Friday, October 9, 2009

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.

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