Marketing Strategies For Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) | Grow Your QSR Using These Marketing Strategies

Yash Taneja

Jul 23, 2020 — 5 min read

Quick Service Restaurants or QSRs or Fast Food Restaurants are a type of restaurants that serve fast food or Quick Service to their customers. QSRs are more popular than traditional restaurants due to a number of reasons. The most important reason is that it has a low ticket size. That is, for a price much cheaper than what you need to spend at cafes or restaurants, you can get quicker and better service. The number of Quick Service Restaurants is increasing day by day. Hence, it becomes essential to adopt right marketing strategies for you to remain at the top of your business.

Marketing Strategies For QSRs

1. Create A Good Website For Your QSR

A good website attracts many customers. People will research about your business and when they go to your website, they must not be disappointed. You should add pictures and videos of cuisines offered at your QSR so that people are attracted towards your business.
Make use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools so that your website pops up at the tops when someone searches ‘QSRs near me’ or ‘Fast Food Stores near me’.
Add your QSR on the ‘Google my Business’ listing to improve the chances of people finding about your restaurant.
Add details such as opening and closing hours, contact number, website, etc so that people get to know about your QSR.

QSR Marketing Strategies — Google My Business Listings Will Show Your QSR When People Search On Google

2. Use Social Media Marketing And Make Your Presence Strong On Social Media Platforms

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the best digital marketing strategy as almost everyone uses social media nowadays. Instagram alone has over a billion active users daily. Therefore, choosing the right Social Media Marketing Strategies will help your QSR to grow. Some important points of Social Media Marketing are:

Use paid advertisements offered by social media platforms to reach out to more and more people
Collaborate with Food Bloggers and Influencers that can write good reviews about your QSR. These people have a huge presence on social media and collaborating with them can increase the number of customers of your store significantly
Be active on social media. People are interested in businesses that are active on social media. Post regularly about the dishes you offer to your customers and about offers and deals.
Reply to every query and complaint by your customers through social media.

QSR Marketing Strategy — Use The Power Of Social Media To Build Your Customer Base

3. Partner With Food Delivery Apps

This is the only thing that will help run your QSR during current times as people cannot visit your QSR to enjoy their favourite meals. This will also help you to reach more people and gather new customers as their will be some people who will get to know about your QSR through these apps only.
Zomato, Swiggy, Uber Eats, Dunzo and Foodpanda are some of the most popular food delivery apps in India.

4. Email Marketing

This still remains one of the most important business strategy. There are many tools available online for the creation and sending of good quality commercial emails to your customers. Also, in comparison to social media marketing, email marketing can be more personalized and more economic. Almost all people check their emails regularly and find these types of personalized emails attractive.

You can send emails to your loyal customers informing them about offers and discounts
You can send them personalized offers (Just For You!). Such types of personalized offers will attract your customers
Send them emails regarding changes in menu and items that are ‘Today’s Special’

5. Offer Deals To Local Offices And Workplaces

You can partner with local offices and workplaces around your area. This will help in the growth of your QSR especially if your business is new. You can reach out to them and offer them deals to deliver food items at discounted rates for their employees. This will also initiate the process of mouth-to-mouth promotion which will lead to the increase in number of your customers.

6. Offer Deals And Discounts To Your Loyal Customers

Show your gratitude to your loyal customer base by offering them special discounts and offers. Offer time limited discounts. This strategy will attract your loyal customers as well as other people to buy from you.

7. Offer A Good And Hygienic Dining Space

Although some QSRs have minimal dining space, it must be good and hygienic so that people feel comfortable sitting there and eating. Some QSRs such as McDonald’s also provide free Wi-Fi service to their customers. If a customer visits your QSR and isn’t satisfied, he/she won’t visit again. As they say, ‘First impression is the last impression ’. This in fact is true in this case also. Also maintain a clean and safe working environment for people that work at your QSR.

Adoption of good marketing strategies is a very essential process for the growth of your QSR or any other business. Choosing the right strategies and implementing them correctly will lead to success and growth while the opposite can lead to the downfall of your QSR. Some of these marketing tips can prove out to be difficult to implement, but once they are implemented correctly, they will undoubtedly bear good results for your QSR.