Start a Restaurant

You have probably noticed that the number of restaurants and fast food joints in your area are increasing at a fast pace. If you are an independent contractor you probably have a great deal of competition from restaurant chain operators. These restaurateurs are focused on marketing and have large budgets to draw lots of attention.

Even though the chains are serious competition, an independent owner can have significant advantages. There are tactics you can use to take advantage of your independent status and ways to promote your restaurant without shelling out a lot of money.

What may work in the way of marketing one restaurant, might not work for another. It is a well known fact however, that you must use restaurant marketing ideas to succeed. If you find one type of advertising isn’t working well, try something else and just keep trying. If your ideas are creative, you will be able to bring traffic into your restaurant.

One form of restaurant marketing, is to place a press release in the local papers. There is a site on the internet that offers a Restaurant Press Release Creator. This tool will allow you to create a properly written and creative press release to announce what type of restaurant you are opening, and what you will offer.

There are several ways to advertise that are cheap and even free. You can create a customer newsletter and use it as a marketing tool. A newsletter is a way for customers to remember you better than any other form of advertising. Those who use this type of advertising say that it builds relationships with the customer. (more…)

When you open a restaurant, you will need as many new customers as you can get to make your establishment a raving success. Your restaurant marketing strategy will be the biggest part of bringing in new business. Here are a few restaurant marketing strategies for you to try.

1. Market your Restaurant in Hotel and Motel Rooms– People on vacation and people who do a great deal of traveling, will want to know where to find an excellent meal in your town. An excellent restaurant marketing strategy is to call or visit hotel and motels within a 5 mile radius of your restaurant, and ask them if you can place menus and coupons in their rooms and lobby areas. Some hotels and motels provide a list of area attractions for their guests, ask them if you can add your restaurant to their list. When the guests get hungry they will see your menu or your name on the list and will think of your restaurant.

2. Form an Alliance With Local Event Sponsors. This is another great restaurant marketing strategy! After any local concert or sporting event, people may be ready to have a meal before they go home. Many people come from quite a long distance to these events, and they will be looking for a place to eat before they head home. You can advertise on existing monitors, or have someone stationed at the door and give out menus when the patrons go inside. Remember women are more apt to keep flyers than men. In exchange for the advertising you can advertise the event in your restaurant.

3. Enter and Sponsor Contests– One of the biggest ways to use a restaurant marketing strategy, is to enter and win a contest. You can enter your cook or chef in a cooking contest, or enter contests in restaurant magazines and browse the internet to find contests to enter. You can create contests in your restaurant that will bring in customers. (more…)

Congratulations. Taking the time to consider your staff’s appearance is a great step towards building your brand awareness, increasing productivity and much more. With all the challenges that restaurant managers and owners face, it is understandable that restaurant uniforms come close to the bottom of the list. With more than 925,000 restaurant locations in the United States, restaurant competition is growing fierce. If you have great food and service, you are well on your way to winning customers. But, there is more to it than just that. Many times people are looking for a good experience just as much as good food. What your staff wears adds as much to the experience as anything else. A well thought out uniform can do much for your staff and your customers.

Your staff is the face of your company. They represent you and your establishment. They should convey cleanliness and confidence to your customers no matter what kind of atmosphere you have, casual or formal. Even in the most casual diners, people want to see some uniformity. Maybe because it promotes professionalism and shows you care. For some sub-conscious reason, uniforms put customers at ease.

A smart waiter uniform creates brand awareness with or without imprint. We can immediately conjure up images of the striped shirt, suspenders and “flair” of one national chain. When we walk into that restaurant, we are immediately put into the fun mind set that their uniform creates. We are expecting a louder, happier, funnier waiter to put us at ease right away. Conversely, the tuxedo uniform or waiter jacket and gloves can create an exclusive or “special occasion” atmosphere that makes the customer feel important and fancy (and probably willing to spend lots of money). We expect a low-toned waiter that follows proper etiquette and knows all about the demi-glaze and Pinot Blanc. (more…)

When you work with an industry professional to select high quality promotional products to get them printed and delivered, you will always save precious time and money. Why spend hours choosing specific logo items for an ad campaign when when someone more qualified can do it for you? It makes sense to free you up so that you can do what you do best, run your restaurant business.

So what’s the best way to include promotional products in your marketing mix? A pro may suggest several ideas to set your enterprise apart from the competition. Here are a few to start you off:

1) Spread word of mouth by handing out logo printed balloons to every customer’s child. Add a catchy phrase like “… things will be looking up when you dine at YOUR restaurant …” and then watch the traffic increase as your visibility on the street increases.

2) If you’re a more upscale restaurant, present branded steak knives to customers who order a steak and tell them that this special knife will remind them of your restaurant whenever they cook a steak at home. Your brand will be there at the exact time when they are thinking of great food. (more…)

‘Tis the season to be jolly and yes, it is time to be jolly indeed! The holidays are here again and many of us will surely be going out with families, dear friends and loved ones. Buying gifts for and treating them out to restaurants are one of the familiar ways we usually do to let our loved ones know that we remember and cherish them especially this time of year.

As for business and restaurant owners; it is still business as usual but it is also during this time that the sales are going up, up, up as long as necessary steps are taken to ensure customers’ satisfaction. True, restaurant owners in particular are going to experience how the holiday season can become extremely generous. People will flock but when they do, meeting their needs and expectation is a criteria that doubles its importance.

As a restaurant owner, consider what strategies you can think of to help maintain the positive feedback of your customers towards your establishment. Always remember that happy customers mean that you have done something right. Impress only in the most honest and effective way and you can expect to be talked about by holiday goers in no time. (more…)

If you own a restaurant, I can sympathize with your plight. I’ve been in advertising for 35 years. First working for an ad agency, owning my own, then being a sales consultant for the Yellow Pages for 25 years. I have had many restaurant accounts and they all have one thing in common; the need for customers. The trouble is that they are also heavily invested in the kitchen equipment, staff, rent, and other overhead. So, when it comes down to advertising, they have little left. But without patrons, the business will fail. So where do they turn?

It depends on many factors. Major national chains like McDonalds are franchises where they participate in joint ventures as part of their agreement. So the parent company does the TV and radio ads and other promotions for them. If they are independent operations that are part of a group like the Olive Garden, they can do local ads or piggyback on the national ads. In both cases, they use the larger media like TV and radio. The smaller, localized single entities run by families are not so lucky. They can rarely afford television with their more limited budget.

That’s where I usually fitted in. As a Yellow Pages representative, I would explain how they could target their market in the most used product of its kind. Everyone had the YP. Whether at home or traveling, even all the motels and hotels had a YP. They simply placed a decent sized ad in the book with some examples of their offerings and they should expect some business. If they tried to tell me they were considering another media, I would educate them. It went like this.

No one would look in the newspaper for a restaurant, unless you are placing a discount, special, or coupon. Then it made sense, but just for the short term. As far as direct mailers, ditto. You would have to make the recipients an offer they couldn’t refuse. Local magazines might be fine for a high-end establishment like a bar, club or specialty restaurant. But their rates are fairly expensive. Obviously, unless you had multiple locations, TV and radio are too costly as well. So the YP was the best local choice, at the time. And that time was prior to the advent of the Internet. (more…)

Every restaurant will have competition, and even those operating on a tight budget, will need to know something about marketing a restaurant. Marketing is essential for your restaurant to succeed. You need to keep the seats filled to make a restaurant work.

There are several ideas listed below on how to go about marketing a restaurant.

• Guerilla Marketing– This involves using more than one type of smaller advertising ideas, instead of using larger, more costly advertising such as advertising on national TV. You can find other and more unique ways of advertising that are cheaper, and sometimes free.

The Top 10 Guerilla Marketing Tactics:

1. Signs– Create the biggest, most clever, unique sign for marketing your restaurant that your local community will allow. Make your restaurant stand out from all others.

2. Use Flyers– Have a grand opening and make sure everyone knows about it. You can offer a percentage off a meal, or free drinks with any order. You can also offer a percentage off any entrée during the first week you are open. Above all be creative, and make your customers remember you and want to come back.

3. Samples– You can set up a table in front, with your most personable server handing out samples of your food. Breakfast muffins in the morning, or your best pasta dish in the afternoon will allow your customers to try a bit of your fare. You may also want to make up coupons for a dollar or so off a meal (within a certain time line). Have your friendly server tell them about the restaurant and make sure they are able to field simple questions from the public. (more…)

Restaurant business constantly needs promotion and it should be well known to many of the audience within its target market. The uniqueness, theme, food presentation, staff and most of all, customer service makes up the importance of a restaurant to being able to stay in business against all its tight competitors.

You have more or less seen many schemes from different restaurant establishments for promotion. Some doesn’t completely have any relation to the food or type of service they render while some offers a completely relevant scheme of promotion. No matter the differences, these type of attempts in to getting their target market crave for their service and good food do appear to the preferences of the majority. Still, you may wonder what do balloons have to do with the food you want to order since you didn’t go there to eat balloons in the first place.

Staying in business especially when you have a restaurant to run requires a lot of patience and extra creativity. You may take advantage of the talents of advertising specialists to help you with your advertisement and promotional ideas but you simply can’t spend too much on each attempt. You always have to find a way how to gain benefit from promoting, though you will need to spend some money. And spending it too much on an advertising specialist is not the way to go. (more…)

Restaurant press can add more than just a few dollars to you bottom line, it can add credibility and a flood of follow-up mentions if you play the game right. If you have read your local paper, or watched your local television you have to have noticed that whenever there is a story affecting the food and beverage industry the same names and places are always mentioned. How does this happen, why do they always get the spotlight? Well, let me tell you, they work it. If you want to get into the game you have to work it too.

What you need to start working the media
First you need to do is put together a restaurant press kit. Make sure you have a restaurant fact sheet that describes the detailed information about your establishment. Include any relevant articles such as reviews etc. All of you menus should be printed and included; breakfast, lunch, dinner, wine, specialty drinks, even your beer list.

Pictures are also a must. Get some high quality shots of your restaurant and several food pictures as well. Have associated food recipes for the pictures. The more the better, you never know when you’ll need one on the fly. A good picture and bio of key personnel, like the Chef, is also a nice touch and can be very valuable.

Next you will want to put a list of possible topics that you or your staff can be considered experts on. Be creative here, try to anticipate what stories would show you in the best light, what type of news or situations are on the horizon, or what type of news story you can create. Restaurant press can come in almost any form.

Present it with the right look and feel
Time for a Staples run! You’re going to have to give some thought on how you want to present all the material you have gathered. If you are a five star dining establishment, your restaurant press kit should present yourself accordingly. A package for a sports bar should give a feeling of a sports bar. Remember, you are presenting your restaurant so keep it real. Make sure you put together enough to go to all of the newspaper and televisions in your area. (more…)

Restaurant gift certificates can be a convenient yet thoughtful present to give to a loved one, especially those who are very hard to shop for.

There are plenty of times the “perfect” gift is out of stock, especially during the holiday season. Gift certificates, however, are always in stock. Last minute shoppers never have to worry that the item will run out.

Restaurant gift certificates will always be appreciated because everyone loves to find a reason to go out and eat at their favorite restaurant.

There are plenty of times a person’s favorite restaurant is more expensive than they would normally be able to afford. This is another reason a gift certificate is a perfect gift to give to those people: It lets them go out to eat to their heart’s content because they know they could not otherwise afford it.

Many people wait for special occasions just to eat in fancy restaurants. When that special occasion comes, sometimes the budget will not allow them to celebrate at that particular restaurant. With a gift certificate to their favorite restaurant, they will be able to use it during that special occasion. Since most gift certificates do not have an expiration date, they do not have to be used right away. They provide the recipient with the opportunity to experience something that they would not normally do. (more…)