Are you looking for ways to get more people into your restaurant (especially on those slow days/nights), build buzz for your brand, create local community advocates for the quality of your service, and come up with new menu items that your customers love? If the answer to one, and most likely all four, of these questions is YES, then perhaps you should consider running a Local Chef Sweepstakes.

The idea behind a Local Chef Sweepstakes is a simple one, but it’s a pretty creative idea, which is where the power lies.

Run a Local Chef SweepStakes

Gather a group of local residents (who enjoy cooking) in your area to come into your restaurant one night a month (make it the least active night of the week), each bringing their best-cooked dish to share with everyone. The theme of the dish should fit the food style of your restaurant, unless you’re looking to expand the type of food you offer your customers.

During what I like to call the Sampling Event, each of the local residents (ahem, Chef’s) will sample each dish and vote on their favorite – it’s probably best to have them not vote for themselves. The person with the most votes at the end of the night will win a prize – you can decide what that is, though it probably shouldn’t be a free meal at your restaurant. Get creative here, and by that, I don’t mean you have to spend a ton of money. Maybe partner with another local business and in exchange for you mentioning their business in your promotion of the Sampling Event, both online and through PR, they will provide you with a gift certificate good for a certain dollar amount towards their products/services. The winner will also get the opportunity to have his/her dish featured as a Special menu item at your restaurant, one night a week for the next four weeks.

The winner can setup a time to teach one of your chefs how to create the dish. The winner should then be given a percentage of sales for their dish. This provides people with HUGE INCENTIVE to participate in your Local Chef Sweepstakes – extra income is always nice, especially during the current economic times. If the menu item is a hit, you can negotiate with the winner to make it a mainstay on your menu.

That’s it. That’s the idea of a Local Chef Sweepstakes. Now you need to promote it to the world.

Promote Your Local Chef SweepStakes

An event like this will generate huge amounts of publicity if it’s marketed properly. In my opinion, publicity is the result of good marketing, whereas the classic way of looking at publicity is as a marketing tool in and of itself. Once you decide to go for it and you schedule your first Local Chef Sweepstakes, you need to get the word out about it to your local community. Here are a few ways to do that:

• Promote it at your restaurant to your existing customers. Put some information on every table and direct them to either your website or one of your social sites (perhaps your small business Facebook fan page) to learn more about the event.
• Add information about the Sweepstakes on your small business website and Facebook fan page
• Promote the event through your LinkedIn groups and events
• Add information about the event on Yelp
• Tweet the time and location of each event on a regular basis leading up to the event
• Write about the event on your blog
• Ask others in your online and offline network to promote the events to friends and co-workers

There are countless way to promote the Sweepstakes leading up to the Sampling Event each month, those are just a few. It’s probably a good idea to request RSVPs for the event to ensure that there are enough participants, but not too many.

Not only does this build some great buzz pre-Sampling Event, but you can also promote the results post-Sampling Event to generate even more buzz and awareness. Here are some great ways to promote the Local Chef Sweepstakes post-Sampling Event:

• Video record the Sampling Event and put it on your small business YouTube Channel
• Write about a cool story that occurred during the Sampling Event on your small business blog
• Tweet the winner’s Special dish and when it will be featured
• Add images of the winning dish to your small business Facebook fan page or Flickr account
• Update your specials on Yelp to include the new dish
• Capture Video-based customer testimonials of patrons enjoying the new dish and share them on your YouTube Channel

Again, there are countless ways to promote the Local Chef Sweepstakes post-Sampling Event. It’s just takes some creativity. So, does this all sound intriguing OR are you still asking yourself, “What’s in it for me”? If so, keep reading…

The Benefits of Running a Local Chef SweepStakes

Let’s get back to the opening sentence of this post, “Are you looking for ways to get more people into your restaurant (especially on those slow days/nights), build buzz for your brand, create local community advocates for the quality of your service, and come up with new menu items that your customers love?” Hopefully if you answered YES to the questions above, then you made it all the way through this post. That’s great! Thanks for staying with me. Now, for the last, and perhaps most critical part of the post, in order to motivate you to host a Local Chef Sweepstakes, the benefits…Here are just a few:

1. Get more people into your restaurant through the Sampling Events and ultimately if the promotion is successful, it gets more people into your restaurant on a daily basis moving forward
2. Can be picked up as a great public relations piece by the local press and local bloggers – this builds buzz and awareness for your restaurant
3. Those who participate in the sampling events become huge fans of your business – they feel a sense of community while being there with other local patrons. They in turn will tell everyone who will listen about your great restaurant.
4. The creation of many local sample dishes allows for new menu items to be created. Offering some of the early favorites as Specials can provide you with great information on what dishes should become full-time menu items and which ones should be shelved OR only treated as Specials moving forward. Either way, you are able to add great new menu items that customers love.

So that’s the Local Chef Sweepstakes in a nutshell. What do you think? I’ll bet the costs to run this type of promotion are very minimal and the rewards will far outweigh the results you get from those print ad coupons you’ve been running in the local circular. Do you think you’ll run a Local Chef Sweepstakes for your restaurant?

If you love the idea and want some help executing it for your restaurant, feel free to contact Catalyst Marketers. By the way, this idea can be adapted for a number of different business-types. You just have to get those creative juices flowing.