Essentials of Restaurant Marketing

Restaurant market is a very competitive and hyper-local market – most of the restaurant’s customers live within a 5 mile radius. In order to reach out to your customers you have to have a mix of online and offline marketing activities that every restauranteur should try it out – I am going to list specific tools that you can use in order to execute the activities listed below

Online Activities

1) Get listed on all local directories: Even though Google is the 800 pound gorilla in the room each and every restaurant should not ignore local directories as this not only helps with Google rankings but also in local searches. Tools to use – Yext.com and getlisted.org to check where all your restaurant is listed and which ones to get on to

2) Get social: Social is the new mantra and there are tons of avenues that every restaurant should get onto as each of these social media outlets cater to different segment of the crowd. When it comes to social media have a single objective of creating content that engages your customer in a very effective manner – some ways this can be done is through contests (photo etc), events on social media etc. Make sure you use pictures of your dishes, your customers, events which will help you achieve customer engagement objective. Tools to use – Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Twitter. Another application which you want to consider is vine where you can take 6 sec videos which are going to be a very powerful tool to capture customer attention and engage them as well

3) Review Sites: I consider this by far is the most important piece for restaurants – given the presence of mobile all around, customers are looking at review sites more and more before making that purchase decision. Restauranteurs have to take care of their customers within their premises – from food to their experiences which would be reflected in these reviews. Follow up on the customer reviews (make sure that you always remember the motto – customer is always right) thanking for their time, their reviews and take necessary corrective action. Sites include Yelp, UrbanSpoon, Zabihah, TripAdvisor and some local review sites DMagazine, Dallas Observer, Pegasus News, DishGrade etc.

4) Order Sites: There has been an increase in the number of sites that allow customers to order food and some will deliver as well. There is no upfront fees (for some of them) and you as a restauranteur will pay for orders that you get. Some of the sites include waiter.com, GrubHub, Eat24Hrs, DiningIn etc…

5) Blogs & Critics: This avenue is where your restaurant would be under spotlight from a known critic and the mileage a restaurant would get is immense. This step would be a mix of offline and online marketing – you need to reach out to the local food critics and get them to visit your restaurant and provide their feedback/critic. Most of the critics would be willing to accommodate your requests and you have to pursue them with options like FREE food etc and at the same time not overly imposing on them. Some sites that you should go after include local eats, eater.com, culture map, Side Dish etc

6) email list: You need to create an email list that you can use to send specials and information about your restaurant. This you need to build it out by having your customers drop their cards at your restaurant, having Facebook competitions etc. You can use mail chimp FREE account till you reach 2000 emails and you also have the option of sending 12,000 emails in a month

7) Miscellaneous: There are other online sites that you should take into consideration for marketing your restaurant – one such example would be meetup.com: here you can find groups that you can go after as well as sponsor some groups as well. Another resource would be dishcrawl – this is a new concept where a group of people go around visiting restaurants and you can reach out to this group to include your restaurant/cuisine.

Apart from the above online marketing activities your restaurant should also execute offline marketing activities which include

1) In-store Engagement: One of the very critical factor is the quality of staff and your staff has to be trained in engaging customers in a way that would help you build on the different marketing programs that you are executing. Your staff has to be trained to request online reviews, coach them to push your customers to like your Facebook page and so on.

2) Flyers and Coupons: In this era where every one has a mobile phone and constant barrage of online marketing, coupons and door to door advertising works – check your local companies that operate within your neighborhood (your reach should be within the 5 mile radius) and try to do flyer distribution on a quarterly basis. There are also magazines like clipper magazine which has worked for a bunch of my clients

3) Local marketing: This is where you have to reach out to local apartment complexes and other businesses – local apartments organize community events and your restaurant should try to participate in these events. There are twin advantages of local apartment marketing – you might end up as one of the catering partners for this events (treat this as a marketing event and hence might have to provide food at subsidized rate) and also your to-be customers would be tasting your food

4) Co-operative marketing: Customers are picky and tend not to eat the same kind of a cuisine within a short span of time. Also given that you might be just the kind of a restaurant (cuisine wise) in your block/neighborhood you can reach out to your next door neighbor with some kind of cooperative marketing efforts – in this case you can cross promote each other and can come up with incentives to alternate dining between both of you.

There might be more options to promote your restaurant apart from the above listed ones – if you can think of something else let me know and I will be more than happy to include them as well.

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