Kids as a way to attract customers to your restaurant

We all know by now how important kids are when certain families decide to eat out. If we want those families to see our restaurant as an option, we have to give children much more weight.

Many situations revolve around kids and their family's potential visit to a restaurant.

We know exactly how important this topic is, so as restaurant owners we have to be smart and create the means that make us an option for the families who want to eat out.

What do the big players do about this?

We know that large restaurants and chains have special play areas, and that is usually a good way to attract customers, but it is only within reach if you have a fairly large budget available, and it is not a very common or convenient option for every type of restaurant, so it is not something worth copying.

They have a kids' menu, which in most cases tends to be quite profitable, especially when they run campaigns announcing that kids' combos come with a "free" toy.

Those are old techniques that have proven to work very well, but since they are so common, I honestly have no idea how profitable they really are at this point, and given the obvious competition, they may not be as profitable as they used to be, and they will hardly be profitable for a small restaurant.

So what strategy would be advisable?

There is a very interesting movement that can serve as a model if we want to make the most of families with young children. Most restaurant associations that conduct studies in different countries agree that today, one key to this issue is the availability of healthy alternatives for kids in restaurants.

That is right… any restaurant that pays attention to this will see excellent results and the studies say so, not me, which is why this topic deserves more weight.

What a restaurant should do is work on offering kids' options that meet these two elements:

• 1 – They should be healthy and nutritious. This will keep parents from hesitating to visit the restaurant. Something that simply fills kids up is not enough; you should consider healthy food that is more beneficial for the child.
• 2 – They should be visually appealing to kids. With the control and decision-making power kids have today, it is clear that you will have to work on something that appeals to them too.

As parents, does it make sense?

Parents are increasingly concerned about how careless or harmful our children's diet can be, and if there is a restaurant we want to visit to have a good time that also offers healthy alternatives for our kids, it is almost certain that we will visit it and prefer it over the classic big-chain restaurants that bring fun to our kids but usually leave aside the importance of eating healthy.

As restaurant industry business owners

Attracting families generates tables of no fewer than 3 people, and we all know how important it is to attract groups, just as we discussed in the article Attracting customers in groups to increase a restaurant's sales, which we invite you to read if you have not done so yet.