Restaurant Marketing Strategies July Newsletter

Spending Your Restaurant Marketing Budget Wisely (Part 2) In my previous newsletter I told you the marketing strategies that didn’t work for me when I acquired my restaurant. (My energy and willingness to keep trying to make them work exceeded my marketing experience – that cost me a lot of wasted money). Now let me tell you the changes that I made after losing money following those strategies, and the impact that these changes brought to the restaurant. My first move was to look for a new coupon service. By the way, I am a firm believer in coupons as a means of bringing new people to a restaurant, since they are very measurable. You can just collect the coupons that your visitors bring to your place and instantly know exactly how many new people visited because of the coupon offer. This allows you to measure if your investment in a coupon program is worth it. The problem that I had with my previous coupon company wasn’t the coupon offers themselves but the audience that they targeted. You see, my restaurant was a middle- to upper-scale Italian place, and the coupon company was targeting bargain hunters, more interested in saving a few bucks on their meal than to have a great dining experience. Suffice it to say that the other two restaurants in the coupon package were a sandwich place and a pizza parlor! (Not that those eateries don’t have their place; I was trying to target prospects interested in a higher-caliber experience. ) As you can imagine, these weren’t the kind of clients that I was trying to attract. They usually came to eat the cheapest dish that we had, drank only free tap water - then used the coupon to get the discount (not to return until they received the next coupon). Not really exciting stuff. Coupons may work for some establishments; if you have a fast food restaurant where high volume is more important than the quality of your meals, then they may be effective. However, they surely didn’t work for us: a small place where people spend two to three hours talking over dinner. So, after some research, I found a company that delivered exactly what I was looking for. They would target the client prospects we wanted to bring in.