Restaurant Marketing Solutions
One of the most difficult things to learn is how to go about marketing restaurants. Your marketing plan is essential to your success, but it is often difficult to determine how to go about the process of marketing your restaurant.
Whether your restaurant is new or has been in business for a while, the way that you market it will dictate the degree of success that you have and the profit that you make. With restaurant management tools or heaps of restaurant marketing ideas on hand, you will have all of the information you need at your fingertips to increase your business’ profit margin.
In all my years of running a restaurant, I’ve yet to come across a resource as comprehensive as the ‘Restaurant Marketing Management Toolkit’. This resource features a marketing module that I use to create a marketing plan for my restaurant. The tools in the module include marketing promotional templates, discount voucher templates, all different types of advertising templates, and many more materials to help restaurant managers and owners see to the operations better.
In most cases you will be looking to find much more targeted options, however, you first have to understand exactly who your customers are and who your potential customers are. Are they the same? If you are looking to expand your offering by opening more hours, for different meals or by providing ‘off-site’ catering (delivery, take-away etc), the customer profile could differ.
This is one of the major reasons why lots of restaurants, who decide to open for lunch, struggle with their customer numbers. They have not taken into consideration that the customer profile differs. Your food offering has to match the customer profile.
Look at your typical customer and decide how you would describe him/her. Work out the profile or demographics of your customers and then make a list of where you would find more of them. That is the area that you want to target your restaurant marketing at. It’s very important to have a strategy to reach your typical customer, if you look at twitter or Facebook, you may find local groups that fit the bill, then you can chat with that group.
Another way to approach your ideal customer is to use your current customer base. People form cliques and they will associate with others like themselves or who have the same interests or professions. Builders know other tradesmen, shopkeepers tend to know other shopkeepers, lawyers other legal eagles. I’m sure you get the picture, but just one more. Stay at home moms know other stay at home moms and they want to drink coffee, have lunch and talk about, well, everything.
Once you have isolated your ideal customers, you can then start to find them, research local websites to try to find where they hang out online, look for forums or find the streets where they are likely to live. Your aim is to get your restaurant known as the ‘in’ place for your target group, by providing the best facilities for that group, whether it be internet access, a relaxing bar area, private dining etc.
When you have identified where you can find them, you will then know the best way to promote your restaurant to them.
If you want to transform your restaurant business from barely making a profit to wildly profitable, you will want to learn more about marketing restaurants.
With the Restaurant Marketing Ideas system, you will be able to create a marketing plan that will increase your sales and profits. Included with this system is all of the information that you will need to define your market, structure your marketing plan, analyze your competitors, and marketing templates to make a marketing plan that will give you a much better chance of success.
If your restaurant profits are not where you would like, you will want to determine how to go about marketing restaurants using another system. By implementing some of the marketing ideas that are found in the systems of more successful restaurateurs, you will soon see what good marketing can do for your business.
How To Attract More Customers To Your Restaurant
If your business is slow, perhaps this is a great time to re-evaluate the efficacy of your marketing. Eliminate dead wood in your marketing expenses and start investing your money smartly in marketing that really works (and you can prove that really works).
I met recently with the owner of the latest restaurant that I am consulting with, and we did precisely this exercise. I asked him to write down every single marketing expense that he was making, and then we started evaluating which ones could be tracked.
Amazingly for him (not for me because I was expecting this), 80% of his marketing expenses were non trackable. This means that he was expending a substantial amount of money advertising in the Yellow Pages, two local weekly papers and some other local restaurant catalogs, and yet he had no clue how many customers these expenses brought to his restaurant.
The first thing that we did was to eliminate any marketing expense that couldn’t be measured. This is just a logical step to really assess the return of investment.
The larger chain fast food restaurants rely on some of the more traditional forms of marketing (such as TV advertising) to create a brand that everyone can associate with.
The classic example being McDonalds and how they created a new brand to replace the Ronald McDonald brand. Couple this in with changing the feel of the restaurants to bright, modern, fresh gave the marketing impression of a completely new brand (even though the food stayed very much the same as before).
The high street eateries use discount marketing in order to attract customers in (2 dine for 1 on Mondays before 7pm as an example) which does seem to work well. Websites such as Groupon also are popular to encourage more customers in and spending.
Fine dining use a completely different kind of marketing strategy; by leaning towards quality over quantity they can create a brand that can be build on. Generally word of mouth acts as one of the most powerful marketing tools in people telling friends about a great new bistro or dining experience.
The most important challenge for the restaurant owner is to attract customers. Advertising is of course an expensive task and it sometimes pays back and sometimes don’t.
When talking about marketing, it is very important to start being more strategic and less operational. Successful restaurant marketing is the first step to attract new customers to your restaurant and once they come to your restaurant, then the next step is to make them come back again and again. Positive news is that there are many marketing initiatives that can be implemented at with not too much expense.
If your restaurant is doing a good job by offering good food and service to the customers then there will be probably more customers coming who would be referred by family and friends. This calls for making a formalized referral system which would be helpful in bringing more people and then more quality people.
The most powerful strategy in restaurant marketing is referral. As on owner, you would be definitely having an informal referral system where happy customers would recommend your restaurant to their relatives and friends. A step forward is the formal referral system and this is something worth considering as this strategy can prove efficient and cost effective.
Most of the restaurants owners prefer to pay a lot on sales persons using their marketing budget on traditional advertising that are not very productive like advertisements in newspapers and magazines, yellow pages, radio etc that no one remembers. Customers really don’t care about how big your Yellow pages ads are.
Instead of this, spending few more time on something for implementing marketing strategies that work will be more productive and rewarding like online marketing. The usage of internet is increasing and most of the customers’ access or have access to the Internet. People use the internet to search for their wants in this fast and busy world.