Competition is strong in the restaurant industry. Lag behind and your competition can easily overtake all that you have worked hard for. Which makes marketing all the more important. It puts your name out there and allows to be easily discovered by a huge market simply waiting to be tapped. That alone is a huge reason to do your best in restaurant marketing, however, that is only the tip of the iceberg on why restaurant marketing is important.
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The Challenges of Restaurant Marketing
Before tackling why restaurant marketing is important, it is necessary to first understand the challenges that comes with it. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. You don’t get to pick up a computer and start getting busy with your marketing strategies. That’s not how easy and fast it works.
Instead, there are a lot of risks and difficulties that need to be passed through every step of the way. At some point, it gets exhausting and tedious, but when you know why you do all of it, everything shrinks down compared to what you are getting in exchange.
So, here are the things that are going to make restaurant marketing difficult and a challenge.
1. Fast-paced and Rapidly Changing
Restaurants are constantly changing and so should you. From promos to new offers, the concepts that you use in your restaurant marketing is rapidly changing.
How long do promos last? In most cases, a month is already too long. Your new offers and specials? You’re lucky if it still maintains the hype it gets two months down the road.
Long story short, if you want to keep your marketing strategies competitive, you must be willing to keep on changing and doing something. You can’t expect that a single poster will last you for a year. Same goes for your slogans and other marketing materials.
2. Restaurant Marketing is Costly
A consequence of a rapidly changing marketing industry is the cost. The more marketing materials you need to produce and strategies you need to come up with and implement, the more budget you are going to spend.
Posters, social media banners and posts, and everything else are going to cost money to plan and produce. When you need to constantly have them, it means needing to repeatedly spend on your marketing strategies.
Down the road, those expenses are going to stack up quite easily. Before you know it, you are spending quite a lump of money and that can be problematic when you don’t have any reserve to tap on. Because restaurant marketing is a long-term investment, the returns don’t come that fast and easily. So, you cannot depend on the money it is going to return to fund your current programs.
3. Time-Consuming and Tedious
Another consequence of a fast-paced marketing industry is the amount of time and effort needed to produce materials and implement strategies. Your marketing isn’t going to make themselves; that is your responsibility.
While you may not necessarily be the one to do everything, you are the one who are going to be involved in the following.
- Looking for a professional marketer and talking about your choices.
- Hiring content writers and graphic designers.
- Creating and managing a budget.
- Conceptualizing and planning your marketing campaigns.
- Tracking and analyzing data and results.
- Coming with the next applicable marketing campaign.
When all of these are on your hands, it can easily physically and mentally exhaust you. Especially that you are not just talking about a one-time thing, but rather something that happens every month, whether you like it or not.
4. Requires A Lot of Attention
When you start using online mediums in your restaurant marketing, things get a lot harder. And it’s not like not doing online marketing is a choice.
Online mediums such as social media marketing for restaurants, creating your own website, and making the most out of review websites entails a lot of types of engagement. From replying to reviews to addressing messages and negative feedback, everything happens on online marketing.
What this means is that you constantly need to have an eye on all your platforms to address all these types of engagement. Especially that you don’t want a negative post ravaging havoc all over the internet and bringing down your reputation. Not to mention how a seemingly absent social media can strongly impact how you appeal to your market.
It goes without saying that it gets tiring and exhausting. As a matter of fact, doing it all by yourself is not entirely a possible choice to begin with.
The Benefits of Restaurant Marketing
Despite all the challenges, learning how to make a restaurant marketing plan is all going to be worth it in the end. When you compare what seems to be a huge struggle to the returns, it shrinks down to a point no longer worth worrying about.
So, if it is all that great, what are the benefits that you can get?
1. Restaurant Marketing Improves Brand Awareness
You already know this but it pays to further understand what brand awareness is all about. Most would think that it is just about putting your name out there for people to see and discover. However, it is more than that. That is the core concept, but it is also about creating a great reputation, cultivating widespread interest, and creating valuable engagement.
The more your brand gets known, the easier it is for it to be associated with a lot of things. Your brand gets mentioned more frequently and that not just makes it easily discoverable, but gives you a reputation that you are something that needs to be prioritized.
2. Increases Customer Acquisition and Retention
As you already know, one of the goals of marketing is to put your restaurant out there. The easier for you to be discovered, the more customers you attract. Ultimately, it results to new actual paying customers.
Acquiring new customers is only one part of it, another is retaining the prior ones. As a matter of fact, it is harder to acquire customers than retaining them. So, if you are capable of attracting customers, you are retaining your previous ones.
Marketing is able to achieve retention because it is one way to tell your prior customers of everything else they have missed. Think about it, if they only know one thing in your restaurant, they are bound to get bored and never come back again.
However, if you constantly feed them about what they are missing, you are giving them a reason to stay. The best part is that these people already have an experience with your restaurant So, it’s not so much a big decision since they know what they are going to receive.
3. Keeps You Competitive in the Market
There are a lot of ways to be competitive in the industry, and one of that is through marketing. Because no matter how great your services are, if others are presenting theirs a much better way, there is no way for the market to steer closer in your favor.
4. Increases Revenue
If you are inviting more customers into your restaurant, you are earning more revenue. The same applies with repeat customers, the more they come back, you are looking at making more money than you used to.
Marketing is what differentiates a couple of customers here and there from being full day and night. It is also marketing that makes it possible for customers to spend more than they used to.
5. Better Decision Making
Jumping to a less known benefit of marketing. When you do restaurant marketing, you are gradually growing your capability of making better decisions. While it may sound unusual, it does happen.
With the various features available with online marketing, you are able to hear the opinion and feedback of your customers. As a result, you are able to make changes and improvements based on testimonies that really matter.
Remember, sometimes, what you think is what your customers need isn’t really the case. The people who know what’s best for your audience are your audience themselves.
Marketing is A Worthwhile Investment
With the long list of restaurant marketing benefits, there are so many things on the line if you don’t do it properly or decide to not do it all. As a matter of fact, with so many, skipping restaurant marketing doesn’t seem like an option at all. Because it isn’t.
Without marketing, you are looking at the failure of your business due to the lack of customers and market penetration. So, no matter how little, as long as it is done right, restaurant marketing is something you should always have.
As mentioned earlier, marketing is not something you can do easily. It is a technical skill, therefore, there is no shame if you don’t know how to do it or where to begin. Everybody goes through that phase, but that doesn’t mean that it is inevitable for your restaurant to fail.
Instead, what you need is the help of the best digital marketing agency. You will be guided from start to finish, along with receiving the necessary resources to undertake all the needed tasks. So, contact us today to get yourself a free strategy consultation that will be right for your needs.
