Running a restaurant comes with a variety of challenges. You must fine-tune your menu to suit local tastes. You must also find talented wait staff to serve your customers and leave them delighted. However, one of the most challenging aspects of running a local restaurant is finding a way to market it. Since restaurants are a low-margin business, spending big money on marketing efforts is rarely an option. As an alternative, working to get some free exposure is a good idea. Custom hats offer multiple ways to do that. Here are some ways to use custom hats to market a local restaurant.
Branded Hats for Servers and Staff
The most basic way to market a local restaurant with custom hats is to make them part of your staff’s dress code. Having your employees wear your logo while at work will create a strong reinforcing impression among your customers. Plus, you can expect many of your employees to wear their hats to and from work. That gives your business some added free exposure amongst the public. You can outfit your delivery staff with branded hats if your restaurant offers food delivery.
Custom Hats for Food Challenges
One of the best ways to draw new customers into your restaurant is by offering a food challenge. They are any-time events where a customer must attempt to eat a substantial food portion in a preset amount of time. If they succeed, the food is free. If not, they pay full price. You can make such a challenge an even more effective marketing tool with custom hats. For example, you can make two hat variants for customers who succeed or fail the challenge. That turns every challenger into free advertising for your restaurant, whether they succeed or fail.
Sell Branded Hats to Customers
You can also make a variety of custom-branded hats to sell to your customers. Those can provide a valuable marketing opportunity that pays for itself. It’s a good idea to design at least three hat variants to get started. Ideally, using the same designs on additional merchandise would be best to round out your offerings. You can sell those items in person and on your restaurant’s website. You’ll find that branded items sell well among your regulars and customers stopping in while traveling. They work exceptionally well if you go out of your way to make every customer’s visit memorable. That turns your merchandise into attractive keepsakes customers will have no problem paying for.
A Versatile Marketing Solution
Custom hats are among the most popular promotional items in various business types. They’re inexpensive to produce, come in endless styles, colors, and fits, and have multiple applications, as demonstrated above. Plus, people love hats. That makes it more likely that anyone who receives one of your restaurant’s hats will wear it. They can generate the kind of local exposure that your restaurant needs to survive and thrive. In other words, they’re a near-perfect low-cost marketing solution for your local restaurant.
People love supporting local restaurants, but they must know about your restaurant first. Custom hats are a unique way to spread marketing efforts by word of mouth and involve the local community.
