About nine years ago I ran into some money and wanted to learn how to market my restaurant. But back then,
I was pretty wet behind the years and naïve and needed a lot of guidance. If you’re trying to start on the restaurant business and you have the right capital and financial backing, getting started in getting your business up and operational is very easy. There are expert designers out there that can draw you great blueprints of awesome looking restaurant kitchen designs. When people eat at your restaurant they can be very forgiving about the prices and could care less if one your plates costs a couple bucks more than the same place down the street. Well I guess I can say that’s every scenario, but the majority of people don’t really care. What they do care about, is customer service and how they were treated when they’re in your restaurant.
So when I asked myself how to market my restaurant one of the things I asked was how can I keep my customers satisfied. Dining out to a lot of people isn’t just something they do occasionally, too many it’s actually a religious ritual and that could be a lot of money in your pocket is a restaurant owner if you can gain their trust in business. So your objective is a restaurant owner is to get diners in your business filling their tummies with your great food and making sure they’re happy so they come back over and over. In order to promote your business properly, you either need to have a talent for marketing or higher a company that does have these talents. You can market your business on the Internet and you can also market it off-line, and for purposes of this article we will examine both.
When I was trying to figure out how to market my restaurant I realized that marketing it off-line was very simple. All I had to do, was watch what all the competitors around me were doing and start taking notes and evaluating about a dozen restaurants in my area and surrounding areas that were serving the same types of food. All I would have to do is observe them for a week or two, take notes and start implementing all their ideas and the customers started coming in like crazy. There’s an old saying called if you want success copy success in the restaurant business this holds true especially when it comes off-line marketing. Online marketing however, is a different story because all the real hard-core new techniques are only being used by probably 1% of the population at the very most.
When I was thinking about how to market my restaurant, I started thinking about Facebook and setting up a Facebook event and the importance of using Facebook to drive people through my front door. What I did was set up coupon system and every single person who visit my Facebook page were bribed with a coupon if they would like my Facebook page. After they like my Facebook page, I had permission to post on their wall. Actually every single post that I made would go on their wall and this was done through special software which we own. The viral effect of this approach worked magnificently, and drove lots of highly targeted hungry people into the restaurant.
I also started having each customer that paid for their meal propositioned to enter their e-mail address and name for a free MP3 player that we give out each month. When I was thinking about how to market my restaurant, I would take all these names and e-mail address and put them into a list and tell them that they needed to confirm this e-mail address once they got a message to confirm it so the e-mail list I built was a double opt in list and not just a single optin list. Over a few months the list started getting pretty large which was getting me excited, because I realize that I can e-mail these people anytime we have a special or we wanted to get them in to the restaurant on a slow day or evening.
Someone else told me that they used to arrange events so local organizations could attend their restaurant which was another great method I started using when I was thinking about how to market my restaurant. Basically any way you can get new people to the door is to your advantage. There are so many different ways on the books to do this and that’s the beautiful part about all this. The Internet it is getting more more popular, and your restaurant will do really good if you have a blog that has consistent fresh content going out and a website that’s being promoted. I still believe the content method is the best way to promote a small business restaurant since longtail keywords in the restaurant local niches are so easy to rank for. You could literally dominate your marketplace within six months by doing this.
