Friday, October 9, 2009

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.

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