How to get your competitor restaurant customers to your door?

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You have an excellent restaurant, and you are wondering why your competitor is so busy and you not?

This is a question that comes many times to the heads of restaurateurs. If you offer a similar restaurant experience in the mind of your customers, the answer to the above question is: Marketing!

Below is a suggestion that I recommend if you are having this problem.

Study your competitors marketing tactics that are working. You may find out that: they send out a weekly email newsletter that is converting their first time customers into regulars, or they have been working with a marketing company/ consultant to enlarge and engage with their facebook page fans.

Whatever is the reason that is working for them, you should consider using a similar marketing strategy with some modifications in order to make it even stronger and more engaging. If it is working for them, it should also work for you! Additionally, if your opponent is having success with its strategy, he is not spending his/her efforts on improving it, that increases your success probabilities.

Do you know what marketing strategies have been working for your competitors?

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If your restaurant isn’t good, your restaurant marketing can’t be good!

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All restaurants need a good marketing plan. When well developed this plan will help your sales and customer retention, but before you start developing your marketing plan you need to be fully confident on your restaurant qualities and its strengths against the competitors. If your product isn’t good, your marketing can’t be good!

The passion about what you produce in the kitchen and the ambience you offer to your clients is your marketing foundation. You need first to fully believe in your restaurant quality, and its ability to satisfy your customers in order to develop your marketing strategy. If you don’t feel that you have a great restaurant “one that your customers will be pleased to patronage and pay the bill”, you will need to work on your product first before you start creating your marketing plan and tactics. You should first study what your target market is looking for (price; portion size; service speed; etc..), and only after learning about your customers necessities and desires, you start developing your product in order to accomplish what your customers are looking for.

When you know that you have a great product that will definitely please your customers, then you can start promoting it. At this stage, your marketing plan and promotion tactics will be very easy to be developed and to achieve great results.

In summary, if you offer value for money to your target market, go outside and promote it! If not, go back to the kitchen and revisit your menu, pricing, service etc… until you are confident that your product will sell!

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Building a website for your restaurant? How to display your menu?

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Do you like to download files to your computer? If you answer is no, please read this through.

After researching on restaurant websites, I noticed that there are quite a few restaurants that do not “write down” their menu at the website pages, but instead, the user have the possibility of downloading the restaurant menu in a pdf format.

Below are 4 reasons why you should display your menu in your website instead of asking the users to download a pdf menu.

1- Your potential customers may “run away’ lazy to download the menu to their computer. People nowadays want things fast and are afraid of downloading files to their computers. This can make them “run away” from your website when they understand that they will need to download the file in order to see what is available at your menu. [Read more...]

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Restaurant online ads- Google or Facebook?

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Both of them are very powerful advertising tools that can make your ads only visible to your potential clients. This way you won’t overspend by paying more to show your ads to people who will never patronage your restaurant. If you want to start by only using one of them, I strongly recommend Facebook. The reason why I recommend Facebook is because of its viral opportunities.
When you create an ad on Google, people will see it on the google search page when they perform a search related to your ad. After seeing your ad, potential customers may click on it and be transferred to your ad page/ message. However, if you want to send them another message, you will need to spend money again to create another ad. On the other hand, if you create your ad on Facebook, first your target market will see it even when they are not searching for something similar of what you are promoting, and if that ad is linked to your Facebook fan page, they may like your page and be connected with you “for life”, giving you future possibilities of promoting and engaging with them for free. Have you tried Facebook or Google advertising platforms? What are the results?

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Why you should spend 30 minutes building a facebook page for your restaurant?

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We all listen about the “power” of Facebook. Facebook is the most used social media network in the world (more than 1.2 billion), and almost everyone from developed countries uses it or at least consider using it. People use it mostly to communicate, share experiences and search. This search is mostly on friends, but nowadays people also use it a lot to search for businesses.

Today, I will talk about the importance of spending 30 minutes to build a Facebook page for your restaurant, even if you don’t spend the time commenting/ sharing/ liking.
The reason why I think you should create a Facebook page, even if you don’t plan time to spend on it, is because Facebook users (more than 1.3 billion) can search nearby restaurants according to their physical location at the Facebook platform. So if your restaurant is within their location, your page will appear at the search results only if you have spent 30 minutes to create your restaurant page. This may not bring a dozens of customers daily, but it will for sure bring you a “couple” sometimes for the next decade.
Do you have a Facebook page? Have you tried the search nearby restaurants function in Facebook?

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The basics of Restaurant Marketing - Rule No 1- Who is your restaurant ideal client?

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To define your restaurant ideal client is the first thing to do when you want to start to do marketing efforts for your restaurant. Many restaurateurs start by creating the end product (ex: special dish) and spend dollars on marketing before they think if that dish will create interest in their ideal client.

This is wrong! You need to define your ideal client even before you open your restaurant and then, everything you cook, promote, or even mention is to please that ideal client. Some restaurant owners try to please everyone and then they soon realized that their efforts are not working! Of course it won’t work! You can’t pleased a 16 year old with a boring old style ad, a 67 year old with an ad full of yellow smiles, and you will not attract people living away from your restaurant with an ad at your door.
So please, before you start spending dollars on marketing, create your ideal client profile. This profile should define as much as possible: how old are they? Male or female? What are their interests? Where they live? Where they hang out? What is their profession? Why they chose your restaurant…

After creating your ideal client profile, you should create what is called of client persona. These are fictional descriptions of your desired customer.

After you created your client persona/s, all ads you make are with the goal of attracting this ideal client to your door.
What about you? Who is your ideal client?

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