Restaurant Marketing Plan – Setting Yourself Up for Success

Restaurant Marketing Plan

Eighty eight percent of independent restaurateurs don’t know how to market a restaurant effectively! You can see why this statement can be true, when you understand what is defined as marketing. Marketing is telling people about your place of business, getting them to try new and interesting foods and beverages and having them come back again bringing their friends. Having a restaurant marketing plan is crucial to the success of any restaurant.

A restaurant has basically only four things to sell. First is the food. Whether the menu is fast food hamburgers or gourmet pate, a restaurant is basically in the business of selling food.

Second, a restaurant sells service. Service may be fast, with self service, or it may be fine dining with elaborate table side service provided by a squad of talented and trained captains, waiters, and bus boys.

Third, is the selling the ambiance of the restaurant. This is the comfort, appearance, sights and sounds, and all the good and interesting things that keep a customers attention and make the dining experience pleasant.

Fourth is the sale of hospitality; which is the atmosphere produced by the other three and confirmed by the attention and friendliness of all the people who are in contact with the customer.

How do you tell people about your great food, prompt service, delightful ambiance and sincere hospitality? Advertising is the means that almost all businesses use to attract the attention of prospective buyers. We are all familiar with the common methods of advertising such as newspapers, radio, magazines, hand bills, TV, direct mail, sign boards, window signs, and banners. However, the future of marketing and advertising in the restaurant industry is in Internet and mobile devices.

Everyone in business today understands at least something about marketing, but less understood is the technique of getting the customer to try the new and interesting foods and beverages. This is called merchandising and it is a tool to get the customer who is in the restaurant, to buy. You may not have thought of these as examples of merchandising, but they are. These include menus, table tents, waitress badges, menu clip-ons, place mats, posters, suggestive selling by employees, special menus, table-toppers and menu boards.

Some operators confuse merchandising with promotions. However, if we define promotions as special events developed to call attention to a special product or service or both you can understand that a promotion may use merchandising and advertising or both to achieve its purpose.

Publicity and P.R. (Public Relations) should not be confused with advertising, merchandising, or promotions. Publicity is really news, either good or bad, concerning your business establishment.

“Publicity is free” if anything in this world can be considered free. Publicity is welcomed if it is good news about your business. It is unwelcomed if it is bad news. Some restaurateurs spend a lot of their time trying to create good P.R. for their restaurant. They do civic work, participate in community activities and make their restaurant food or service available for special needs of the locality and the people that they serve in that area. However, no matter the good deeds, if a customer customer visits an establishment that has poor service or a less than desirable atmosphere that customer may take to the newest form of publicity to tell the world about it, the Internet and consumer review sites. These types of comments about an establishment can damage the overall reputation and make additional advertising and promotional campaigns futile in their attempts to get more business in the door.

Marketing is an on-going activity akin to the life of a human being. Your restaurant, bar or catering facility will have a life that can be defined by four states. The first is called the youthful stage which is the beginning of your business when there is a lot of interest by the public in what you are doing, how you are doing it, and where you are headed. Whether you create a food or facility in an empty corn field or buy out an existing store front, the community that you serve is usually aware that something new is happening. Their curiosity plus some prompting through advertising or promotions will bring them initially to your front door.

Usually during this youthful stage you are in active control of your restaurant, like a good parent watching everything that is happening, exerting considerable input on the activities of your employees so that your food and your service meet the goals that you established for your business before you opened.

Be wary of getting over fatigued during this time. Your employees will be inexperienced in the ways of your restaurant and if you can’t supervise them effectively, their efficiency can decline resulting in poor performance toward your customers and subsequently poor reviews for your restaurant.

As the owner, watch out and try to avoid over working yourself which can result in a poor image being create in early on customers. These customers could cause the word to spread that your food and service are not what they should be. By anticipating this situation and counteracting the causes, you can avoid a poor image of the food facility being created in the public eye that can continue to haunt you in the years to follow.

The most important steps that can be taken are:

1. Make the initial menu easy to prepare

2. Let it have enough variety and uniqueness to satisfy the target market

3. Allow the staff to get used to the system gradually.

4. Don’t have an immediate ‘Grand Opening’.

5. If possible, begin with a limited number of hours open for business.

6. Hire some outside ‘experts’ to help get through the initial opening shock.

Keep in touch for the next article that will help you with the elements of a complete restaurant marketing strategy. This will help you make and effect restaurant marketing plan to help grow your business.

Restaurant Marketing Plan – Foundation is Reputation

Restaurant Marketing Plan

Elements of a Successful Strategy

The Foundation is Your Reputation

Let’s first be clear…There is plenty of confusion in business regarding the differences between marketing and advertising and whether or not they mean the same thing. THEY DO NOT. They are not interchangeable terms. In this article we are going to focus on one of the 4 important areas of and effective marketing system that I personally use that is aimed at establishing a presence that is revered in the local or online community.

Advertising is only an element or a piece of the puzzle. Advertising is the activity that lets potential customers know that your restaurant is alive and accepting diners. It is the newspaper ads, the television commercials, the radio spots, the website, the coupon offers, and the billboards. Advertising works as your announcer, your loud speaker on a large truck rolling through your city telling anyone and everyone about your business.

Marketing on the other hand is the complete puzzle that advertising is a part of. Marketing includes your location selection, market research, advertising, menu creation, merchandising, branding, pricing, atmosphere and/or amenities, sales, customer service, and public relations. So marketing is the strategy that is developed that will help you with the complete management of your restaurant. As you can see it encompasses all facets of your business because marketing is your overall presence.

Successful marketing strategies are all about systemizing. Having a system in place for the different aspects of your business will help with running it more seamlessly and with a lot less confusion. Though setting up a marketing system can be a daunting task, the main purpose of the article is to help you with that. So lets get down to business…

This system consists of four primary areas that are aimed at bringing more customers and more sales more frequently. The four areas are Reputation, Reach, Resell, and Referral. This article will address the first “R” which is going to be the foundation of your strategy and that is your REPUTATION.

Now, whether you are just starting your restaurant or have been in business for some time, your restaurants reputation is one of the more important aspects of your business. With the changing landscape of marketing and advertising and the Internet and mobile devices being a primary source of information for the masses its more important than ever to ensure that your business is being properly represented online.

Zagat is now incorporated into the Google+ Local listings that show for restaurants online. Having a poor rating and bad reviews here can cost you thousands of dollars in lost sales all because someone or several someone’s felt they had a bad experience at your restaurant. Ignoring places like this can harm your online presence but this is not the only place that directly affects whether or not people become patrons of your establishment. Sites like Yelp, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Facebook, Twitter, and other local and social directories deserve a fair amount of attention because that is where people hang out online. Lets take an example: Below are two listings pulled from Google+ Local. Now imagine you are a shopper looking for a new place to go and enjoy some Italian cuisine. Which place would you likely choose to eat? Remember, you know nothing about these restaurants, you’ve never eaten there before so all you have to go off of is the fact that they are being shown to you and their ratings/reviews. Which one would you likely choose?

Lets take another look at some search engine snapshots to show you what other restaurant owners understand about the power of a superb reputation.

Below you will find some of the top listings for “Italian restaurants NYC”. As you can see, from the sheer number of reviews each of these restaurants have, these restaurateurs obviously some type of system or incentive in place to collect these reviews. Because they get so many of them, even if a random customer here and there left them a poor review it would not matter much because it would be drowned out by all of the good reviews. Take a look:

As a restaurateur, you should look for a system that helps you capture as many positive consumer opinions as possible from your new and repeat customers. There are several different methods for acquiring reviews from your patrons, though it would probably be more cost-effective to find a company that offers a full restaurant marketing system instead of putting together individual systems.

For example, having a mobile website that is linked to a QR code that comes on or with the customers check that asks for feedback can be an effective method of gathering reviews. You could also have a mobile website that has the links embedded so that customers can simply go to your mobile site and click a button and write a review. The key is not to make the customer feel totally inconvenienced by doing this.

Unhappy customers will gladly spend their personal time going online and finding a listing that belongs to you to leave a bad review. However, happy customers may not think to do this to tell the world how great their experience with you was. So, sometimes, incentivizing the review process may help to get you more results especially from customers that were extremely satisfied with their visit.

This is also a way to tie in another aspect of the plan, Reselling! Offering that customer a “discount on your next visit coupon” or a “buy this, get this on the next visit coupon” can be and effective way to turn that happy diner into a repeat customer.

Keep in touch for the next lesson in the series. In the next article we will cover the second “R” which is Reach and how your lack of proper exposure is hurting your bottom line.