In the world of restaurant marketing, things change incredibly fast. New tactics emerge, old fads fizzle and fade away, while some strategies prove their worth by enduring over decades.
With so many options available for the modern restaurant owner, it can be difficult to know which of these trends or strategies you should be using to market your business.
Yet, perhaps the best restaurant marketing advice is a combination of the following principles, which are applicable to hospitality businesses of all shapes and sizes, and they will be as relevant in the future as they are today.
Know Your Business
There are winning strategies that may not work for your kind of restaurant or business. And there are some tactics that people claim are old news, yet they could work like a charm with your customers.
In other words, there are few absolutes that will always work or never work. This is why it pays to know the unique requirements and opportunities for your business. After all, you’re likely not interested in the latest marketing trends out of passing interest. You want to know what’s working because you want to apply that awareness to your business and reach more customers.
Assessing potential marketing strategies through the lens of your unique business is a great way to avoid jumping on the latest marketing bandwagon. Because no matter how popular or successful a marketing strategy may seem to be, if it’s not right for your restaurant, it could be a waste of valuable time and limited resources.
For example, you may have seen a restaurant business doing really well on social media. Platforms like Instagram can be a dream for reaching customers directly and growing your business brand. You may even feel that your venue is infinitely insta-worthy, and you might enjoy styling and photographing beautiful images of your meals and creations. All of this may suggest that social media would be a great place to invest your marketing efforts.
However, if you know that you or your team will have little to no time to consistently provide visual or written content, as well as create informal stories and respond to comments, you may find that this particular marketing strategy takes you away from what you do best, i.e. running a great restaurant.
When you’re clear on the strengths and weaknesses of your business, it enables you to see which marketing strategies are going to be viable, and which may be too much of a time investment. Of course, you can always hire experts to handle this aspect for you – leaving you to focus on your food and your customers.
Being crystal clear on what’s possible and feasible for your business will serve you well when choosing the most appropriate and successful marketing method.
Know Your Numbers
Tracking, testing, and analysing results is key for any successful marketing campaign. Whatever you choose to focus on to market your restaurant business, if you want to get the most from your budget and your future efforts, it’s vital that you analyse what’s working well and what isn’t.
While it can certainly pay to hire experts to help with reaching your customers – especially as restaurant marketing is a specialised niche – as the business owner, it’s important that you stay aware of the results.
Tracking, testing, and analysing the numbers has always been a smart strategy for any business owner investing in any kind of marketing. Given that tactics change so fast in the modern world, it’s even more important to stay aware of what results your chosen marketing strategies are generating.
If you’re the one responsible for checking these metrics, it may seem like one more chore on a never-ending To-do list. Yet taking the time to know your numbers will yield priceless insights that will help you prevent wasting money on future marketing spend, as well as learning more about what works – in reality, not in theory – for your particular business.
These valuable metrics can also provide some key insights about your customers. This kind of data is priceless for any business owner who wants to do more of what’s working, less of what’s not working, and understand their customers on a deeper level.
Armed with these proven principles, you’ll be in a strong position to make sound choices about where to devote your precious marketing resources. The range of options is only going to increase in the future, so staying grounded in these core practices will help you to make the right decisions for your restaurant business.
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