Your restaurant might be great, but greatness can only get you so far. It keeps your customers coming back for more, but it doesn’t let new customers discover what you have to offer. So, it goes without saying that you should also allot some energy and resources in creating a marketing plan. You might ask, how to make a restaurant marketing plan?
Difficult it is to start a business; marketing is no joke either. You are not strolling in the park, but rather, you are riding a unicycle with a lot of people passing here and there. It is risky and uncertain, but with some practice and the right strategies, you will get through with it.
One of the things that will make it easier is knowing what it takes to make the plan. Don’t just come up with your plan out of the blue. Instead, prepare the right resources, details, and knowledge, follow the right steps, so that you are not just creating a plan, you are molding an effective one.
So, if you want to make the best plan for your restaurant, follow these easy steps.
Table of Contents
Understanding and Strengthening Your Brand is the First Step to Make A Restaurant Marketing Plan
You can’t perform an effective marketing strategy if you are not completely sure with what you are marketing in the first place. So, the first step is always understanding your brand, knowing the strengths, weaknesses, and highlights.
Once you have gotten a strong grasp of the strong and weak suits of your brand, the next step is strengthening what can be strengthened. Always improve on what you can. It doesn’t mean that it is already great, you should stop there. If you have the means to improve, put in the extra effort to do so.
Most businesses fail because they settle with marketing that is all about broadcasting the presence of their restaurant when they could have marketed an image. If you feature what makes you stand out and what you are all about, it is more likely to resonate than just telling someone that you have a restaurant.
Who are you more likely going to be attracted to? The person who tells you that he owns a restaurant by the street or the one that mentions about Mediterranean cuisine unlike any other in the city?
It’s a no brainer. You need to speak volumes in your marketing campaigns. And the only way to do that is when you have something to talk about. If you don’t have brand identity and don’t strive to make one, you are just like any other restaurant that is bound to get boring and eventually disappear.
Distinguish Your Target Audience to Make An Effective Restaurant Marketing Plan
Everybody eats food, no doubt about that, but not everybody will eat your food. No matter how great it may be, there is always a market for what you offer and that doesn’t include everybody.
When not everybody has the intention to eat in your restaurant, there is no sense in marketing towards the general public. Instead, you should only concentrate on your target audience to increase penetration and influence.
If you are running a fine dining restaurant, you have no business marketing it like a fast-food restaurant; appealing to people who are always on the go and looking for convenience. Conversely, if you are a fast-food restaurant, don’t talk about comfort and luxurious dining.
This goes without saying that when you know your target audience, it narrows down what you can and cannot do in your marketing strategies. With lesser choices to choose from, it is easier to make your pick, plus it increases the chances of audience penetration and influence.
Customer Checklist Guide
Having troubles how to identify your audience? Here is a series of questions that will help you land on an answer.
- What is the most probable method of communication that they will choose? Social media or review sites? (Helps identify marketing mediums and customer age bracket)
- What are the reasons when they dine in a restaurant? (Leisure and relaxation or to simply eat food?)
- Do they prefer dine in or take out?
- Events that are going to turn you into a venue (Dates, birthdays, and parties)
- Do they have a strong desire to partake in discounts or use coupons?
Analyze the Bigger Picture For Your Restaurant Marketing Plan
Marketing is completely strategic. Creating your own strategy means analyzing every detail that there is to craft your own approach.
The question is, how can you effectively analyze your situation? Most people don’t know where to begin their analysis, ultimately leading them to make a wrong one. To make it easier, simply follow the proven SWOT analysis approach.
· Strengths
Understand what makes your restaurant great. What are you doing right in terms of your business procedures? Is your uniqueness noteworthy? And everything else. Strength is one thing to capitalize in marketing strategies.
· Weaknesses
You are not perfect, you are going to have shortcomings and to address that always begins with identifying it. You either improve on what can be done or you turn a weakness into a strength.
· Opportunities
What do you see in your market, audience, and situation that you can use? Every situation is an opportunity if you look at it the right way. The right opportunities can either make or break your marketing.
· Threats
Not seeing anything wrong in your restaurant doesn’t guarantee success. You also need to have an eye on your competition and everything else that can be a threat to your restaurant. That includes new competitors, situational factors that can be detrimental to your side, and so much more. With the right threats, it can easily topple everything down you have worked hard for.
Crafting Your Elevator Pitch
An elevator pitch, as what it is commonly called, is how you would describe your restaurant in 60 seconds or less. It is important to have this as it simplifies everything your brand stands for. When you have a much more defined and comprehensive grasp of that, how you deliver your marketing materials easily follows.
It’s like the theme of your restaurant marketing plan. So, it keeps you in line of what you want to achieve and keeps everything cohesive. Something that is quite important if you want your marketing to stand out.
Things to Remember
It is one thing to decide to make an elevator pitch, and another to actually make one. The responsibility is in your hands and it’s not going to be an easy one. You are going to need some creativity along with trial and error to find the best one that represents your restaurant.
Here are some things to remember to make everything a little easier.
- Remember your restaurant’s name and concept.
- Keep in mind the cuisine you offer.
- Understand what you do for your target audience.
- Emphasize one the things that you do uniquely.
If you have to pack everything in 60 seconds or less, you should be concentrating on the details that cannot be found anywhere else. Don’t take time to explain something that is commonly expected from a restaurant. Why would somebody care if your restaurant has well-trained staff? That’s something to be expected.
Define The Objectives of Your Restaurant Marketing Plan
Remember that marketing is goal-oriented. You don’t do it just for the sake of it, but instead, you have goals in mind that you intend to achieve. Without those goals, it can be fairly easy to get lost why you are doing what you are doing and lose track of what you should do next.
So, one of the things to keep in mind to make the perfect restaurant marketing plan is to establish your goals. Once you know what you want to achieve, it is fairly easy to identify the steps that you want to undertake.
Here are some objectives to give you an idea on what you can work with.
· Reputation
One of the reasons you would want to market is to improve your reputation; how your restaurant stands out in the crowd.
The better the reputation, the more relevant you get. This makes your restaurant more sought out and easily expandable.
· Customer Acquisition
Why you do marketing is mainly about customer acquisition, or in simple terms, getting customers. You want to put your name out there because the wider your reach, the more people that will discover your restaurant and ultimately turn into a customer.
· Customer Retention
While it is important to acquire customers, it is also as important to retain them. Repeat customers can be your biggest market as they already know what they want and have a higher potential to make a purchase.
Retention can be mainly attributed on the quality of your service, but marketing also plays a role in it. This includes being able to promote the right things that will have prior customers coming back to try out what they have missed.
Remember, if a customer tries the same thing over and over again, it gets boring. That’s why your marketing is all about making them try new things and make them feel that there is something more.
Track and Analyze Results to Improve Your Restaurant Marketing Plan
The disappointing thing about marketing is that it is not an accurate science. You can do your best to anticipate the market and target your audience, but at the end of the day, it is all up to your market how they will respond to it all.
What this means is that you should never expect for everything to go perfectly. Instead, find ways that will allow you to know when something is wrong as early as possible. This goes without saying that having the right tracking and analyzing measures is necessary.
If you choose Facebook as one of your marketing mediums, it has a built-in data tracker for your ad campaigns. The same goes for Google and other social media marketing for restaurants, not to mention you can also use third-party software to do the tracking.
When something is not performing as expected, it is immediately back to the drawing board and make the necessary changes. If you don’t, then there is no way for you to make the best restaurant marketing plan.
Creating A Marketing Plan is No Joke
At this point, you realize how long the steps are in creating the right marketing plan. And that is still in making one, you still have to implement it. So, without a doubt, it takes a lot of hard work and effort.
With so much investment needed, it would be a waste for it to be a failure or ineffective. So, it is important to always stay true to the best practices and right steps. In the end, it will all be worth it. Every penny and second that you have allotted to the cause is going to reap results.
Unfortunately, if you are someone with no marketing experience, this can all be too much to comprehend. And it should. Marketing is a technical skill, not just something you can pick up in one go. But that doesn’t mean that it is over for you and your restaurant. Instead, what you need is a little help from the best digital marketing agency. Contact us today to get a free strategy consultation right for your needs.
