Outwinning The Competition Without Cheating

Business is war, or so the Japanese say. Businessmen are always taught to think that there is no room for second place in business, and there is only win or lose to think about in the battlefield.

The difference between war and business, however, is that there is no room for unorthodox and dirty tactics. Businesses are not allowed by law to make comments that will discredit the competition, or else risk legal action.

The only thing that businesses can do to win people over is to promote their products as best as they could. All businesses are affected by this, including restaurants.

That is what restaurant marketing is all about. Marketing is a means to make moves to win market share without resorting to dirty tactics like verbally attacking the competitors.
The Two Kinds of Marketing

Marketing comes in two forms: offline and online.

Offline Marketing

Offline marketing involves the use of traditional methods and media to promote one’s business. There are many ways to facilitate offline marketing, and these methods include:

Flyers

You can choose to distribute flyers about your restaurant, especially if you have just set up and started your business. Flyers are a good way of getting your restaurant to other people’s attention and at the same time gauge interest and response.

Calling cards

A restaurant can also double as a catering service if the entrepreneur so chooses. Calling cards can be distributed to potential clients like big companies, schools, and universities so people will know about your catering service. You can order inexpensive professional looking cards to site like www.vistaprint.ca.

Mass media

Mass media includes TV, radio and newspaper ads. This method gets attention to your business quickly and faster, and is the preferred method next to Internet marketing.

Online Marketing

Since the Internet rose to prominence, people have taken advantage of its communication capabilities. These include businesses. More and more people browse the Internet everyday, and thus information is easily disseminated in the World Wide Web.

Considered the great equalizer, online marketing gives small and large businesses equal opportunities for marketing. It is not unusual for a smaller business to eclipse a larger one in popularity because of effective Internet marketing.

Several offline techniques have also been adapted for online marketing. These marketing techniques include:

Viral marketing

The most effective technique, viral marketing has never been easier online with the rise of social networking sites and forums. Through viral marketing, you can promote your restaurant by maintaining a blog and joining forums about topics relevant to your business.

Of course, you can write about anything you like but to ensure interest in your line of business, it is advisable to write blogs only about restaurants or food to make sure you generate enough interest for viewers to click the link to your business website.

Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing is simply optimizing the content of your website to take advantage of the search engines’ algorithm so that your website is ranked high among other search engine results.

Pay-per-click marketing

Pay per click marketing is an effective yet inexpensive online marketing strategy. Through PPC, your ads appear besides search engine results for keywords of your choosing. What makes this inexpensive is that you can control how much you’d want to spend on this type of advertising.

How To Increase Your Sales On Quieter And Colder Days

Even the best restaurants all over the world have their own quiet nights and days. These are the times when it becomes so hard for them to fill their seats and thus obtain a decent revenue for their business. This could happen to you too, but you can lessen its financial impact if you are already prepared for it.

Here are some ways on how to you increase your sales during dull days:

1. Know when they occur.

   To give you an idea, weeknights such as on Mondays and Tuesdays are always the quietest. There are more and more people too who would rather stay at home during rainy and winter seasons. When you are aware when these boring and uneventful nights would happen, you can already ready yourself with your marketing tools to help invite your customers to dine even at these times.

2. Come up with special nights.

   You can perhaps call Tuesdays as the ultimate ladies’ nights where every girl who goes in to your restaurant will get a free dessert or a glass of wine.

   Monday nights, on the other hand, could be meant for couples, where wives can expect a long-stemmed rose right at their table. The little things that make every night truly special will certainly be something to look forward to by your customers.

3. Cook special meals on certain days.

   Do your customers love your paella? You can serve them on Wednesdays or during times when they are hardly people around, so they would be compelled to visit your store just to get a taste of it.

   If you want to serve your special meal every day, though, you can simply add an extra half-serving for those who decide to come at night. A little addition to the meal without extra charges will be greatly appreciated.

4. Give away vouchers and certificates that only take effect on off-peak seasons.

   Who would not accept gift certificates and vouchers? They could mean several pennies off their usual budget during mealtimes. They can also give these as presents to their loved ones and friends.

   A good catch, however, is to honor them during those times when there are hardly people around, such as during colder nights or weeknights.

5. Identify a “Company of the day.”

   You can tie up with several establishments around the community, wherein their employees can look forward to discounts in their chosen meals at any time during the week. You can give them a fixed schedule, or you can raffle their names to give equal chances to everyone.

6. Have some everyday entertainment.

   You can invite their favorite bands or come up with open mic nights—anything that will keep your customers entertained all throughout the night. You can also hold special competitions such as beer drinking contests, or pie-eating competitions among your guests for the night.

   When you can keep your customers happy, you will certainly be giving them a lot of reasons to come back—come rain or shine.

Going Green In Your Restaurant (And We’re Not Talking Vegetables)

As more and more people are becoming aware with the depletion of the ozone layer or global warming, they want to go green. In fact, business owners who add “living green” concepts into their establishments and enterprise tend to capture the attention of more clients and customers, thereby increasing their revenues.

The idea of “green” can also help you out in promoting your restaurant. But then, going green is not an easy route to take. For one, you don’t know which one would be favorable to the environmental conscious and even to the environment itself.

To help you out, here are a number of tips:

1. Get rid of Styrofoam.

   You don’t need to be told that it takes around 50 years before they can be transformed into decaying materials by the soil. Simply put, they are viewed as totally unfriendly to the environment since they can only add to water and land pollution. What you can do, though, is to settle for green cups, or napkins that are made of natural or organic materials.

   They can be pretty expensive than Styrofoam, but you can certainly earn the thumbs-up of families and even environmental organizations, which then means additional PR points for you.

2. Sponsor environmental associations.

   Look around your community and see if there are organizations that promote healthy living, environmental awareness, or solutions to global warming. You can present yourself as their caterers during their workshops, seminars, and lectures.

3. Do not use chemicals in washing windows and kitchen utensils.

   Some detergents are known to be composed of toxic chemicals, which may be harmful not only to humans but also to the environment. Moreover, these products may come from factories that are dumping their wastes into rivers and other water facilities.

4. Buy appliances that can help save energy.

   Part of going green means saving as much energy as you can, and you can start by purchasing items with high energy efficiency ratings. You can also settle for candlelight dinners or incandescent light bulbs rather than fluorescent ones. Not only will you be able to save some money on your electric bill, but you can also create a cozier atmosphere in your restaurant.

5. Encourage your customers to go green too.

   You can create suggestion cards that you can give away to your customers after every meal. This is one of the best ways on how you can stress to them your active participation in creating a world that’s much cleaner to live in.

6. Create environmental-friendly activities.

   You can join plant-a-tree programs or come up with “all day veggies” day. Don’t forget to invite your customers to participate in.

   When you take a very active role in your community, especially when you’re talking about the environment, it doesn’t become too difficult to obtain their nod of approval to your business. In return for your kindness, you can watch their loyalty building up on your restaurant.

   Besides, whether you like it or not, going green will be beneficial to your business too, as it means a more hygienic and safer establishment for your employees and your customers.

Five Key Methods In Building A Brand For Your Restaurant

Starbucks is one of the most popular coffee shops in the world, and so far, it has retained a top position despite the stiff competition in the industry. Why? The answer is all in the brand.

You don’t need to be a high-end restaurant just so you can justify the need to have your own brand. If you want to make sure that you can outlast your competitors, obtain a steady stream of new and old customers, and boost your revenues, you have to find a way on how to make your restaurant business unique from all the others.

Knowing where to start can be pretty hard, but you can make it a lot easier by following these 5 key methods:

1. Come up with specialties.

   There should always be specialty of the house in your menu, a type of food that can only be tasted at your restaurant. It can be Grandmother’s secret recipe in making an apple cream pie, or the kind of sauce that you used for your pasta. It doesn’t have to be grand, but it should be enough to highlight the uniqueness of the dish.

2. Develop a slogan.

   When you hear of “Finger lickin’ good,” you instantly know that it’s Kentucky Fried Chicken. The purpose of the slogan is to define what your restaurant is all about, the promise that you’re going to be making to your customers. It will also serve as your general guide in the way you prepare your food or entertain your guests. You can brainstorm among yourselves to decide which slogan would fit your business to a T.

3. Allow your crew to wear a uniform.

   Your employees will play a huge role when it comes to branding, and you want to make sure that they also feel truly involved in the business. One way to do that is to let them wear a uniform. Now, you don’t need to settle for the unusual shirt and pants. You can perhaps add a sombrero if you have a Mexican café or a polo shirt with flowered prints if you are running a Cuban restaurant.

4. Create a name for your restaurant.

   Just imagine how people would call your restaurant if it doesn’t have a name in the first place. Though the rule is always to tickle the fancy of your target market, make sure that your name doesn’t sound too foreign that it becomes so difficult to remember or even pronounce. It may have a meaning or not.

   The most important thing is your restaurant will be associated to that name at all times.

5. Up your customer service.

   Part of the branding is customer service. Usually, people may come for the food that you prepare, but they will be more than happy to come back if they know that your customer service is brilliant. For example, on special occasions, you may have some freebies to the celebrant and to his or her guests. You can have singers who can provide some form of entertainment while your guests are eating their meals.

Absolutely Free Marketing For Restaurants

Do You Want to Market Your Restaurant for Free? Here’s How.

Marketing is an essential part of business. You need marketing in order to get yourself noticed by your prospective clients. Restaurants too need to be marketed for them to gain regular customers. However, marketing restaurants can be difficult and needs definite strategy, and could sometimes be expensive.

However, they need not be expensive. There are ways that you could market a restaurant without having to spend a single penny for the advertising. If you find it unbelievable, we will show you to market a restaurant for free.

Open Public Directory Project

First of all, you can submit your restaurant to this website which is a listing of the best websites in the Internet. They have a corner for restaurants as well, among other things. You can have the opportunity to be listed, along with your complete information like address, phone numbers and your cuisine specialty. There are even vivid descriptions of your restaurant.

One advantage of the Open Public Directory project is the reliability that it brings to visitors. You can be sure that visitors won’t have any qualms about visiting the page for your restaurant because there are no redundant or questionable content in the website.

OPD is maintained by volunteers that work on very high standards, and its staff won’t hesitate to reject entries that they do not meet those standards.

Another advantage is that Google, Yahoo and MSN! consider Chefmoz.org as a quality resource. This means that if anyone makes a search for restaurants, Chefmoz comes up right away as one of the highest ranking results.

The website has a very logical organization as well. Their database is organized efficiently by location, so your restaurant can be easily found by anyone searching for restaurants in your area.

So, that said, you need to come up with a good website for your restaurant and submit it to the OPD’s restaurant directory at http://www.chefmoz.org.

Online Yellow Pages

Like the OPD, the online yellow pages are good free advertising techniques that you can take advantage of. The yellow pages let businesses post a company profile for free. Although the information that you can put on a yellow page is minimal, it is also complete and important like phone numbers, location, and cuisine. If your restaurant is operating in Canada, add it here -> Yellow Pages Add Listing
Offline Internet Marketing

This is not a paradox. You can still do Internet marketing offline. This involves making visual advertisements of your restaurant’s name and restaurant’s website in the real world, instead of posting the traditional name, location and telephone number.

This is to take advantage of the fact that people rely on the Internet to search for information.

Offline Internet marketing can be done relatively inexpensive methods using flyers, newspaper ads and business cards, among others.

Yahoo! Listing

If you own a Yahoo! ID, then you can list your business in the Yahoo! business listings… for free! This gives your website the opportunity of appearing on top searches for restaurants using the Yahoo! search engine. Submit your site here: http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php

Craig’s List

Craig’s List is one of the oldest classified ads in the Internet. It covers a lot of locations worldwide, including countries in Asia. You can also use Craig’s List to post an advertisement for your website for free.

Visit www.craiglist.org, find the province/state and city where your business is operating, then select “Post to Classifieds.”

Five Good Reasons Why You Need to Set Up a Restaurant Web Site

Everyone is now crazy about online marketing. When before people used to rely on yellow pages and newspapers to get their messages and business across, people now use the Internet and websites to facilitate marketing. Restaurants are no different.

There are even websites nowadays that are devoted to listing restaurants and advertising them to potential clients.

As a restaurant entrepreneur, maybe you’re wondering what good there is in using a website to promote your place. After all, setting up a restaurant website is not free and you could be spending a lot of money paying designers and SEO specialists.

Is setting up a website worth the money spent on it?

Here are reasons why you should get your business a professionally designed website:

1. It’s cheap.

   Believe it or not, maintaining a website is actually cheaper than other forms of advertisement such as television, radio and newspaper ads. The only big amount you’d probably spend on will be for the creation of the site, which is a one-time investment and could generate returns right away. Complementary advertisement such as pay-per-click ads are low cost as well.

2. You can set your own website up to the satisfaction of your customers.

   Most companies rely on blogs and articles to get their messages across. It is not a bad idea, and especially it’s free. However, having your own website gives you the freedom and the flexibility to come up with designs that can be pleasing to your customers.

   For example, you have the freedom and the space to embed Flash videos in displaying your online menu or to display your locations. What’s more, you can publish articles and blogs as well on your official website.

3. An online presence exposes You to more audiences as possible.

   There’s no denying it. Everyone is using the Internet, with the exception perhaps of a select few that have not the resources to learn to use the technology.

   Everyday a huge percentage of the population is browsing the Internet to search for information, including restaurants. What’s better, the Internet is open to anyone around the world. You may be advertising only to people of your local area, but you could end up linking up with people from other sides of the world that would definitely remember your restaurant if they happen to stumble by your place.

4. You get instant advertisement.

   All advertisements in the Internet are uploaded and are live just a few moments from being submitted. This means that you don’t have to wait a long time before your ad appears in the pages open to the viewing of prospective clients and customers.

   This means the moment your website is finished, it is up and running and your target audiences can now find it easily provided it has been optimized for search engines.

5. It’s easy to measure responses.

   Most websites today include a dashboard feature which allows you to view just how much traffic your website generates. This enables you to determine whether or not your marketing schemes or your website content generates the needed traffic, and if you have to modify your schemes to maximize the potentials of your online marketing strategy.

Should You Hire An Agency For Your Marketing Needs?

Should you or should you not? This will be one of the most proverbial questions when you’re already in the marketing stage of your restaurant business.

If you’re left in a confusing state, then perhaps evaluating the pros and cons of it will help you come up with a better decision later on:

You will hire a marketing agency if…

1. You don’t know anything about marketing.

   If you’re basically a newbie even in marketing, the tendency is you’ll be wasting your time knowing how to promote your business. A restaurant marketing agency knows the ins and outs of restaurant promotions, so you can definitely rely on their technical and creative expertise.

2. You don’t have the time to do so.

   Normally, when you’re in the process of opening a restaurant, you tend to do all tasks at the same time, such as marketing and financing. A marketing agency will help lighten the burden on your shoulders by performing one of the most integral parts of the business.

3. You want to build a brand for your business.

   Creating a brand position is definitely not an easy task, but a marketing agency can help you discover your strengths and use them to your advantage. Some of them can even come up with their own marketing materials, such as flyers, slogans, banners, and whatever else that you need to develop an identity of your own and make it well-known to your target market.

4. You need to determine your target market.

   You may have your restaurant, but do you know to whom you’re selling to? Your target market will basically determine the ambiance, the kind of food that you’re going to serve, your marketing promotions, offers, and anything else that is related to running and maintaining the restaurant. A marketing agency very well knows how to seek for leads, develop and nurture them, as well as track them for you.

Don’t get a marketing agency if…

1. You don’t have the money to do so.

   Real and professional marketing agencies can charge you hundreds of dollars for every hour of work, so you already know that they are pretty expensive. If you don’t have the money to burn, you can forego this idea and settle for marketing strategies that you know best.

2. You don’t think you can trust them.

   Trust is very important when you’re working with marketing agencies. If you don’t have one, you will always end up meddling with their techniques, and they certainly don’t like that. If you believe that you have the ability to market your business on your own or with your own team, then better do so.

3. You will lose your creative ability.

   Whether you like it or not, there’s a huge chance that you’ll end up with an advertising agency that doesn’t want any other creative input than theirs. If you think that it hinders you from taking more control over the marketing strategies of your business, then you might as well take the matters into your own hands.

Six Highly Effective Offline Promotional Materials For Restaurants

Just because you have a restaurant coming up, you have to stick with the newest and popular marketing trend: creating your business website.

In case you don’t know, there are still thousands out there who don’t even know how to handle a computer properly, more so surf the Internet.

That’s why if you want to get yourself and your delicacies well known, you may want to combine your online marketing with the traditional approach: offline advertising.

Now, offline advertising can be real costly, if you don’t know to plan your marketing strategies very well. You could be spending hundreds of dollars for a ¼-size ad in your local daily. It gets a lot more expensive if you’re thinking of producing a TV commercial for your restaurant.

As a beginner, you need to control your expenses while making sure that you can still have a spotlight for your upcoming restaurant. To help you out, here are 6 offline marketing techniques that you can follow:

1. Be as creative and as wild as you can be.

   Publicity, good or bad, is still publicity. When you don’t have much budget for your advertising, creativity should be in full-blast mode. If you’re thinking of opening up a deli, you may want to have one of your crews dressed up as French fries or a burger.

   If you’re opening a trendier and more upscale resto, perhaps an al fresco, you can have the most dashing waiter to stand out your door and greet every guest with his impeccable Italian accent.

2. Give away food samples.

   People would never say no to anything that’s free. You can set up booths in your neighborhood or your town, where your restaurant is located. You can then allow passersby get a taste of one of your special dishes.

   You can also offer something that’s on the house for your customers during the first week of your opening. It can be your apple pie to go with their main course.

3. Get that signage up.

   A sign will never fail to capture that attention of your target market, especially if you’ve come up with a very smart name for your restaurant. It doesn’t have to be too elaborate. The most important thing is that it has impact and can speak of what your restaurant can offer.

4. Send special gifts.

   Especially if you don’t have such a large market, you can always settle for the extra mile. Perhaps you can collect the birth dates of your loyal customers and send them gift certificates or vouchers to your restaurants during their birthdays.

5. Sponsor an event.

   Will you be having a community fair? Why don’t you go and volunteer to feed at least a hundred of the visitors? Not only will you be able to show your support to the community, but you can also make your restaurant business more known.

6. Keep your promise.

   If you say that you’ll have the food cooked in 15 minutes, make sure that you can do it around that time or even less. In the end, the most effective and the cheapest mode of offline advertising is the word of mouth.

   Keep those customers impressed not only on the food you provide but also of your excellent service.

Three Qualities Of A Successful Restaurant Website

Do you know how long your time is to convince your website visitor to stay?

You only have 5 seconds.

Since 1999, I am helping small business owners in designing website and in their Internet marketing campaign. All these years, only few of them really talked about how to give right information to their website visitors.

I’ve seen hundreds of restaurant and small business websites that were designed to please business owners and not their customers. This is pretty common up to this time.

Flashy design, pictures of the owner (and their kids), colourful fonts, etc. Name it, they’ve done it.

On the Internet, the competition is always just one click away, so if you frustrate users they’ll head to your competitor’s website.

So here are 3 criteria that your website should be based on.

1. It says what you offer

With limited time, your website should be self-evident. Meaning, if your business is Italian restaurant, the graphics, design, pictures, and text should tell the visitor immediately that they are in an Italian restaurant website.

Do you offer delivery service? Do you accept Visa, MasterCard, etc.? Does it require reservation?

Do not bury all these information if you can present them immediately without sacrificing the professional design.

2. It says why they should pay a visit

Unless you offer online ordering, your website ultimate goal is to convince visitors to get off their computer chair and to visit your restaurant.Every single page of your website must be pre-selling your restaurant.

It should tell how good your food is. The delightful ambiance your restaurant offers. Your friendly staff. That services that they can’t find from anywhere else.

Persuade them. Remember that you’re not just competing with other restaurants; you are giving them good reasons why they shouldn’t cook for dinner and visit you instead.

3. It says where you are and how to contact you

   • This will help your visitors to easily contact you
   • This will help your website to rank better in search engines whenever people are looking for local restaurants or businesses.

Many people need to phone you to find more information about your restaurant. Aside from your contact information page, put your telephone number and complete address at the bottom of every page.

This will give you two benefits:

Your complete address is vital especially for your new customers.

If your location is in a busy district like downtown, traffic flow and parking are of concern to them. Help them solve their concern by giving them map and parking suggestions.

Hours of operation are another thing should be on your website. It’s so frustrating for a hungry customer to drop by only to realize your restaurant is closed.

So there you have it. These are non-technical suggestions but are foundation of successful restaurant website.

Now make sure your website passed all these criteria and expect to increase the number of new customers coming from your website.

How To Develop A Restaurant Niche

Whether you’re thinking of opening a restaurant today or tomorrow, there’s always that huge possibility that you’ll be pitted against small but many competitors, or few but huge ones. Since you know that the only way to get noticed and obtain customers is to stand out, you have to come up with your own niche.

A niche has a lot of advantages. For one, if you don’t have a huge marketing budget, a niche is less risky, since these people are the ones that are highly interested with what you’re going to offer to them. They don’t need a lot of persuasion to eat or try your restaurant. They will also be one of your best marketers. They will be glad to share their customer experience to their friends and family members.

However, this is also where a lot of restaurant owners fail. They are aware of its purpose, but they don’t know how to develop it. Just so you’ll be spared with the heart and money aches, here are few tips on how to define and enhance your chosen niche:

1. Conduct a research.

   It’s highly suggested that before you open a restaurant, you already know who your target customers will be. After all, majority of the business plan will be related to them.

   For example, if you want to open a restaurant for businesspersons, you may want your restaurant to be perfect for meetings and conferences, perhaps filled up with tables composed of more than two chairs. If you’re opening a café for college students, your restaurant may be something that’s convenient for studying and relaxing after a whole day of classes.

   Research will also give you an idea of the profiles of your customers. What do they want? Would they go for cheap food, or are they willing to pay very high prices for sumptuous meals? Where are they located? If your target market are the moms, you have to look for a location that’s near the suburbs or residential homes.

2. Promote your business to them.

   Going back to the previous examples, if you’re hoping to capture the attention of mothers, you may want to offer free meals during Sunday weekends. You can also buy a small space ad in magazines that they frequently read. If you’re after the businessmen, you could offer vouchers to their employees, where they can eat at your restaurant at discounted prices on selected dishes. Since these people are concerned of their economics, they wouldn’t mind having to spend less on employee benefits.

3. Focus on your strengths.

   It becomes a lot easier for you to develop a niche on something that you’re truly familiar of. Are you a champion when it comes to Mediterranean dishes? Do you have a knack for themed cafes?

   You can use these strengths to determine the kind of people you want to deal with, as well as what kind of restaurant you want to put up. These strengths, moreover, will be your main sources of motivation to always innovate and change to cater to the changing needs and demands of your niche market.