Restaurant Marketing Strategies June Newsletter

Spending Your Restaurant Marketing Budget Wisely (1st part) A few years ago, I bought my first restaurant. It was a turnkey operation; a charming small and upscale Italian restaurant with loyal clientele in a great location. The previous owner was an experienced guy who spent all his life in the restaurant business. I still remember what he told us about the restaurant: “It is working fine. Don t change anything. . . ” For a while, I complied. I didn t have really much experience running a restaurant, and as they say: "If it ain t broke, don t fix it" right? So we kept on running the business as he was doing, including repeating his marketing investments and advertising expenses. Well, after a few months I realized that we were spending a large amount of money (several thousand dollars each month) in marketing. Now, I am fine with spending marketing dollars if I can see the results of my marketing expenses, which, in the case of a restaurant, appears as people walking through the door and having a meal at your place. You as a restaurateur have a really big advantage over many other businesses: when a person walks in your door and sits at your table, you ve pretty much have made the sale (unless your service is so slow or your staff screws up so badly that your customers leave your place without paying!). Very few other industries can claim this advantage. Many businesses spend thousands of dollars in marketing campaigns just to bring people to their stores or websites without any guarantee that these people will spend any money on their goods or services. So - going back to my experience - after seeing that my marketing budget wasn’t producing enough, I started questioning all these expenses. (I used my business experience at a a large Information Technology company as a reference). I asked myself: Why wasn’t my marketing working? How can I measure if a marketing campaign is working? What kind of advertising brings in clients? Was I throwing money in the garbage? The first steps were to collect and analyze all the marketing expenses. I realized that I was spending money in the following marketing initiatives: 1. Pocket cards distributed in hotels, some businesses, etc. (Very expensive!) 2. Ads in a weekly local Seattle magazine 3. Big and very expensive ad (1/4 of a page) in one of the Yellow Pages Book 4. Premium positioning in a well-known online city directory. 5. Passport Card program 6. Direct mail coupons