Some people want to bring their kids along; others want to dine alone. The more accurate your hypothesis, the sooner you will build out an effective restaurant marketing plan. Needless to say, owning a restaurant is not for the faint of heart, and smaller restaurants often have it much harder because they don’t have a huge budget to dedicate to hiring marketing experts, accountants, HR pros, and the like. The key to a successful restaurant marketing plan is: By the end of this guide you will be able to: We hope you enjoy reading this guide as much as we enjoyed writing it. Avoid this temptation – instead, implement a small number of ideas well before trying other things. This section will require you to conduct research into your restaurant’s niche and outline a target market for your restaurant. 5 In the technology startup world, there has been a lot written in recent years about something called Lean Startup Methodology. Most restaurants are poor marketers. This inspires them to invite their children and grandchildren to the restaurant the next time they are in town. Research Sample Restaurant Marketing Plans. For example, the recent success of new restaurants in the region can be a double-edged sword -- while it bodes well for new businesses, you must determine if there is a glut of restaurants in the region. Get all the best stories for free. Ranking in Whoville Post Annual Restaurant Review, Reduce shift management time to 25% of time, devoting the remainder to marketing direction and strategy, Devote at least two hours per day to marketing activities, Achieve revenue of $1.8 million per year in year three, Become the top family restaurant in Whoville by end of year three, Implement Neon Points customer loyalty program, Implement staff incentive system of monthly bonuses. You also have the option to send an employee or two out to drop off your coupons at a specific neighborhood or apartment complex. Anytime you post on your restaurant’s social media, send an email to a guest, or mail out your takeout menu, you’re marketing your restaurant. To fill a niche and remain relevant, prospective, as well as established, restaurants have to hedge their bets with well-rounded and well-directed market research. 3. This can also be achieved through detailed desk research – use the approach that you’re comfortable with. This list is critical because it will act as the overall barometer tracking the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. There he finds images of the type of frestaurant he thinks his family would enjoy. They also run classes to showcase their food preparation techniques. Monitoring social media accounts, tracking online reviews, reviewing influencer and/or food critic comments can all point not only to how adept you are at serving your customers, but to how effective you are at advertising your restaurant, especially when you compare yourself to the competition. Spending $10,000 on Facebook marketing is a great idea once you: Comparing this to another discipline is interesting. Consider the types of restaurants that people gravitate toward -- in a recession, diners often choose lower-cost restaurants than they do when the economy is booming. Marketing is experimentation; you need to develop a hypothesis and then test it. The primary marketing goals are to maximize revenue of the Neon Memories Diner and reserve cash for the opening of an additional restaurant under the same brand in 2013. Improve revenue from midweek lunchtimes by $5,000 per week. Kona-Q will leverage its two-pronged competitive edge to quickly gain market share. We plan to bring in 50 new customers by the end of the year. You can check out Mplan’s sample restaurant marketing plan to get some initial ideas. This will generate ten extra bookings per week.”. 14. Let’s think about the London restaurant Seasons Kitchen and what messages they want to convey through their restaurant marketing plan. The next part is probably the most important – you need to decide where to start. Most restaurants develop a marketing hypothesis in an unstructured way. You must decide on the right level of granularity – is it worth breaking down “wealthy regulars” any further? Getting ready to create a marketing plan? This makes marketing to them relatively easy, but it still requires thoughtful planning. Whether you choose to create ads for YouTube or TV should depend on what audience you are attempting to reach. This includes the cleanliness of the restaurant, the authenticity of their uniforms, and their behavior with customers. Almost every restaurant approaches marketing backward; they start coming up with ideas. 7 2 13 The financial metrics can then be tracked – a spreadsheet may look something like this. That doesn’t mean you have to have the budget to run a Super Bowl ad. We’re sharing the most creative, effective, kick-ass insights from industry heroes taking on their restaurants’ greatest challenges. Can be confident that there aren’t better uses of the money. It's important to be specific about the type of people you’re targeting in your marketing campaigns, otherwise you'll waste time and money. In a market that’s home to more than 1 million restaurant locations in the U.S. alone, you need to really know your customers. Consider interviewing your team members asking what makes their job enjoyable, interview customers about their experience at your restaurant, or have your management team talk about your restaurant’s values. Here are a couple of examples to get you thinking: Seasons Kitchen, London: “We are food & wine passionate people aiming to offer honestly sourced produce, cooked well without too much fuss but some twists, alongside a short considered drinks list in a warm and convivial atmosphere.”, Alinea, Chicago: “Featuring a single, seasonally driven tasting menu of between 18 and 22 courses, the experience of dining at Alinea is not only delicious, but also fun, emotional, and provocative.”, Porter House, New York: “The menu of seasonally-inspired American classics is complemented by expertly crafted cocktails, an acclaimed wine program and genuine, warm hospitality – all overlooking Columbus Circle and Central Park.”. The best restaurants can clearly define a mission statement that should distill the restaurant’s value proposition. All rights reserved. Note how the plan is modest in size. Often, these goals are stated in terms of dollar signs. Alongside a unique dining experience, a combination of content marketing and PR was used to develop the brand. Increase the number of weekly covers by 40%. Small businesses have it tough, but it’s possible to compete with the top dogs in the industry as long as you’re using strategic marketing. Marketing has been integral to this success – let’s take a closer look. Being able to focus your efforts on key areas. Once you’ve come up with ideas make sure that you can: Developing hypotheses should start as a brainstorming session, so start by pulling in as many ideas as you can and building a shortlist of approaches you think are realistic to implement. For example, in Q1 we want to turn over $700,000 and in Q2 $735,000, etc. If you have a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly sales goal, state it clearly in this section. This guide will give you the confidence to start developing a professional plan to build a healthy and sustainable pipeline of customers. It may be hard to unpick this, but you can turn tactics on and off to track what is working. You can also download our free eBook, “The Insider’s Guide to Successfully Using Market Research Online Surveys,” for additional tips on harnessing the power of the Internet for your survey needs. Ledger, a fine dining restaurant in Massachusetts, used video marketing to showcase an annual event they host where seven of Boston’s best chefs prepare a seven course dinner and all proceeds go to Share Our Strength’s “No Kid Hungry” campaign. Subscribe now to get unlimited access to the best stories for free. Couple these facts with annual restaurant food sales reaching nearly 800 billion dollars, and the stakes are high. Here are some great ways to make your small marketing budget have a big impact. Take your restaurant special ideas, download a few marketing plan examples for restaurant templates from our list, and get to work. Optimizing your website for Google or other search engines makes sure you’re visible to all your potential guests when they search for somewhere to eat.. To increase your chances of being seen by the largest audience possible, keep your Google My Business page as up-to-date as possible, bid on keyword terms that match your restaurant, and include specific and descriptive keywords on your website. So you’re sitting looking at five ideas – you want to try them all (many restaurants fall into this trap), but you are going to focus on two ideas. A restaurant may hypothesize: “By posting daily high-quality posts on Instagram with offers and syndicating this widely, we can boost our Instagram followers by 600 in the next 12 weeks. Market research for your restaurant doesn’t end after your grand opening. Look at the competitions: look at successful restaurants that serve a similar customer base and look at how they market. Create a Tracking System. The restaurants that succeed are often great marketers. Image courtesy of www.alinearestaurant.com. There may be many tactics and experiments that help them meet these goals: These tactics are very specific and can be tracked separately. Start with the same general components of a standard business plan, then gear it specifically to the restaurant industry and your plans of succeeding in that industry. As mentioned, this is critical so you can judge how successful your efforts are and iterate effectively. The perfect place to start forming the actual plan is an internet search of other restaurants’ marketing strategies. Tracking progress, so you know what works. We want you to be one of those restaurants where people look in the window and say: There is no trick to restaurants marketing – it is a set of core principles delivered consistently. If you see competitors doing something well, you can learn from it, and if you see them doing something badly, you can learn from that, too. They prominently display the keywords that someone would typically search for on their website, so they appear at the top of the list for searches like “takeout salads in Boston” “best salads in Boston” or “Boston salads”. This gives their Instagram page a very personal feel, which increases their customer engagement as well. A big part of their image is the story – focussing on how the three siblings built the business. You can even use a chat bot to scale your marketing strategy and respond to simple questions from customers without having a staff member constantly monitoring your messages.