Taking Control of Your Restaurant Marketing

In these days of doom and gloom I hear manyIf people really read his ad and came to his
restaurateurs complain about how slow business isrestaurant because of it, they will surely bring with
and how the clients are spending less and lessthem the discount coupon. In this way, he'll know
money dinning out. However, as the saying says,how many real customers this ad brings him and
"Times of crisis are times of opportunity".we will be able to make the numbers to see if it
If your business is slow, perhaps this is a greatbreaks even to cover for the expenses of the
time to re-evaluate the efficacy of youradvertisement (I sincerely doubt it, but we'll see...)
marketing. Eliminate dead wood in your marketingSo after the inventory and cutting down several
expenses and start investing your money smartlyof his marketing initiatives, this owner was happy
in marketing that really works (and you can proveto see that he could save $2400 a month! That's
that really works).money in the pocket that he was wasting. But
I met recently with the owner of the latestthis is not all. We also started implementing some
restaurant that I am consulting with, and we didinexpensive marketing changes. For example, his
precisely this exercise. I asked him to write downonline presence was very underwhelming and yet
every single marketing expense that he wasmost of the potential and current restaurant
making, and then we started evaluating whichcustomers nowadays (including his, of course) are
ones could be tracked.looking for restaurants online.
Amazingly for him (not for me because I wasSo I started working with him beefing up his web
expecting this), 80% of his marketing expensespresence.
were non trackable. This means that he wasOf course the first step is the restaurant's web
expending a substantial amount of moneysite. His web site was nicely done but quite
advertising in the Yellow Pages, two local weeklyunderutilized. I met with his webmaster and we
papers and some other local restaurant catalogs,implemented a signup form in the front page to
and yet he had no clue how many customerscapture his visitors information (on exchange for
these expenses brought to his restaurant.getting a welcome to my restaurant discount
The first thing that we did was to eliminate anycoupon when they enter it). We also added an
marketing expense that couldn't be measured.online registration, a comments field and some
This is just a logical step to really assess theother useful and interesting information for his
return of investment.customers.
Let me ask you. Would you invest money inHe also signed up for Meta Flavor a great (and
stocks or a mutual funds if you couldn't measurefree) way to promote your restaurant in the
how well (or bad) they were performing? Ofweb.
course not, and yet many restaurateurs stillFinally, he created a Twitter account and now
spend money hoping for the best and withoutstarted twitting whenever he has empty spaces
any substantial way to know how manyand wants to bring people (quickly and
customers those investments bring to theinexpensively) in. These are just some examples
restaurant.of things that you can do to improve your
Since this particular owner was very attached tomarketing and save money in the process.
one specific weekly magazine, and he wasIn these days of slow economy, taking control of
assuring me that it brought him many customers,your marketing and operating strategically and
I asked him to change the ad to include asmart is a must, if you want to survive these
discount coupon.challenging times.