153 – 7 Reasons why your Restaurant needs Marketing

In the last episode, we discussed the best free Restaurant Marketing tools you can use to boost marketing campaigns for your restaurant.

These are just the show notes for our Episode on Why your Restaurant needs marketing.  Make sure you download this episode and have a listen as James goes into a lot more detail on why Restaurant marketing is so important for your Restaurant.

Now that we have a good idea of the apps you can use for marketing, we’ll now have a refresher about why you should be doing restaurant marketing and this is also to get people to understand why they need to be marketing their restaurant. It is a fundamental issue with so many restaurant owners in the game. 

Getting New Customers for your Restaurant

The top of this is to find new customers. Word of mouth is amazing but you can’t rely on people to tell a story if, for example, you serve a really interesting vegan menu. They’re not going to specifically say “oh they’ve got a cool vegan menu so let me just tell this to the vegan people I know and tag them on a Facebook post or email them all now”. 

There have been a lot of those restaurants out there where the food is amazing but the marketing just doesn’t convey that message. The business plan is amazing but they don’t have a marketing plan to articulate it. You should be thinking about how to get new customers into your restaurant.

Having a significant number of people walking by your restaurant is nice but what are you going to do to bring them inside. The easiest determinant is to look at the restaurant on a Tuesday night. If it is not full, then you need to be doing a little bit more marketing. If it is full but you’re not making the kind of wages that you think you should be, then you need to be doing more marketing.

A lot of chefs think of marketing as being dirty and would say “let’s just let the food speak for itself and let the customer come in”. You might think that letting the customer have the experience that we have engineered for them will be enough. But sadly it is not enough and you will see this from time to time. 

Successful restaurant marketing sometimes involves SEO, great photos, and social media campaigns. They might also run ads or build an email database. 

Restaurants doing their marketing are the ones who are getting the new customers. If you don’t get them that first time you’re going to miss out on them as a customer and this brings us to the second point.

Repeat Restaurant Customers – How marketing can help

No one is born a repeat customer; they are a new customer first. Many restaurants don’t know who their customers are and they’re not building a database for them. There’s one thing that makes getting a new customer significantly different from a repeat customer. New customer doesn’t know if you’re any good or not but the repeat customer does and so this is one of the things that makes our job hard. 

You need to look at your menu and what’s going on in the kitchen. You need to be looking at the quality of the food. If you can’t deliver great food, great value, and great experiences for your customers then they’re not going to come back. Determine what it is that you offer those customers so that there will be something to go back to. 

Those repeat customers for many restaurants are the backbone of profitability. The walk-ins like the tourists or the people who come and go are the cream on top. Consequently, the more repeat customers you have, the more likely you are to have a really strong and resilient restaurant.  This is why your Restaurant marketing database is so important.

Marketing Your Team

First, your team is going to function a whole lot better when you talk about what makes your restaurant unique. When you want to be getting the best people to work in your team, your profitability is going to be better.

When you do have an opening and you know maybe it’s because you’re growing. Maybe it’s because you’re going to add a lunch shift to increase the sales of your restaurant and decrease your fixed costs as a percentage of sales. Lots of good things that you can do there but you’re going to have people who love to work at your restaurant because there’s a lot more fun there or it would be a great place to learn much better. Now, that is a powerful thing that you can do for your company, for your restaurant.

Decreasing your churn of employees increasing your retention is epic but one thing you can be doing in your marketing is making sure that there are people out there who want to work in your business when you have an opening. 

Marketing Restaurant Take Away

The number one thing for so many restaurants out there is to embrace the fact that you don’t want to have the best restaurant that no one’s ever heard of. You need to be thinking about what it is that you want to be doing in your life in your business and have got a marketing plan to support that you might want to be thinking about those things.  Too many Restaurants didn’t value the take away side of their business.  COVID changed that for a lot of businesses, so making sure you are managing and marketing your take away business is just as important.  Our Restolo product has a built-in loyalty management system that has driven millions of dollars of repeat business.  If you aren’t emailing your old customer base and retargeting them with Social Media marketing, you are missing out on a really important slice of the profit pie.

These are the first three things you need to know in restaurant marketing and the rest of them will be on the next episode.

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.

Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.

Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.

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