How Do Fast Food Restaurants Attract Customers?

Attracting customers can be tricky sometimes but big franchises such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and you name it, have been pouring millions of dollars each year only for marketing and research about the best ways and they have perfected it.

In this post, we are going through the 11 best ways how to attract customers where from many are something you might expect and they truly work, and other methods are really clever and unique. Let’s take a peek at the methods.

1. Ads

You guessed it, ads are a great way to get something to people’s attention and money is the powerful tool here and fast food chains well have a little bit of money… When launching an ad on the internet you are paying a specific amount of money to get a specific amount of people to see it, the more money you use on it the more people will see it.

There are more powerful ways to advertise to a fast food restaurant such as Tv ads, billboard ads, bus stop ads, and virtually everywhere.

Also, there are super clever ways that for example, Mc Donalds have advertised for free to their franchise. They once planted super rare flowers in the shape of ”M” to a hill right on the side of a highly trafficked highway and that surely gets everyone’s attention when driving by a giant yellow flower bed shaped like M.

In addition to that the flowers were that rare that it’s illegal to pluck them out, therefore, it stayed there for months and costs only the amount of the seeds.

2. Limited Time Promotions

Limited-time promotions are a great way to get people thinking that they need to try that while it is available. Many fast-food chains have created a theme around a super famous movie that is trending at the moment to enhance the promotion effect even more. There are different

kinds of fries, burgers, sodas, ice creams and meal options that a restaurant could use to get that hype around so there are infinite promotions were to choose from.

When launching a promotion those products are usually more expensive as well and it will increase profits by a lot. Imagine if a fast-food chain charges $1 dollar more from a burger or a meal, that is millions of dollars difference because the buying volumes are so huge.

3. Deals

Fast food restaurants use various ”deals” that feel and usually are a better choice when hungry. For example, when offering 5pc of nuggets for $2 and if you take 10pc you can get it only for $3, in that situation if you choose the 10pcs the restaurants get more profit and you get 5 nuggets for $1 instead of the $2.

The sky is the limit in this case as well and most restaurants provide discounts from ice creams, desserts, or side snacks to a meal buyer and think about it how many times you have added the extra with a smaller price to your meal, there you can see that it truly works.

4. Beautiful Pictures

This is where you really start to get your mind fixed that you need to get to a fast-food restaurant as fast as you can. The mouth-watering ad and display pictures are made within a professional team of artists, photographers, Photoshoppers, and critics to get that ultimate and best possible outcome of the picture. Those pictures go to the eyes of millions of people so the pressures are high and so are the demands.

There is another reason why you can’t just get a picture from a finished burger and use that, and it is the fact that if done that way the customers wouldn’t know exactly what they are going to get.

When placing the ingredients to display in the picture the customers can see okay I’m getting 2 patties, some onions, pickles, and oh there is hot sauce as well so they can make an informed decision about do they want that or not. It usually is yes tho…

5. Decor, Lightning, And Overall Look

This might become a surprise to you as it came to me as well when first learned about it, and it considers seating, tables, lighting, distances, and everything that is what it is because of a reason.

The lights in a fast food restaurant are usually more bright than most would like, the seats aren’t that comfortable and it can get crowded really fast so the customers would want to leave and not spend too much time in there so the restaurant could get more customers faster. That’s why they are FAST food restaurants.

6. Multiple Choice Options

When the fast-food restaurants came into existence they usually offered a couple of different choices and everything was the same size. Those days are behind us and fast food chains have come a long way since that with the 3-5 different soda sizes, dozens of meal choices, and recent years has brought variations for vegans, healthy diets, and special cases as well.

This has really made it simple and easy for literally anyone to walk into the restaurant and enjoy a meal without any obstacles in the way, resulting in more and more customers each year.

7. Child-Friendly Inducements And Collectibles

Nearly all restaurants have been offering toys, collectibles, glasses, and other things that children would really enjoy for years now.

This will greatly increase the sales in a couple of ways.

Firstly if the restaurant offers collectibles that can very well be the reason a person walks into a restaurant and when the person gets the first collectible, there’s a high chance that she comes back to get more for the set.

The second way is to offer toys that children would really love and in the best case that can result in a whole family comes to eat which again means more customers and more money spent.

8. Applications

Everyone has heard from the Mc Donalds Christmas calendar and other franchise apps that will give you discounts, stamp cards, events, and other baits that you can get excited from.

Within the apps, there are usually giveaways that when providing an email address you have a chance to win the latest console, big gift card, or a vacation. A little sum to pay for the restaurant when thousands of people give their email addresses and they can use email marketing as well to notify you from the latest events and promotions.

9. Offer Takeout And Online Ordering

The world has changed so much from the early days of fast-food restaurants and nowadays you don’t have to leave your house to get that tasty treat from a restaurant.

Online ordering is a huge percent of orders nowadays and it gets bigger every single year. And things get even better when a restaurant doesn’t need to set up a delivery system of their own when there are Uber Eats, Wolt, and all the other delivery companies that make it easy for them as well.

10. Coupons

Coupons are a great way to push a customer to come and eat in the restaurant. But how does it differ from promotion and discount displayed in an ad or commercial?

Well, when holding that physical piece of paper that states you will get a discount or a free item with this that is much more likely to encourage the customer to go and use it than a virtually displayed text that the person cant actually touch.

In addition to that coupons are one of the earliest ways to offer benefits for the customer so especially older people love to use them and it might be the determining reason if the person comes to eat or not.

11. Social Media

Started as a way for people to connect and now social media plays a huge role in marketing, beating your customer, and being even a business model.

This won’t work as well if a fast-food chain generally announces from the latest events and promotion in their main social media account, it needs to be a specific restaurant from that area where the people are living, this will have a much more of an impact and higher chances of people coming in and ordering something.

Most fast-food restaurants have their own social media accounts for the locals to follow and catch up with the latest trends.

Conclusion

These are the obvious and secret ways that fast food restaurants use to get the most of the available traffic out there and get those last people to eat in their restaurant.

If you have a restaurant and aren’t using most of these strategies, you will be surprised what they can do after you have started using them for part of your business.

Feel free to comment if you are using one or more of these strategies and how are they working in your restaurant!