Restaurant Marketing

It’s sad really, but 80% - 90% of restaurant marketing budgets are spent against new trial – getting a new customer to visit for the first time.  This is the least effective place to spend your money.  The majority of new trial efforts are spent against mass media advertising, which is costly and has dismal return on investment.  The fact is, new customer acquisition is 7-10 times more expensive than building restaurant sales through increased frequency, check average and party size.  But restaurant marketing isn’t always about what’s most effective, more often, it’s about what everyone else is doing.  Restaurant operators see that their competitor is on television or in the yellow pages or on a billboard and that they should be too.  They do this without regard for what’s working.  Restaurant owners have to wear so many hats that sometimes they just do what’s easiest – they write a check for mass media advertising and hope for the best.  Mass media is often more about feeding ego than driving sales.  It’s also impossible for most companies to compete in a toe-to-toe battle with the big guys.  Subway spends $290 million per year on television.  They can do that because they are a multi-billion dollar enterprise – a title less than 100 restaurant corporations in the world can claim. 

Keys to great Restaurant Marketing

• Branding: There has been lots of hype over the last few years about branding. We’re all being told we need to do more branding and a better job branding, but no one has really stopped to explain what a brand is and how you build it.  A brand is a promise.  It’s what customers, employees (Internal Customers), vendors, the media and all other key constituents come to expect in dealing with your restaurant. Brand-building is closing the gap between what you promise and what you deliver. A strong brand is one that has alignment between the promise and execution.  It’s not something that happens when you advertise, and it’s not that people recognize your logo or recall your advertising.

• Positioning: Positioning is an under-leveraged restaurant marketing component. Positioning is the place you hold in the customers or prospects mind relative to the competition (the cheaper choice, the higher quality choice, etcetera). Effective positioning involves incorporation of your Unique Selling Proposition (U.S.P.). The USP is the one thing that only you can claim.  It’s a point of differentiation that the competition either cannot or does not claim. An example is Burger King versus McDonald’s. If Burger King can convince you that a flame-broiled burger tastes better than a fried burger, they’ve won the war because McDonald’s will never go into all 14,000 stores and rip out fryers to install char-grilling pits.

• Due Diligence: Restaurant marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  Effective restaurant marketing must be built on a foundation of fact and knowledge about the market, your competition, your customers, your Internal Customers, financial history, marketing history, the industry, and outside forces that will impact your business.  It’s a lot to worry about, but restaurant marketing has to factor these considerations into the overall strategy.  Not even Coca-Cola can afford to market to everyone all the time, so effective market research and due diligence can help you be more effective in your restaurant marketing efforts.

• Menu Mix: Every six to twelve months, you’ll want to conduct an analysis of your menu.  This will include profitability analysis and a competitive restaurant menu analysis. To keep your menu fresh, relevant, and profitable, you’ll need to know specifically how each item on your menu is performing and also how it stacks up next to your top competition. Think of each item on your menu as a tenant leasing space and it has to earn its right to the space you’ve granted it.

• Training: Restaurant marketing, human resources, operations and training are inextricably connected. You’ve heard before that great restaurant marketing will just kill a bad operation faster.  That’s because if you send people into an operation that is performing at a B- level or below, people will have a bad experience and your money would be better spent on operations improvement rather than restaurant marketing. Training is a vital component of restaurant marketing for this reason. Your training will have to go beyond just employee orientation. You’ll need an ongoing program that constantly improves and evolves your staff competencies. It’s also a good idea to include a restaurant marketing component in your training program so that you have a staff of ambassadors to help your sales-building efforts.

Here are a few tactics that would help you to market your restaurant better than before.