennials in the U.S. spending about 27 hours per week on social media and about $600 billion every year. You can see why appealing to this generation can influence your bottom line.
Don’t miss our full webinar with Toast, a restaurant point of sale and management system that helps restaurants improve operations, increase sales and create a better guest experience, on marketing to millennials:
The first step to reach millennials and make them want to visit your restaurant is to make your restaurant millennial-friendly. Here’s a tip from Toast:
There’s no point marketing to millennials if your restaurant isn’t millennial-friendly.
The way to make your restaurant a place young people want to visit is to start integrating technology into the customer experience.
77% of millennials say tech improves the restaurant experience.
According to Toast, millennials are the most common users of apps and ordering sites. To make their experience the best it can be, they suggest implementing the following tech upgrades to your restaurant if you haven’t already:
- Guest Wifi
- Online Ordering
- Online Reservations
- Loyalty Programs
- Digital Gift Cards
- Mobile Payment Options
- Digital Receipts
Be Authentic
When it comes to your presence online, it’s important to be authentic to attract millennial customers and keep them coming back. They want to know what a business is all about before they decide to spend their money there.
Tell your story
The bio sections in the profile pages of your social media accounts provide your business with a great opportunity to tell your story in a couple sentences that will catch your customers’ attention. Check out how this ice cream shop tells their story:
Engage With Your Customers Online
Engaging with your customers on social media means liking user comments, responding to user questions, and liking user posts. It’s a great way to build relationships with your younger fanbase — over 60% of millennials say they’ll become loyal to a business if the brand engages with them online.
Check out this example of a BBQ restaurant responding to user comments on Facebook:
It can be that simple — just acknowledging their comment by liking it and then responding to it can influence whether or not a customer might want to pay your business a visit.
Support your community and showcase your values
Millennials want to align themselves with organizations that are making a positive impact on their local communities, on the country, and on the world. Giving back is important to them — in fact, according to a recent millennial impact report, 52% of millennials polled gave money to charity in the previous month and 46% gave their time. If you want to appeal to this generation, you can start supporting a cause at your business —and, a good place to start is with a local organization trying to make a difference in your community.
Get behind a cause
Try reaching out to a local charity or non-profit organization to set up an event. You’ll be helping out your local community and bringing in young people at the same time.
In this example, this restaurant is supporting a local environmental organization Keep Austin Beautiful with an event:
In this example, many of these elements appeal to millennials — local products and organizations, giving back to the community, and a raffle/contest. Try utilizing these elements in your business to bring in more young people and keep them coming back.
“With the first of the millennial generation now in their thirties and the majority of millennials beginning their careers, they will be an important engine of the economy in the coming decade.” — Statista
Watch the full webinar “4 Millennial Marketing Tips for Restaurants,” here:
Reach millennials today by downloading our guide, or get started with us here.
