Restaurants: 9 ideas to fill up your Valentine's Day party

The festival of love, Valentine's Day, is one of the highlights of the year for restaurateurs, who see an increase in the number of visitors to their establishments over the course of an evening. Many are keen to make this annual interlude a unique and romantic moment for their customers in love. But transforming your restaurant for an evening is no easy task, and neither is standing out from your competitors, who are also sure to take advantage of the occasion. So how do you stand out from the crowd and convince your customers to celebrate love in your establishment?

Valentine's Day is the second biggest customer peak for restaurantsafter New Year's Eve. On this special day, restaurateurs post a fill rate between 80 and 100% occupancy rate! It's also an opportunity for them toincrease the average bill of their customers, who spend between €25 and €50 more per coupleon this special evening . There's no doubt about it, then: Valentine's Day is a real opportunity for restaurateurs to boost their sales this February. But it's also a time to gain visibility with a new clientele and surprise regular customers! In 2019 64% of French people celebrated Valentine's Day. They see this holiday as an opportunity to get away from their daily routine. The restaurant, as an experiential venue, is therefore seen as a space that offers a change of scene and the chance to spend an unusual evening, but how do you satisfy the desires of those celebrating Valentine's Day? And how can you surprise your loyal clientele, who will be delighted to discover something new? Here are 9 ideas to ensure the success of your restaurant's Valentine's Day party.

DRESS UP YOUR RESTAURANT FOR VALENTINE'S DAY

1. Thinking up a special menu for the evening: the example of the Auberge Nicolas Flamel

Offering a special Valentine's Day menu in your restaurant is an opportunity to meet the expectations of lovers in search of romance, as well as those of your regular clientele, who will be pleasantly surprised to discover new dishes. In particular, this menu is an opportunity to choose more noble products, and therefore more expensive than usual, which will enable you to increase your prices. People celebrating Valentine's Day are not averse to spending more in restaurants on this special day. For example in almost half of casescustomers opt for menus priced between 50 and 100 euros. A further 8% choose menus costing more than 100 euros.

Valentine's Day is therefore an opportunity for restaurateurs to let their imaginations run wild and offer a different menu from the one displayed on their menus the rest of the year. For the occasion, there are many tempting proposals: a red menu? A menu designed to be shared entirely by lovers? To make sure you don't make a mistake, it's also possible to propose a menu featuring all your establishment's flagship dishes.Offering an exceptional menu is the logic followed every year by theAuberge Nicolas Flamel, the oldest Parisian inn. It concocts a colorful menu especially for the occasion, enabling it toraise its prices by €30 per menu for the evening. On the menu for the day: escalope de foie gras, Saint-Jacques, rouget... Customers in search of nobility are delighted , enabling the restaurant to sell out every year several days before February 14th.

Malou's communication advice

How do you successfully promote your special Valentine's Day menu? Nicolas Flamel has opted to highlight the menu on its website several weeks in advance of the event. The Valentine's Day menu even features in the header of the Auberge's website.

These special menus are also the perfect opportunity to contact journalists from the B-to-C press. Most media outlets publish lists of the best opportunities to celebrate love on the big day. Restaurants that contact the right right media days in advance may be lucky enough to find their establishment on these lists or in other articles dedicated to Valentine's Day.influencers to come and discover it! If they're won over by the experience, they'll publish posts and stories about their visit, promoting the restaurant to their communities. The restaurant will gain in visibility and have the opportunity to attract many new prospects.

2. Invite an artist to entertain

The menu isn't the only thing that customers are looking for this Valentine's Day. Buthow do you transform the atmosphere of your restaurant? There are many options available to restaurateurs, but the most obvious is to invite an artist into your establishment. A musician could add a touch of romance to your special evening, and win over many of your guests.

A simple piano-vocal, which leaves room for duet discussions, seems perfectly suited to a Valentine's Day atmosphere. Organizing this type of event is also an opportunity to stand out from the competition and encourage potential customers to make a reservation at your establishment.

Malou's communication advice

To capitalize on this unique moment in the life of your restaurant, it's important to communicate well in advance, but also to make the most of it at the very moment!It's therefore imperative to announce this event on social media and to inform the BtoC press of its organization, so as to increase the number of reservations. If the artist has a large community, it may also be worth asking them to relay their presence in the establishment on their social media. But organizing this type of event has another advantage besides filling your venue: it allows you to demonstrate your dynamism to your community. It would therefore be wise to plan live communication during the evening. Facebook and Instagram are excellent tools for this. Their stories allow you to show what's going on at your venue in short videos or photos. It is then possible to fix these stories, which only have a 24-hour lifespan, on your Instagram profile by adding a title such as "Valentine's Day 2020". This fixed story will be visible to all followers of the restaurant's page for an indefinite period. The following year, customers who visit the establishment's Instagram page will thus be informed that events are being organized there on this occasion.

3. Stand out from the crowd and organize an atypical evening in the image of your restaurant: the example of Big Fernand

This kind of highlight of the year is also a time for restaurants to showcase their identity and enhance their assets. February 14th is an opportunity to offer lovers celebrating Valentine's Day a unique and original experience. Highlighting your special features is the secret weapon of good communication. Restaurants offering specific foods (100% vegan dishes? African cuisine? Asian cuisine?) will be able to propose evenings that stand out from those offered by their competitors.

Big Fernand, the 100% French burger brand, took up this challenge a few years ago, and decided to use Valentine's Day as an opportunity to promote the brand and raise its profile. The brand gave away several meals for two on Valentine's Day in their space in Galeries Lafayette, which they had decorated for the occasion in the style of " Prom' Night in the 80s". This theme enabled the brand to promote its identity: a brand that imposes French culture on the most American of dishes, the burger. This unique evening was won by 10 couples who took part in a competition organized beforehand. Several years after the event, a page dedicated to the evening can still be found on the group's website.

Malou's communication advice

Winning dinners at your restaurant is an excellent way of increasing the visibility of your event and ensuring its success. Organizing a competition on social media allows you to present your offer to a large number of Internet users and encourage them to come and discover the program, even if they lose the competition.

CLAIMING THE COMMERCIAL ASPECT OF VALENTINE'S DAY

It's been said and blamed: Valentine's Day is above all a commercial holiday. It is one of the most propitious moments for purchases, and an opportunity for brands to boost their sales figures. Restaurants can seize on this commercial aspect as the perfect opportunity to communicate with their targets.

4. Organizing gift-making workshops: the CRILLON example

Many couples are in the habit of giving each other gifts for Valentine's Day. Two years ago, Le Crillon capitalized on this trend, offering its guests gift-creation workshops on the evening of February 13. The establishment invited fashionable florist Djordje Varda to lead the workshop. His objective: to teach guests how to compose a bouquet and give them the opportunity to offer their loved one a floral arrangement made by their own hands.

Malou's communication advice

Organizing this type of event is an opportunity to invite influencers to your restaurant. Creative workshops are an opportune moment for them to create original stories. By tagging the restaurant in their publications or stories, influencers will not only promote the restaurant's setting and décor, but also the dynamism of the place.Non-influencer participants are also excellent ambassadors for this type of event. For greater efficiency and impact, we recommend that you include a hashtag in your publications (posts or stories) prior to the event. It's also advisable to remind people of the existence of this hashtag and the restaurant's Instagram and Facebook name on the day of the event, so that participants use them.

5. Set up partnerships with brands with values similar to those of your restaurant.

Last year, Café de la Paix offered all its February 14th customers a box with a number inside. This mysterious gift was in fact an operation set up between the Café and the lingerie brand La Perla. Customers simply had to visit the brand's boutique to find out if the number they had been given was enough to win a piece of lingerie.

This delicate attention has enabled La Perla to win visitors to its point of sale, and Le Café to leave its mark on visitors' minds.

Malou's communication advice

In terms of communication, this type of operation enables both partners to join forces and reach a wider target than their own communities. It is therefore important to agree on the conditions of this partnership and to think about communication actions in tandem: the parties involved must communicate on social media and promote the event to their subscribers by tagging their partner.

6. Think of something special for your guests: the example of Easy Sushi

Valentine's Day is the perfect time to offer your guests a little something special. A flower offered to each of them at the end of the meal would leave the best possible impression on their guests, who wouldn't hesitate to come back the following year or some time later for dinner or lunch.But beyond gifts, it's also possible to offer special discounts on the big day, which will encourage customers to consume more and increase their ticket. In 2019, the Easy Sushi restaurant decided to introduce a special Valentine's Day offer in the run-up to the holiday: a 10% discount is offered for every order placed before D-day.

Each order placed before February 14th was eligible for a 10% discount and delivery on Valentine's Day. This type of upstream offer is particularly interesting for restaurateurs when you consider that customers reserve their restaurant on average 14 days in advance for this special occasion.

Malou's communication advice

For these offers to have the desired impact, it is imperative to give them high visibility on all communication media. Easy Sushi has set up a pop-up which is activated each time a customer visits its website. The stories and posts Facebook and Instagram are also excellent ways to showcase these offers and increase the number of customers on the day in your restaurant.

THE OPPOSITE OF VALENTINE'S DAY

It should be pointed out, however, that some studies show that 54% of French couples don't celebrate Valentine's Day. This holiday, which celebrates love, is increasingly suffering from its commercial image, and many French people are choosing not to celebrate it. While this may seem like a risk for restaurateurs, who lose out on an opportunity to boost sales, it can actually be a communications opportunity for them!

7. Offering a Valentine-free evening: the MOB HOTEL example

A number of venues are taking the opposite approach to this increasingly unpopular holiday. Such is the case of the MOB HOTEL, which last year proposed an evening called "Without Jules or Valentine". Aimed at singles, the evening offered reduced prices on drinks and food, as well as discounts on rooms after 11pm. These advantages are just as appealing to singles wishing to take the opposite approach to this day dedicated to love, as they are to couples looking for a trendy place to spend their evening.

Malou's communication advice

This type of counterpoint is the perfect opportunity to make your community laugh by opting for offbeat visuals and slogans. MOB's "For couples, For singles, For triples" (which can be read on the visual above) is an excellent example of a formula that makes people smile, while being in perfect harmony with the values of the hotel, whose main baseline is "MOB HOTEL OF THE PEOPLE".

The hotel also opted for impactful visuals as seen in this publication broadcast within one of their fixed Instagram stories. The MOB has thus anchored itself in the trend by not celebrating Valentine's Day, but still benefits from it commercially.

8. Thinking of singles and creating encounters on the day: the example of Le Pain Quotidien

And why not think about singles looking for love? Restaurants are first and foremost places of exchange, which can lend themselves to unexpected encounters. A few years ago, Le Pain Quotidien decided to force the destiny of its single customers by allowing them to anonymously offer a brownie to the person of their choice.

9. Choosing not to organize anything for Valentine's Day

It's entirely possible to take the opposite approach to Valentine's Day and decide not to organize anything in your restaurant. A commercial holiday? Should love be celebrated all year round? All the arguments are good for deciding to make this a normal evening with no special menu, no special discounts and no event. But in this case, don't hesitate to communicate on this positioning, whose arguments are equally valid and which will personalize the restaurant's communication!

Conclusion: communication for action!

There are many ways to make this Valentine's Day a memorable event for your customers. From generous offers to inviting an artist or organizing workshops... Restaurateurs are invited to use their imagination on this special day. However, there are two rules that restaurateurs should keep in mind when playing this game: keep in mind the identity of the restaurant, and offer an experience that is out of the ordinary, but that retains the essence of the place. And finally, it's important to communicate! Instagram, Facebook and the restaurant's website are excellent showcases for this event. Journalists and influencers can also be excellent relays to think about in advance!