Every savvy restaurateur understands the impact of seasonality to their bottom line. Armed with our 2018 Foodservice Calendar, operators can now plan ahead and come up with seasonal ideas and new ways to promote their business and increase their sales.
The Importance of Planning Ahead
As the old adage goes, failing to plan is planning to fail. Not having a strong promotional plan for your food business can significantly impact your sales: you may be missing on growth opportunities or not preparing for the quieter times.
So, how do you go about in planning your promotions in 2018?
The first step is to get your hands on a good calendar and identify key events and dates of importance to your business. To help you in this process, we have compiled The Complete Foodservice Calendar for 2018. The calendar highlights all upcoming events for this year such as: holidays, festivities, food expos, food celebration days, festivals, sports events and other seasonal happenings. We haven’t missed anything!
DOWNLOAD CALENDAR HERE
Once you get the calendar, start thinking about how to make the most of those key dates.
3 Core Things to Plan in Advance
- Promotions: What promotions you can run on the various seasonal themes
- Menu Seasonality: What menu changes you can make to optimise for each season
- Marketing activities: what will you need to best spread the word about your promotions both in-store and online via your website and social media.
7 Practical Steps To Make the Most of Each Event
- Plan all promotions in advance to have enough time to prepare
- Print posters, table tents, etc. Stick them up around the venue before the event. Check out these print-ready posters we’ve created, completely free to download.
- Create social media posts for those special days and post on your Facebook/Twitter/Instagram pages
- Post about the event on the week running up to the event to ensure maximum awareness and to build anticipation
- Use key hashtags related to this day to join the social media conversation that is already happening
- Run a social media competition or interactive campaign on the day to create more interest and engagement.
- Don’t overstretch – do less, better. Only pick a few key events you believe will have the most impact on your business and invest all your promotional effort in those.
Get planning today – download the print-ready calendar here!
