Restaurant Marketing Strategy: Go Green

Today, there are around 80 percent Americans who consider themselves as concerned about the environment. Moreover, more than 60 percent would like to eat in an eco-friendly or green restaurant. Simply put, it is already a given that one of your most powerful restaurant marketing strategies is to position your restaurant as socially responsible.

Here is how you can make your restaurant green:

Avoid the use of plastics.

Plastics do not decay at all but instead add to tons of garbage that pollute the earth today. Thus, as part of your green restaurant marketing strategies, you may want to avoid the use of it. Rather, go for clean ceramic or porcelain ware. They tend to last very long too and are elegant to look at. Moreover, rather than using plastics for take-out, consider paper bags.

Have vegetarian or organic food options.

Customers who are eco-friendly would surely love the idea of eating fresh fruits and vegetables for their meals. Do not forget to add them into your menu options. If you are not a completely vegetarian restaurant, you can consider coming up with at least 5 dishes that your customers can choose from.

Obtain a certification.

It is very easy for you to say that you are green, but it can be quite difficult to really prove it. To enhance your credibility, it is best to have yourself certified by organizations such as Green Restaurant Association. So far, there are three different types of certificates handed out: for existing restaurants, new ones, and events produced. Every year, you need to have your restaurant evaluated by the organization before you can get yourself an updated certificate. It is going to be quite a long process, but the reward is worth it. You can proudly display your certificate in your restaurant.

Maintain your own garden.

There are three benefits you can get out of this. First, you can save on costs, since a good number of your ingredients can be yours for free. Second, you can bring the prices of your goods down because of less expenses on raw materials. Third, it is a good restaurant marketing technique since you can mention it to your environmental-conscious customers.

Work with the local government.

Is your government creating environmental-friendly programs? You can create tie-ups or partnerships with them. For example, if they are promoting proper waste management, you can set up garbage bins outside your restaurant where customers can throw their garbage in the designated cans. You can also offer freebies or discounts to any guest who participates in the initiatives of the government to keep your locality clean and green.

Teach your customers how to go green.

You can display different tips on how to conserve energy or save Mother Earth in different areas of your restaurant. You can also come up with free cooking demos or lectures on how to prepare delectable organic food or how to choose the freshest produce.

Do not miss out on your social responsibilities. Incorporate doing green business in your marketing strategies.

Restaurant Marketing Ideas That Bring Customers In

What is a restaurant without diners? Indeed, your restaurant marketing strategies should be focused on how to get customers to come into your diner and eat. However, with stiff competition in the industry, you need ideas that would surely work.

You can start with these:

Come up with a theme for your restaurant.

A very good way of differentiating yourself among your competitors and as a form of restaurant marketing technique is creating a theme for your restaurant. There are actually too many options to choose from, and it may range from something elegant to chic or geeky. You can then reflect your theme to the decors in your restaurant to the design of your menu or uniform of your employees.

Go online.

There are surely hundreds of potential customers who do not know of your existence simply because you do not reach out to them in cyberspace. Today, it already becomes necessary for you to have your own web presence, perhaps by creating a website or even a simple blog about your business. There are also a lot of free tools that you can use, including social networking and microblogging sites.

Do not miss out birthdays and anniversaries.

There are only few restaurants that keep tab on special occasions of their customers such as their weddings and anniversaries. Make sure that you can be one of those to do that and even enhance the program. For example, you can have all your customers sign up in your mailing list or in your database. You can then program the system to alert you if someone is celebrating special events in the coming days. You may then invite your customers to come back to your resto, so you can offer them great discounts on their food choices. They would surely appreciate the gesture.

Be green.

Do you know that guests prefer those restaurants that are socially responsible? So far, there are more people who are converting themselves to environment-conscious individuals and would prefer to dine in restaurants who share their principles.

Do not be afraid to go green, as there are a lot of ways on how you can achieve that. For instance, you can add organic dishes into your menu, which you can offer to your guests. You can also promote proper waste management by developing properly labeled or coded trash bins. You may also hand out flyers on how your guests can become more helpful to the environment. In fact, you can offer discounts or freebies to those who participate or support any environmental program by the local government.

Never ignore age-old restaurant marketing methods.

We are talking about the calling cards, brochures, flyers, and newspaper ads in here. Furthermore, take time to create surveys or feedback form that your guests can fill out or sign. You do not only get their names and contact details, which you can add into your database and use for your marketing campaigns later, but you can also know what your customers really feel about your business.

Restaurant Marketing for Beginners

If there is one thing that you have to keep in mind when you are opening your own restaurant, it is this: it is going to be hard. There is no other way around it. You can be up against a lot of competitors. You still have so much to prove to your target market.

However, you can speed up the beginner's phase and progressively win trust and customers to your business by implementing these restaurant marketing strategies:

1. Come up with a restaurant marketing plan.

Never jump into any type of promotion without determining what steps to take and who should be your target market. More importantly, you must have an idea on how much you are going to spend for your restaurant marketing strategies. After all, one of the biggest issues you are going to face when starting out is your budget.

Moreover, your marketing plan would be useful when you already have to do evaluations on your strategies. Unless you are really a genius, only a number of your techniques will eventually bring the highest conversion rate. However, you would never be able to tell which of these strategies worked and which ones did not unless you have a plan that you can use to compare to your actual figures.

2. Rely on free advertisement.

One of the biggest money-savers is free advertisement, and contrary to what other businesspersons believe, it is not as difficult to achieve as they think. First, make sure that you can please your first customers. If they are satisfied or happy with the food and your service, they would be glad to spread the word to their friends and family. Second, you can do something good for the community. Perhaps as part of your launch, you can organize a food shelter for the homeless within your area. Surely, the press can speak the story up and get your good deed and your business published without spending a dime for a press release.

3. Create a website.

There are millions of people who log in to the Internet every day. Surely, a good number of your targeted customers are out there too, looking for restaurants such as yours. To reach out to them, you can produce your own website.

Because of competition, most websites come in very cheap. You can download free website builders and have them hosted for less than $10 every month. You can also buy a domain that is very inexpensive. In fact, if you know how to research well, you can get both at less than $50 a month.

4. Stick to the theme of your restaurant.

What do you like your restaurant to be? Would you like it to be family friendly? Would you like to cater to a particular demographic or group? Your restaurant should reflect whatever theme or goal you have in mind so you can also drive the right people in.

Again, it is going to be a long and winding road, but with these tips, you will not have to struggle so much anymore.

Restaurant Marketing Don’t's

Do you know that one of the foremost reasons why businesses such as restaurants don't prosper is because of poor management? As early as now, you may want to avoid these dont's on restaurant marketing:

Offer something that you really can't.

Don't allow your customers to just bite the bait. Avoid misleading them with false advertisement; otherwise, everything will just backfire on you. Thus, if you're offering 30 percent off on your lunch menu, make sure that it's going to be so unless, of course, you have clearly made your own terms and conditions.

Forget to measure your goals.

Seriously, what are you restaurant marketing goals if you're not going to assess them anyway? It's very important that you know if you're achieving your objectives or not. After all, if it's going to be the latter, there are two possible explanations. First, you're not creating and implementing the right restaurant marketing strategies, which means you need to modify them. Second, your goals are not just feasible, hard to measure, or completely impossible. Hence, you need to create new ones for your business.

Disregard a marketing plan.

You just don't produce marketing materials or create strategies randomly. For one, you're going to spend money for them. Moreover, not all marketing ideas will work. For instance, a local restaurant doesn't have to spend hundreds of dollars for a space in national newspapers. Local dailies, which are cheaper and more targeted, will already do.

A marketing plan will also provide you with the guide you need to achieve your goals. In it, you would determine the different techniques that you have to implement to reach your desired number of customers and sales for a given period. If the estimates and actual figures don't match, you can go back to your marketing plan for re-assessment and remodification.

Ignore training your employees.

In case you don't know, one of your biggest assets and your no.1 walking and talking advertisement is your employees. If they don't know how to treat your customers very well, you can't expect them to go back to your restaurant again. Worse, they would campaign against anyone who would consider dining in your resto, simply because they don't want others to be treated with disrespect and poor customer service.

Make sure that you can definitely take time to train your employees before you send them out there and entertain your guests. More than the proper way of handling food, they should know how to be polite and to settle grievances from your customers. The least thing you want to happen is for them to start looking for you. By then, it means that your employees have performed poorly on the floor.

Forget you're running a restaurant.

In the end, your customers are not eating in your resto because of the ambiance. It's only secondary. Besides great service, they are also looking for great food. Never fail to provide them what they want. When they are happy and satisfied, they would surely help out by spreading good words about your business.

Restaurant Marketing Do’s

Just when you thought that you know all about restaurant marketing, you realize that there are still so many things that you need to learn. Let's start with the usual do's:

Make a list of your target market.

One of the foremost reasons why your restaurant marketing strategies won't work is because you really don't know to whom you're selling your business to. After all, if you're selling Mexican food, you cannot just advertise your products to those who prefer Japanese or Italian. Moreover, you cannot just offer burgers and fries to families since parents would always want something healthy for the kids.

Have a plan.

Make sure too that it's going to be a good one. You must remember that your restaurant marketing plan should not just be an outline of the things that you want to do or something that is very broad. As much as possible, it must be very specific. For example, how long should your promotion last? Is it going to be for a month or a year?

It's also essential that you would be able to measure the results of your plan. This is how you can evaluate if your marketing techniques really work or not. Have you met your quota? If you didn't, then the comparison between the actual and the estimated figures in your plan must provide you with the answers you need.

Promote your business through word of mouth.

There are actually wide varieties of marketing strategies that you can employ. You can even go online by creating your own website. However, the best mode of advertisement would still be the word of mouth. Never encourage your guests to spread any good word about your restaurant. If possible, you can ask for their own testimonials, which you can put into your website or even right at the menu.

Emphasize the benefits, not the features.

Here's another potential mistake that you can make. Rather than focusing on what your customers would get out of your menu, you prefer to highlight their features. For instance, you may say that your salad is different because you are using balsamic vinegar than mayo. Instead of doing this, why don't you stress the benefits? Balsamic vinegar is definitely way healthier than mayonnaise or any other type of dressing. Always remember that your customers would always ask, "What's in it for me?" when they decide to dine in your restaurant. Unless you are able to meet their needs, you could not expect them to come back.

Make true to your promise.

Don't create any hype. In the same way, you're not allowed to say anything that you know you can't commit. For example, don't say that you have a very spacious restaurant when you're only occupying a very small space. Don't mention the word "cozy" if there are plenty of smokers in what should be a non-smoking area. You just don't create ads for your restaurant just to drive people in. You want to make them come back too.

Perform Restaurant Marketing with Your Employees

As they say, the human resource is one of the biggest and the most important assets in a business, even in a restaurant. Thus, while you take time to come up with the best menu and create the most inviting ambiance, make sure that you can also focus on your employees. After all, having a good team is an excellent restaurant marketing technique.

Your employees can actually help in your restaurant marketing strategies. They can aid you in coming up with a database of prospects and customers. They are also your front liners, so if the customers are happy with their services, you can expect them to come back again sometime soon.

Ensure that your employees therefore can do the following:

Welcome and walk the guests.

There should be someone who's going to assist the guests as they enter the restaurant. It's just like venturing into something unfamiliar. Your guests would feel more apprehensive of the unknown unless there's someone with a trusting gesture can help them out. This is also necessary if you have a seating plan in mind to maximize your profit. You really don't want them a couple to sit in a table good for four because you will already lose 2 more people.

Guide the guests through the menu.

Regardless if he or she is a regular customer or not, a staff should be there to help your customers in figuring out what to eat. He or she can walk the guests through the different pages and even suggest specials or promos that they can avail. Sometimes the diners also need elaborate explanation of the meals written on the menu.

Smile.

This is a simple yet very effective restaurant marketing strategy. Seriously, would you like to eat the food served by a grumpy waitress? Of course not. You may think that they're not really happy with your presence. A smile can make a guest comfortable and can assure him or her that someone's taking care of his or her needs while he or she is in the restaurant. Conflicts can also be easily resolved when your staff smile. It would make your customers feel that issues can immediately be resolved.

Wear their uniform properly.

If they have to wear a uniform, ensure that they are wearing it the right way. As implied, they are like your walking and talking ads. Wearing the uniforms improperly is also a sign of disrespect to the restaurant or unprofessionalism. You don't like to transmit that feeling to the guests.

Operate the cash register well.

What irks customers? Besides bad food, they don't want lousy servers, especially if they are already asking for their bill. Worse, they don't want to be charged with food that they did not eat. Ensure that your staff knows how to work themselves on the cash register or to your POS system, if you have one.

With proper attitude towards their customers and even to their fellow employees and the management, your staff would be your best allies as you make your business grow.

How to Do Restaurant Marketing for Free

Seriously, is there a way for you to perform restaurant marketing without really spending a single dime? The answer is actually yes. The good news is that there are a lot of ways on how to do that.

Gather testimonials or use word of mouth.

If you believe that what you are doing is right, you can encourage your customers to help spread the word about your restaurant. The word of mouth is still considered the most powerful restaurant marketing tools. Nevertheless, to help them convince to do so, make sure that you can also provide quality service to them.

Create a blog.

There are millions of blog readers around the world. Some of them could definitely be your target market. Moreover, food blogs are a craze today, especially now that people have become picky and conscious on what food they spend their money on.

Creating a blog is simple, easy, and very cheap. Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, and Livejournal.com, for example, are some of the blogging platforms that can help in your restaurant marketing strategies at a cheap cost since they can be free. You only need to pay when you need to upgrade, and commonly, doing so is not necessary.

Write press releases.

You can also promote your business through a press release. This is a copy that introduces your restaurant to your target market and allows you to talk about what your readers can expect once they decide to dine. For some, press releases are costly. For you, it is not going to be, since there are free press release distribution centers today. A good example is http://www.free-press-release.com/. Just make sure, though, that you can follow the directions in creating and submitting a press release to avoid rejection.

Submit articles to article directories.

Besides press releases, you can come up with regular articles that you can submit in article directories. These are centers where various informative copies are being stored, ready to be read by thousands of Internet users and publishers. Usually, you are not allowed to sell your business outright. However, you can redirect your readers to your restaurant website if they are looking for more information. One of the best is http://www.ezinearticles.com.

Create a fan page in Facebook.

Why should you go for Facebook and a fan page? First, this social networking website is the biggest to date, containing millions of users from around the globe. Second, a fan page gives you more control on what you are going to publish. You can upload your own pictures or start your own discussion. Facebook is free. Take advantage of it.

Encourage food reviews.

Do you have bloggers among your customers? You can encourage them to create a feature or a review about your restaurant. Surely, they have their own set of readers; most of them are either friends or family members of the reviewer. Because of the level of trust and confidence, it is easier for their readers to believe in what the blogger says about your restaurant.

How to Do E-mail Restaurant Marketing Right

There are a lot of restaurant marketing tactics that you can employ, but one of those that you should not miss out is e-mail marketing. You want to know why? Well, get this figure. Based on a survey done by Direct Marketing Association in 2007, e-mail restaurant marketing strategies can generate more than $57 of return for every dollar that the businessperson spends. That's more than 100 percent for you.
However, you should also know that you'll never be able to get that number if you're not going to do e-mail restaurant marketing right. To avoid mistakes, take note of the following tips:

1. Follow drip marketing.

What is drip marketing? It's actually a marketing strategy based on plant irrigation. Crops are not "fed" with so much water; otherwise, they will drown. It's the same thing with e-mail marketing. Too much of something is going to be bad. It's therefore not ideal to send promotional materials every day. You'll be too annoying. Learn how to evenly spaced your e-mail marketing campaigns. Usually, twice a month is already enough.

2. Be more personal with your e-mail.

Never make your subscribers feel as if they are just part of one huge database. Starting your e-mail with "Dear, Sir/Madam," doesn't work anymore these days. Instead, use their personal names in the subject and salutation. Of course, it's going to be such a huge challenge if you have hundreds to thousands of names. What you can do is to use an autoresponder that you can modify to send out e-mails reflecting the names of your respondents. Some autoresponders are free or very cheap. Aweber, one of the best systems out there, can be yours for just a dollar.

3. Avoid selling constantly.

Again, this boils down to the fact that customers and prospects don't want to feel like commodities. Limit your selling strategies. Rather, feed your subscribers with valuable information that would help them in making excellent decisions. For example, if you're offering a a new organic dish, you may talk about the benefits of organic food to health. Use your newsletter as an opportunity to tell your unique selling proposition and the benefits offered by your restaurant.

4. Limit graphics.

The best way to attract your customers and prospects to dine to your restaurant is by giving them visual presentations. This means you can attach images of your dishes in vivid colors. You can make them look mouth-watering and definitely enticing.

However, you should be careful with using graphics too. Technically, they tend to slow down download time of your e-mail. If your subscribers can't see your e-mail images in less than 5 seconds, you would never have the chance of showing your pictures to them. Thus, you're not able to send your message properly.

5. Create a good heading.

If your heading sounds too spammy or commercial, don't expect your subscribers to read your e-mail. Spend time coming up with a heading that would compel them to click on your mail. A good strategy is to spell out what they can get from reading an e-mail. "Enjoy 20 percent off your lunch with a coupon" is much better than "Buy your lunch now."

Restaurant Marketing Strategy: Modify the Menu

One of the best restaurant marketing tools is your menu. This is a collection of the different dishes you're serving in your restaurant. It will be the basis of your customers when they want to buy or not your meals. If you don't come up with a well-planned menu, it's either the customers won't be able to make a very good decision and will have very terrible customer experience, or they won't eat at all.

It's important therefore that you can spend some time strategizing on how your menu should look and feel like. Here are some great tips to start with:

The menu should reflect the theme of your restaurant.

If you have a theme for your restaurant, it would be great if it can also be presented on the menu. It could be in the shape, color, names of food, or material used for the menu. For example, French restaurants may make use of cursive and elaborately designed letters on the cover and content.

Keep your menu options to a minimum.

There are a lot of reasons why there should only be at most 30 menu choices available. First, it's easier for you to come up with specialties. These are the foods that are salable in your restaurant. Second, you can ensure that you can maintain a small inventory and prevent wastage of a lot of ingredients. Besides, you don't want to exhaust your customers into thinking what food they should eat.

Classify the food.

A good restaurant marketing strategy in designing menu is classifying them. The traditional method is according to when they are served. For instance, appetizers come before soups and entrees, while desserts will always come last. The last page of the menu would also be your beverages and full-set meals, if you have any. This is because the latter offers smaller profits for the business.

If you have specials or best-selling food items, it's better to place them in the first few pages of your menu. If you can no longer edit your menu for some reason, you can include a pamphlet showing your promos. You can also add a star or any symbol beside the name of your hot sellers.

Don't be too creative with food names.

Usually, with your intention of keeping up to the restaurant theme, you tend to overcreate the food name until it's harder to pronounce and more difficult to understand. A rule of thumb is to name your food according to the most special ingredient found in it. For example, "Grilled Chicken with Thyme and Rosemary" gives your customers an idea of what the food could be as well as the name is mouth-watering enough for them to get it.

Describe your food accurately.

Refer to the word "accurately" again. Descriptions are actually not the area where you have to come up with the most number of adjectives just to attract your customers. In fact, it's a lot better to be simple, straight to the point, and precise with them. You don't want to mislead your guests.

Top 4 Online Restaurant Marketing Strategies

Based on a report submitted by AIS Media, around 89 percent of restaurant customers have actually looked restaurants up over the World Wide Web before they decide to book a reservation or dine there. This means that unless you're going to play your cards right when it comes to online restaurant marketing, especially making your website known to your target audience, you'll never get to enjoy this huge percentage.

There are so many restaurant marketing techniques that you can implement online, yet not all of them can perform really well. Just to give you a good head start, you may want to consider the following modes:

1. Create a mailing list.

What is a mailing list? You can view it as a database of those who signed up to your newsletters and other offers. The list then tells you of your initial prospects or individuals who express high interest over your restaurant business.

A mailing list often accompanies a sales or information page, which provides them reasons why they have to sign up for it or add their name and e-mail address into the list. For example, if they do, they may receive coupons they can use when they visit your restaurant.

2. Perform e-mail marketing.

On a study conducted by Forrester Research, it has been found out that more than 85 percent of e-mail subscribers use information from company e-mails to make purchasing decisions. Moreover, close to 80 percent do read their e-mails daily. You should also not forget that virtually 100 percent of those who surf the World Wide Web has at least one active e-mail address. You can definitely reach out to a huge target group if you can send your promotional materials through their e-mail address.

3. Opt for great online visitor experience.

For your restaurant marketing, don't just settle for any type of website. Make sure that it's not only navigable but also filled with a lot of information that would help your customers come up with the best dining decision. Great additions to your website include polls, blogs, and message boards where customers and prospects can interact with one another.

4. Optimize your website.

This is highly important, as this will be your ticket to make your website prominent in search engines. Most Internet users would go to Google, Yahoo, and MSN to search for restaurants like yours. So they can notice you, you must appear in the first few pages of the results page. You can never achieve that if you don't optimize your pages.

There are two ways on how to do that: off-page and on-page optimization. Both have their own benefits to your website. If you don't know how to do optimization, you can look for cheap but effective SEO specialists in the Internet.

There's one thing you need to remember, though, when you're doing online marketing strategies: never forget to measure them. Just because these work for a lot, they should also work for you. You would never know unless you take time to evaluate their effectiveness in your business.