Restaurant Marketing Ideas and Solutions
Saturday, August 1st, 2009Restaurants often face a difficult challenge when it comes to marketing. Franchise restaurants have the ability to hire large advertising agencies to do massive branding work as well as getting budgets for local and national media buying and coverage. However local restaurants often don’t have the volume and size to compete on these same levels.
Instead you have to do things at a more grass roots level, which can be just as effective and doesn’t have to cost as much as a TV advertising campaign.
Market Your Restaurant with Social Media
Social media is one of the largest growing marketing techniques. With more and more people joining social networks and spending large chunks of their online time on them it is one of the best ways to get in front of your target market with out spending lots of money.
Join the popular social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Create groups, pages and make connections with relevant and interested people and then continue to post updates. Every time you post an update it will remind everyone who you are connected with that they should try eating at your restaurant again.
Create an E-mail List
You can get a lot of marketing value for your restaurant by gathering a list of e-mails from your customers. Give people who come in a card that they can fill out to get the latest specials, menu changes and events is a way to remind people that they should eat at your restaurant a few times a month.
The important element here is to ensure that the customers actually want to get the e-mail and that you are giving them value. Spamming customers is a way to keep them away rather than get them to come in more often.
Offer Bloggers and Writers a Free Meal
Want to get some publicity? Offer a free meal for local bloggers and journalists. If you make it no obligation most people will feel like they should reciprocate the favor anyways and you have a very high chance of getting a review.
You could even suggest that if they enjoyed their meal they could write a review in local directories and publications online such as Yelp or Yahoo Local.
Sponsor an Event with Catering
You can get good exposure and people tasting and trying your food by sponsoring an event. Since you will be supplying food it will be at cost and cheaper than just purchasing the sponsorship.
Make sure to put business cards, take out menus, etc by all the food. If you can have people getting feedback and reviews that is even better!
More Restaurant Marketing Ideas
There are tons of ideas to market your restaurant. If you still need additional ideas consider looking through the restaurant management center. They have a lot of great resources on managing and marketing your restaurant.
