Your restaurant may be situated amongst office buildings and other entities where employees struggle over what to do for lunch, but winding up in such an ideal location is only half the battle — you still have to pull them into your business. Counting entirely on walk-by traffic is a strategy that will leave staff twiddling their thumbs, says Robert Smith, founder of Champion Media Worldwide, a Loves Park, Illinois-based marketing and PR consulting company.

Instead, says Smith, restaurants must aggressively market to these hordes of hungry folks if they’re going to increase their lunch daypart. Above all, he adds, you must do so in a way that stands out from the hundreds of other restaurants in your area. Otherwise, you’ll just blend into the background.

Kerry Elliott, co-owner of Slice It Up, located in Malvern, Pennsylvania, believes in being different. In business six years, the restaurant is located in a shopping center/strip mall where there are four other eating establishments. Surrounding it are plenty of offi ce buildings and other businesses. Elliott says they’ve made a “concerted effort” to cater to the corporate crowd. “We did this from the jump,” he says. “In the weeks before we opened we’d go out to the office buildings and drop off a whole stack of pizzas and menus at the reception desks.”

They also hit the various extended-stay hotels, bringing in free pizzas for the staff, along with menus, asking front desk staff to steer guests to the restaurant and giving them discounts off their own orders if they did.

“After we opened, this brought in a lot of people. One corporate building employs around 2,000 people — they’re probably our biggest supporter. But, other buildings support us too,” says Elliott, adding that lunch accounts for about 70 percent of their overall business.

They still rely on this strategy to keep their restaurant in front of people. In fact, they just recently dropped off free pizzas to around five of the extended stays, he says.

But that’s not all. They also fax out daily lunch specials, market through social media, pull business cards for free lunches (up to $10), and cater corporate meetings and other events, supplying paper plates and setting up hot food at no additional charge.

Boston’s Restaurant and Sports Bar also utilizes a face-to-face marketing strategy. Around five years ago, the franchise operation established a community outreach coordinator (CRC) position, says Randy Steinbrenner, vice president of sales and marketing.

The chain started in Canada in 1964 (where it currently has over 380 sites), entering the U.S. market in 2000. Presently, there are 53 locations in the contiguous U.S. and Mexico, says Steinbrenner, speaking from the U.S. headquarters in Dallas.

They try to hire a CRC — solely tasked with establishing a community/ business presence for the restaurants — in each location, he explains. The CRCs drive around in a logoed car, visit local businesses, drop off free pizzas (for example to local radio stations at lunchtime, bringing some good publicity), provide paycheck stuffers inviting employees to come by and try a pizza to hospital HR departments, connect and network with pharmacy reps (“They have to buy a lot of lunches,” says Steinbrenner); it’s a man-on-the-street position that keeps the restaurants in the public eye.

“We’ve had a lot of luck with the CRC program,” says Steinbrenner, adding that they do more lunch than the average casual dining restaurant. “In the states, you’re seeing more GMs and managers doing this kind of outreach. But we feel it’s best to have these positions focus on restaurant operations. The CRC program gives us the manpower to do this.”

Schools offer good lunchtime opportunities, especially if you’re catering to ravenous students, as Angela Dominick, chef and owner of Dom’s Trattoria in Beverly Farms, Massachussetts, does. For the last two school years, Dominick, whose 22-seat restaurant is located in a small community with many private schools, has been providing lunch to four of these via a lunch program she helped establish. Currently, 570 children are registered in the program, which offers healthy eating options, including gluten-free pizzas.

The schools lacked cafeterias, so students were brown-bagging it. Some parent-customers brought her to the attention of one school, and opportunity expanded from there. Parents order and pay for the lunches on her Web site; Dominick and her employees (three, including her, handle the lunch program) package the food in color-coded bags, delivering it to each school.

Getting involved in school charity auctions helped shine attention her way, says Dominick. Rather than simply providing meal gift certificates, she gave away group cooking lessons to couples, affording her a fun way to build relationships.

The school lunch program has made a big difference to her lunch daypart, says Dominick. It not only increased her revenues, but also her exposure. For example, she also participates in back-to-school nights at these private schools, talking to parents about her restaurant and her approach to food/ nutrition.

Her advice? Rethink charitable giving. “A lot of people think of charities as a headache and just give away gift certificates,” Dominick says. “But if you use them correctly, they’re a real opportunity.” 

Pamela Mills-Senn is a freelancer specializing in writing on topics of interest to all manner of businesses. She is based in Long Beach, California.