154 – Is Marketing the missing ingredient in your Restaurants Secret Sauce for Profitability?

Marketing for a Restaurant is often the missing ingredient for Restaurants.  This is Part 2 of our series on why Restaurant Marketing is so important for Restaurant owners.

These days have the best food is nowhere near enough to be successful.  Remember – you don’t want to have the best Restaurant that no one has ever heard of.  Have a listen for our reasons for Restaurant marketing and see if there is something that you are missing.

This is the ninth episode in our Restaurant Value Engineering podcast series. 

In the last episode, we discussed the best marketing tips you can use for your restaurant. We talked about how you can gain new customers and have repeat customers.  

What’s really cool about marketing is you can market to people who might want to work in your organization. You’re going to get people who are a much tighter organizational fit, which means that the efficiency of your team will go up. You will make more money and your retention will improve.

For this episode we will talk about why you should be doing marketing for your restaurant.

Increasing Margin

Even though your restaurant is doing well and is full all the time, it doesn’t mean you don’t need to do any marketing. Marketing is making sure that you’ve got the strength and resilience in that market so you can put up your prices a little bit. It allows you to clearly enunciate your value proposition. If it is more valuable, then you can charge more than your competitors. Marketing is indeed the best way you can increase the profitability of your restaurant.

Yield Utilization

It is a pricing technique focused on knowing, predicting, and manipulating customer behavior to increase your income. That’s where creativity and innovation come into the picture. You can use your creativity to do special events, like, for example, on Tuesday nights, because a lot of people usually come during that time.

Discounting should not be your first go-to option when thinking of a marketing plan. You need to be more innovative, like looking back up the supply chain. See what you can do for the people who supply you to help them with their business. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but it’s pretty effective. You can help them tell their story if it resonates with your brand. For example, you can do marketing around the fact that you are using a local farmer. You can tell a story out of it and post it on social media. In this case, you will not be able to promote your business but also the business of your supplier.

Creativity and innovation go hand in hand with your marketing efforts. If you’re not taking marketing seriously, then you run the risk of not bringing in new customers and not understanding what people are looking for.

Seize Opportunities

Let’s say, a celebrity visited your restaurant. You can take advantage of that and use it as your marketing strategy to promote your business. Otherwise, you will lose your chance of succeeding.

One of the things that is very interesting is, for many restaurants, fame is very fleeting. First, having a website that is not built for scalability, so the website falls when more than five people want to look at it. What’s worse is when you don’t have a website. So when people want to make a booking but because you don’t have a website, you’re significantly decreasing the value that you could extract out of that moment.

A simple tweet or Instagram post can also help you in making your business known. Who knows, maybe your post has become trending and it gets covered by national or even international media. It can help you effortlessly boost your business.

Without having a marketing platform in place, you can’t seize the opportunity. You’re not going to be able to do Facebook retargeting, collect bookings, collect email addresses. These things can be really powerful and can help you leverage the benefits that you’re going to get from these events.

Personal Plan, Business Plan, and Marketing Plan

There are three plans that you should have when you have a business. The first one and the most important is your personal plan. Where do you want to be in five years? What is it that you want to be doing? What is your legacy going to be? In making a personal plan, you want to make sure that you’ve got a business that’s going to be able to meet those requirements. Upon starting your business, you need to have a business plan. Like how many customers you need to have, what is the amount of profitability, or what your profit margin needs to be. Speaking of profit margin, there will be a time when you want to increase it. That’s when marketing plans come into the picture. It is all about how you can drive those potential customers to your restaurant and increase your sales.

Just remember the most important thing you have to think about is where you want to be, your personal plan. Think about structuring your business and make sure you’ve got a marketing plan that is going to support the numbers that you need in your business plan.

So that’s it. We discussed the reasons why you should be doing marketing. If you want to level up your business and have greater profits, make sure you have a marketing plan. One of the things that you want to have in your business is a long-term customer. What you want to do is to make sure that they’re coming in as often as possible, turning those new customers into finding new customers and turning them into repeat customers.

Don’t forget to check out our free Restaurant Website Audits.  If you think you’re missing out on your fair share of customers, maybe your web developer has made some of the common mistakes.  Book a free 15 minute no-obligation chat with one of our team and get some ideas on how to find more customers.

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