By Michael Gorman, Contributor
A common mistake many restaurant owners make is they wrongly believe that serving high-quality dishes is all that they need to be successful at this business. Although this is an important tenant of a successful restaurant, operators need more than tasty food to run a successful business and develop a brand that can be trusted.
One area where a restaurant might miss it is in their marketing. Too many restaurants rely on their legend of their menu and word-of-mouth to get their food in front of people’s faces. And while these both can be a catalyst for a strong restaurant business, operators need to take a more active role in restaurant marketing.
So, keep these five ideas in mind when you are creating your restaurant market strategy.
Keep Your Restaurant’s Branding Consistent
Like every other business brand, you must establish and distinguish your restaurant brand. Once your brand is defined, stick with it and use it as the drive for all your marketing strategies. Your restaurant’s brand includes your logo, slogan, colors, fonts, theme, ambiance, and more. Everything around the restaurant should support your unique brand including in-store materials, social media channels, and your restaurant’s website.
Your marketing strategy should never contain anything that is not in line with your brand’s mission. Staying true to one message helps your brand to remain distinguished and easily recognizable. If your focus is fine dining, build your market strategy around that and stay away from things that are not in line.
Leverage Social Media
How on earth would you run a business and still choose to ignore social media? No matter how big or small your restaurant your is, social media is a big tool for you. It is one of the easiest and cheapest way to advertise your restaurant and keeps your loyal guests engaged with what your business is up to.
Social media offer your business an opportunity to have a platform, build a relationship with your guests, and remain at the top of their minds. Your customers are on social and if you’re not engaging, entertaining, and enticing them there, your competitors will.
Get Your Restaurant on Google My Business
Operators need to get their restaurants on Google. It makes you more visible on the biggest search engine on the planet. This puts your restaurant on the map. When you claim your business on Google, you can update your menu, website, hours, and other necessary information that your diners might need to know. Google will prioritize your list and display them in the search result.
When someone searches your restaurant online (or even the cuisine you serve), the Google My Business (GMB) listing makes sure that the most useful details are displayed first. This makes it easy for people to find you and also allows you to launch targeted ads.
Run a Loyalty Program
Not having a loyalty program is one of the biggest mistakes a restaurant owners and manager can make. There are a lot of marketing benefits to running a loyalty program in your restaurant that you would miss out on if you do not.
Firstly, it allows you to get data on your guests, especially your loyal guests. For every business data is power. By running a restaurant loyalty program, you can easily collected data on your best guests, know what programs and offers get them through the door, and what the true demographic of your client base is.
The special offer you give as part of your loyalty program will help incentivize your guests, but more importantly, it enables your restaurant to drive repeated business and also launch targeted marketing campaigns.
Manage Your Restaurant’s Email List
It is important that you have your customer data so that you can run targeted ads and marketing campaigns, but this does not give you the right to overdo things and pester your customers with non-stop promotional emails
When you send promotional emails too often, your guests are more likely to unsubscribe from your list. In the end, you lose the value of having your customer data when they no longer want to receive your missives.
While the frequency of emails differs based on industry, it really is just ideal that you send your emails monthly if you do not have a subscription option (weekly or monthly newsletter). A subscription option allows your guests to choose how often they would prefer to receive your emails. This will stop you from sending emails indiscriminately and they will not also feel bugged and unsubscribe.
Another thing you can do to help your email marketing is to not add the “unsubscribe” button. Instead, use something like “manage email preferences” which allows the recipient to choose a cadence or unsubscribe.
About the Author
Michael Gorman is one of the most highly skilled freelance essay writers and proofreaders from the UK who currently works at essay writing services where he writes the best dissertation. Being interested in everyday development, he writes various blog posts and discovers new aspects of human existence every day.
