When you’re running a restaurant, it can seem like just getting customers in the door is the most difficult part of your job. You have a great atmosphere, your food is amazing, your menu design is beautiful. But how do you bring in new customers so they can experience what you’ve worked so hard to create?
Strong restaurant marketing plans are the cornerstone of growing any restaurant. Read on to learn more about how to create an effective marketing plan for your restaurant.
Run a SWOT Analysis
When you get ready to start putting together a marketing plan, the first thing you’re going to want to do is run a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This will give you a quick and easy overview of where your business stands.
Start by examining what strengths and weaknesses your business has – this could include location, staff size, local connections, market position, and more. Then take a look at what opportunities your restaurant has for growth and improvement. Finally, take a hard look at the biggest threats to your business’s success right now.
Set Goals
Once you have an overview of where your restaurant stands, it’s time to start setting some goals. Figure out what weaknesses you want to improve on and which threats you want to address. You can also figure out how you want to leverage your strengths and opportunities for growth.
Make sure you’re setting specific, measurable goals during this session. Rather than saying you want to grow your social media following, set a specific percentage increase you want to see in measurable metrics by a certain date. This will help you determine if your plan is working or if it needs adjustment as you go along.
Create a Marketing Budget
Now that you have your goals in mind, it’s time to set some boundaries on your marketing plan. Of course, it would be amazing to run an ad for your restaurant in Times Square or pay for an endorsement from Bobby Flay. But those aren’t feasible options for most small restaurant owners.
Figure out how much money you can afford to put towards your marketing and how much of a return on investment you need. This will impact which marketing channels you choose and how much you spend on each down the line. It’s important to invest in your marketing, but it’s also crucial that you don’t let the cost of your marketing plan sink your business.
Create a Target Customer
With your goals and budget nailed down, you’ll need to begin by creating a target customer for your restaurant. You may be tempted to say, “That’s easy – everyone who eats in our target customer!” But when it comes to working out marketing tones and strategies, you’ll need a more specific customer profile to focus on.
Start by deciding which customer demographic you want to focus your marketing on. Do you want to attract young families, retired couples looking for a nice night out on the town, idealistic young adults working to live an ethical life, or middle-aged families who need a good meal for a reasonable price? Build out as many details about these target customers as you can – where they work, what they do for fun, etc.
Research Your Customers
One of the most important steps in your marketing plan building will be doing research. Start by researching your target customer demographic, looking for what kind of marketing they respond to, and figuring out what platforms they’re on. This may include social media platforms, magazine subscriptions, email usage, or newspaper subscriptions.
It’s also a good idea to consult with a branding expert on how to build a brand that appeals to your target demographic. Your marketing will be about the messages you send, true, but it will also be about your logo, colors, and fonts. A branding expert can help you optimize all this to reel in your target customers.
Research Your Media Options
Once you finish customer research, you need to research these different platform options and figure out which ones are going to work best for you. Think about your branding and the sorts of messages you want to send to this target customer. You should also take a look back at your budget and figure out which of these platforms will work best with your financial model.
Social media is one of the most cost-effective marketing platforms if you’re a smaller restaurant with a tight marketing budget. Email marketing can also be a great way to engage your customers without spending a fortune. Only if your budget is larger should you look at print, television, and radio marketing.
Identify Your Selling Point
When you get ready to create your day-to-day marketing plan, you’ll need a primary message to focus on. All your marketing should come back to this one point – the reason customers should come to your restaurant instead of the dozens of other competitors. This is your selling point, and it will become the cornerstone of your marketing efforts.
Think about what makes your restaurant unique, quality, or worth experiencing. If a customer came up to you and asked, “Why should I spend my hard-earned money at your restaurant?” what would your answer be? Condense this down into a sentence and use it to build all your marketing messaging.
Create a Day-to-Day Plan
With your selling point, budget, and target customer in mind, it’s time to get down to the work of making a day-to-day marketing plan. This is when you’ll decide what channels to market through and how often. You’ll also need to decide what sort of messaging you want to use on each of these channels.
Always keep these efforts based in research, whether that be about your target demographic or the platform you’re marketing on. There are some tried-and-true marketing tips for every platform, and there’s good data showing how different demographics respond to different messaging. Using this information will keep you from blindly guessing and hoping something works.
Put Your Plan into Action
Once you’ve figured out your day-to-day marketing plan, it’s time for your hard work to pay off! Start implementing your marketing plan, following the day-to-day guide you made for yourself. It’s important to designate a specific person in your organization to handle this so it doesn’t slip by the wayside.
If you know you’re going to have a busy week or the ideal time for you to post is in the middle of the dinner rush, schedule posts in advance to go out on social media. Keep your customers engaged with regular email newsletters. And take advantage of any local connections you have to get endorsements or advertising space.
Track Your Success
It may seem like once your marketing is started, your work on building marketing plan is done! But this is only the beginning; a good marketing plan should be an ever-evolving thing that grows and changes with the needs of your business and customers. You also need to check in and make sure that the strategies you’re using are working for your customers and your business.
Social media platforms provide easy-to-use metrics for everything from customer engagement to ad success. You can see how many people open the emails you send out and how many click the links you provide inside. Print advertising is a little harder to track, but customer surveys can give you some sense of how many people are coming into your restaurant in response to a print ad.
Adjust Your Plan
After a few months of running your marketing plan and tracking the results, your team needs to reconvene and reevaluate your strategy. Take a hard look at the results you’ve gotten and see what’s working well. Figure out ways to devote more resources to the most effective channels that get you the greatest return on investment.
You also need to take a look at what isn’t working and what customers aren’t responding well to. Even if you love these ideas, it’s better to cut your losses and devote that budget to more effective strategies. You can also use this time to brainstorm more strategies and start testing out new platforms or messaging with your customers.
Create Better Restaurant Marketing Plans
Figuring out how to market your restaurant can be a daunting process. But using the steps we’ve outlined here can help you create a plan that will get you real growth. Always stay focused on your customers, and keep everything you do based in data and research.
If you’d like to find ways to make better restaurant marketing plans, check out the rest of our site at River Crab Marketing. We are your number-one web design and marketing solution for your restaurant or business. Contact us today and start growing your bottom line the smart way.