When you’re trying to spread the word about your restaurant, sometimes it can be hard trying to decide which strategies to employ and when. In business promotion, there are 5 common strategies for doing this.
- Advertising
Getting the word out about your restaurant is crucial. It’s the first step to making sure you have customers walking through your door every day. Advertising is a paid method of showcasing your business to a large audience. This can be done using traditional or digital media. Essentially, it’s putting an ad in the local newspaper or on television as well as advertising on Google, Bing, or other websites.
- Personal Selling
Sometimes you get your start by selling your food in local buildings, bazaars, food trucks, or wherever you can offer it. After you set up your restaurant, you personally let your friends, family, neighbors, and other interested parties know you’re open. All personal selling involves face-to-face conversations about your restaurant.
- Sales Promotion
Discounts are great ways to encourage people to take short-term action. Offering 10% off an order for a holiday or with a coupon not only gets your business on people’s minds, it also inspires an increase in orders. Unless your margins are abnormally high, you probably can’t afford to offer discounts all of the time, but occasionally doing them can bring anticipation that is helpful for long-term selling.
Another sales promotion option is loyalty programs, such as offering a free appetizer or dessert after a customer earns points from eating at your restaurant. These are very popular and can greatly increase the regularity of customers coming in.
- Public Relations
Your public image is very important. Public relations is about presenting your restaurant in a positive way. You want to make sure that people know about all the good things your business is accomplishing. Make sure you send out a press release and/or post on your website and social media platforms whenever you host an event, donate to charity, or help others.
Included in public relations is reputation management, which is crucial, especially today. Make sure you know where your business is being reviewed, what people are saying about your service and food, and what you can do to address those comments, whether good or bad (both do need to be addressed). It’s important to keep an eye on your reputation – both online and offline – so you don’t accidently let negative reviews cause problems without realizing it’s happening.
- Direct Marketing
This is, of course, similar to advertising in that it’s a paid way to get the word out about your business. Unlike advertising, direct marketing systems use a smaller, more focused group of people that are more likely to be interested in your specific offerings. These are people in your area, former customers, and similar audiences. Most likely you’ll reach them through emails or social media posts.
There are many ways to market your restaurant, and not all of them are effective for every business, so you may want to try multiple avenues for spreading the word.
