Don’t have any cash left to market your restaurant and still want to improve your revenue and profits?
Clck here to get to the step-by-step guide.
If you are running a restaurant, then you are running a marketing company as well, because no matter how good your idea is, you need some barrier to shout-outs your idea to the public. Like every profession, marketing requires a good amount of patience and money.
99% of the success or failure in your restaurant will come directly from your ability to attract and keep customers and from your ability to market yourself to them.
However, marketing a restaurant requires a great amount of money and patience, so many restaurants end up relying on mouth of words without investing in marketing and thus get less sales.
In this post, I am going to show you how to market a restaurant while spending less money. Let’s get started!
How To Market A Restaurant While Spending Less Money
These are some of the tried and true marketing strategies that have worked in restaurants in the past and present. I am only mentioning those techniques which don’t require much money.
1) Creating a Unique Selling Proposition (U.S.P.)
You need to sell things that seems to be greater than that of your competitors, that is how you motivate your customers to buy things from you. After all, why would someone buy from your restaurant when the exact thing can be bought from other places? You do not need to sell expensive things, just unique things for the same price.
We have discussed about it in details in our previous article.
2) Your business should be customer oriented
Your focus on marketing should be on the on the customers need. You need to serve them better. Always find for the opportunities to know about the opinions of the customers on your food / deals.
There are few ways to do that:
- You can ask your customers politely once they have finished their meal.
- You can distribute “customers feedback” letters to your customers when they have made the payment at the POS.
- You can contact local bloggers to write reviews about your restaurant in exchange of a free meal.
3) Use door hangers for special deals
Door hangers are the banners that are placed in front of the doors. They don’t cost much because they only stick to the entrance of the restaurant. You can create different door hangers for different deals, that way you can repeat your message until it’s stuck in the head of your customers.
4) Create a functional wesite
Creating a takeaway website design to list your deals and services isn’t expensive, while it greatly can have a good impact on your customers giving the impression of professionalism in your restaurant niche. You can even create a separate blog section in your website to list your opinions on different food deals and restaurant related tips.
Your website should have following pages to make it functional:
- About page to let your visitors know about your restaurant briefly.
- Deals page which lists different sections.
- Contact page which will list the contact info of your restaurant.
Before you create your website, you need to register a domain name first. It is a name in which you will use to identify your website. Your domain name should reflect the name of your restaurant.
5) Get a social media presence
You can strengthen your word of mouth marketing with an interesting and interactive social media presence. This gives you the ability to engage your customers 365 days as year, represent your brand and enlist customers to share their stories. That’s priceless.
From different social media networks, the presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest is must. Apart from it, you can even build your audience through the microblogging platform like Tumblr, which not only provides a blogging platform, but a social media network as well. Remember, Tumblr is the place where all cool people (young people) spend their time.
6) Give your menu a modern look
If you have a boring, dull or outdated menu then customers may think your food is not enticing as well and no one will take your buiseness seriously. You need to have a great design that works well for your restaurant niche. Your menu should have everything customers need in an organized ways (i.e., list burgers only in the burgers section, etc.).
Following things are necessary to create an outstanding menu:
- Different sections for different food items.
- Image of food items just to the right of them.
- The background color and the text color should be in contrast to increase readability.
- Fancy and stylish fonts are a good idea when it comes to restaurant menus.
Conclusion
We have discussed the ways to improve your restaurant marketing when you have a low budget, from creating U.S.P to social media presence. These tips have worked for many people in the past, but that doesn’t mean they will work for you as well, though I can assure you that if you follow these tips properly then you are in the right direction in restaurant marketing.
Do you have any tips that you think I have missed in this blog post? Tell me in the comments section below!
“It takes an army of talented and creative people to execute a successful restaurant.” – Callista Wengler of Paragary Restaurant Group
