6 Ways to Market Your Restaurant or Cafe Business in Malaysia and Get More Customers (With Examples)

Customers are the lifeline of every restaurant or cafe business. Even if you have the tastiest food and the most beautiful interiors, if you don’t have a way to keep customers coming back to your restaurant or cafe, you will most likely need to close shop before you intend to.

Now, the big question is: how do you attract people to your business not once, but time and time again?

This is a question both new and long-time cafe and restaurant owners ask themselves.

Thankfully, getting customers to your cafe or restaurant and getting them to come back again and again isn’t a mystery.

There are specific strategies you can apply to ensure that your customers think of you when they are looking for a place to hang out, and have a great time.

What are these strategies?

Let’s take a look!

#1. Buy 1 Free 1 Promotions

Buy 1 Free 1 promotions are one of the easiest promotions to create and run. They are simple to understand and instantly attractive even to people who might not have heard about your brand before.

It’s true: few can resist the pull of ‘Buy 1 Free 1’.

This is why launching a Buy 1 Free 1 promotion can be one of the fastest ways to draw in a large crowd to your cafe or restaurant. The crowds of people at your cafe or restaurant then draw even more crowds when curious passers-by see the crowds and tell themselves: ‘What’s so attractive about that place? Maybe I should check it out!’

The biggest downside of this type of promo is that you might attract bargain hunters who give your business a try during the promo and never buy again.

Nonetheless, when done strategically, Buy 1 Free 1 promos can be one of the fastest and cheapest ways to get more people to know about your brand, and products.

Example: Tealive Attracts Crowds at Each New Branch

Buy 1 Free 1 is an ongoing strategy used by homegrown bubble milk tea brand Tealive.

Each time they open a new branch, they will launch a Buy 1 Free 1 promo.

Take a look at this recent promo at a new branch in Penang:

Copy this strategy for your own cafe or restaurant and watch the crowds pour in!

How You Can Do This

If you want to run this campaign for your own F&B business, here’s how to get started:

1. Decide on which item you want. Pick out an item you want to promote. We recommend promoting a popular product with a high margin for best effect and lowest cost.
2. Decide on the promo period. You won’t be running this promo forever, so you’ll need to decide when exactly you want to run this promo and for how long.
3. Decide on the marketing strategy. Once you’ve picked out the product and promo period, it’s time to get creative and design the marketing campaign to get people to know about it! Design attractive graphics and choose a marketing channel to distribute them.

#2. Run Voucher Campaigns

Voucher campaigns can be yet another effective way to get people who don’t know about you yet to try your products.

Voucher campaigns are when you offer a specific percentage discount for a selected product or products for a specific time period.

While similar to a Buy 1 Free 1 promotion, voucher campaigns are more suited for products that you don’t want to give a ‘cheap’ impression of by restricting the percentage discount to under 50%.

The benefit of a voucher campaign is that if you’re running it for a specific product, it’s likely that your customers will order other normal priced items.

If they have a good time, they’ll likely come back again and buy at a normal price!

Example of How Partnering with Fave Helped Bring Customers to this Japanese Buffet Place

One of the easiest ways to promote your voucher campaign is by partnering with a deals consolidator site like Fave.

Check out this voucher campaign this Japanese Buffet place ran with Fave recently (36% discount off their normal price of RM48.37):

So far, 175 people have bought this deal:

That’s 175 new or returning customers to this Japanese Buffet restaurant!

How You Can Do This

If you want to run a voucher campaign for your own F&B business, here’s how to get started:

1. Decide on which item you want. Pick out an item you want to promote. We recommend promoting a flagship product you can take at least 10% off and still make some profit from.
2. Decide on the promo period. You won’t be running this promo forever, so you’ll need to decide when exactly you want to run this promo and for how long.
3. Decide on the marketing strategy. The easiest way to promote voucher campaigns is by partnering with sites like Fave. They take a cut from your sales, but you’ll be able to tap on their marketing team and their large customer database.
4. If you choose to promote this yourself though, you can design a campaign on Facebook, or Instagram to get the promotion out there!

#3. Partner with or Buy Ads from Social Media Influencers

Influencer marketing is one of the biggest trends in the last few years. If you’re not yet familiar with influencer marketing, it usually means partnering with social media accounts with a large following to bring awareness to your brand.

Influencer marketing are the new billboard ads. If you want eyeballs on your brand, these days, one of the top places to look for it is on Instagram accounts.

Influencer marketing is particularly effective because their followers tend to be more engaged compared to traditional billboards.

Working with influencers either by paying for posts or giving them something in return can help expose your brand to their audience.

Example: Kreepiz’s Feature on VitDaily

Here is an example of a popular food channel on YouTube doing a review for a local onion chip brand, Kreepiz:

With a large number of highly engaged follower on YouTube, Facebook and their website, VitDaily is able to help Kreepiz reach a large number of potential customer and boost Kreepiz’s brand name in the snacks space.

How You Can Do This

1. Decide on the type of compensation you can afford. Can you pay the influencers upfront? If not, what would you be able to offer them?
2. Decide on the type of influencers that best fit your brand. Find out which influencers’ brand message best aligns with your own brand and reach out to them to ask for collaboration and what they’ll be happy to be compensated with.
3. Craft a marketing campaign around all the influencers you’ve hired. Once you’ve gathered your influencers, it’s time to craft your marketing campaign around them. For best effect, be sure to launch your influencer posts in the same time period so your brand appears to be ‘everywhere’.

Pro tip: not all influencers are open to exchange partnerships. If they are asking for payment, respect their decision and look on.

#4. Make your Food or Place ‘Insta-worthy’

There’s no denying social media’s influence on decisions these days. Social media has become the number one place millennials and General Z looks at when deciding which cafe or restaurant to go to next.

These are the generations of customers who are likely going to open Instagram first to look for places. So, if you are a cafe or business owner who wants to be popular among the internet-savvy generation of today, you’ll have to make sure that your cafe or restaurant and its food are unique, or interesting enough to be talked about on Instagram.

The more people talk about you on social media, the more new people get exposed to your business, and the more customers you get.

In other words, if you can make your food and place ‘insta-worthy’, you’ll be able to create an ongoing conversation around your business on social media.

Example: People are Flocking to this Insta-worthy Unicorn Cafe in Malaysia

One cafe that has successfully used their ‘insta-worthiness’ to attract a large crowd to their business is the unicorn-themed Le Fluer Cafe:

Their uniquely designed cafe and theme has attracted a lot of attention all over social media, and has even gotten them multiple media features!

How You Can do this

If you want to kickstart your own ‘insta-worthy’ food and design, here’s how you can get started:

1. Scour Instagram to discover and get inspiration from insta-worthy cafes or restaurants in Malaysia
2. Pick out the elements of each insta-worthy feature you can adapt into your own cafe or restaurant
3. Launch your new food or design by inviting influencers with large followings to try your food, or pay them to write about you. If you’ve done a good job of creating an insta-worthy food or place, your brand will start trending on social media!

Pro tip: Trends come and go. What is insta-worthy today can quickly become stale and boring tomorrow. Come up with something new every few weeks or months to keep things fresh and the conversation going about your brand.

#5. Partner with Well-Known Brands

Forming collaborative partnerships with well-known brands can help your own brand grow by borrowing the credibility and brand awareness of the larger brand.

While other FnB businesses may come to mind when you think of partnerships, in reality, you can partner with any kind of business, as long as you can build a win-win collaboration with them.

One of the most common ways FnB companies can build collaborations with bigger brands are by offering exclusive discounts to specific companies.

By doing so, you’ll attract that company’s fan customer base to give your products a try while allowing that brand to look good in front of their customer base.

Example: Growing Brand Awareness With Grab Food

An example of a brand partnership is La Juicera’s collaboration with Grab Food where they offered free delivery for orders made from their restaurants through Grab Food:

Grab Food gains a good reputation for free deliveries while La Juiceria gets their brand exposed to Grab’s large customer base.

How to do this

If you’re interested to run a partner campaign, you can follow these steps to get started:

1. Think about the type of promotion you want to run (a discount, free delivery, or free desserts?).
2. Look for existing or previously completed collaborations with the brand you’re interested in. It’s more likely for the brand to agree on the collaboration if they have already had success with them.
3. Create a proposal and pitch the brand on the collaboration.

Pro tip: be sure to make the promotion campaign a win-win situation. This will more likely bring attention to you.

#6. Word of mouth marketing

Last but not least is the oldest and one of the most effective marketing techniques in the book: word of mouth marketing.

According to Global Web Index, word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful techniques around. Reading or hearing reviews about a place from someone who has been there before can either encourage or discourage a customer to patronize a cafe or restaurant.

The reason for this is because when people recommend a business to their friends, they are using their own reputation as a guarantee. Since nobody wants to look bad in front of other people, they will usually only recommend a place they know can give other people a good time.

And the best way to get people to say great things about you?

That’s by delivering not only good food, and a great location, but excellent service. And not once, twice, but every single time.

Example: How New York Pizza Keeps Their FnB Daily Operation Smooth

New York Pizza uses a specialised FnB POS system to help them smoothen their day-to-day operations:

How You Can Do This

The best way to get people to recommend your business to people around them is by giving them a great service. Make another cafe or restaurant’s standard of excellence become your F&B’s normal.

Other than hiring experienced and professional staff to help you with this, you need systems that can enable you to run your cafe or restaurant smoothly.

The first thing you need to do is ensure your kitchen SOPs are in place. These will ensure that the quality of your food and drinks stay consistent, no matter when a customer comes by your FnB establishment.

Once that is ready, you’ll want to focus on ensuring that your customer’s whole ordering and dining experience goes well.

The best way to achieve this is by ensuring that you have a robust, reliable and well designed FnB POS System in place.

What does a well-designed FnB POS System look like?

It’s one that can:

• Take orders correctly
• Pass the orders correctly from the waiter to the kitchen directly (with table numbers)
• Issue receipts for your customers on payment
• Capture all payments
• Link with your inventory to ensure you’ll always have enough stocks of fresh ingredients to prepare your meals

Pro tip: Get a POS system that is specialised in FnB, not a generic POS System. We may be a little biased here, but we think you should check out Slurp! POS system (ours :)).  We designed this system to handle your day to day POS needs from front-end cashier to your back-end kitchen. Check it out:

Conclusion

With more and more cafes and restaurants popping up every day in Malaysia, having great tasting food and a nice ambiance is no longer enough to keep your FnB business going.

You’ll also need to have a solid marketing plan in place if you want to stay relevant and get ahead of your competition. Without one, you’ll likely face the fate of an empty cafe or restaurant.

Thankfully, there are many ways you can market your cafe or restaurant to your potential customers. Other than attracting them with discounts and vouchers, you can borrow the credibility of known brands by partnering with them to run promotions.

The best marketing, though, isn’t a fancy campaign. Instead, it’s simply your personal commitment to building a cafe or restaurant experience for your customers that they’ll want to come back to time and time again.

Let us know! Have you applied any of these marketing strategies before? Which did you find most effective? Leave a comment below: