Five Amazing Guerilla Marketing Strategies For Restaurants

There will always be competition.

This is something you need to get into your head the moment you decide to open a restaurant. If there isn’t a single restaurant in your area, expect one to pop up within months or a year of your operation. No doubt your prominent presence as the only restaurant in the area should give other entrepreneurs some ideas. There’s no escaping this scenario.

When there’s competition, the only way to gain the upper hand is to market your restaurant. If you’re low on budget, guerilla restaurant marketing is a viable option, which involves the use of more than one type of smaller marketing ideas instead of focusing on bigger, more expensive advertising.

Here are some effective guerilla restaurant marketing tactics:

1.    Billboard signs
Put up the biggest, most creative sign you could think of. If the local community restricts the size of billboard signs up to a certain dimension, then use every inch of it. It helps make your restaurant stand out from the rest.

2.    Flyers
In literature, they call it “Start your story with a bang.” Same is true for restaurants. Open with a bang, and make sure everyone knows about it by handing out flyers in advance, where you offer meal discounts and free drinks on opening day.

3.    PR gimmicks
Make your staff wear turkey costumes on Thanksgiving, Santa or even Rudolph costumes on Christmas. Be creative and keep your customers talking. Of course don’t forget to compensate your employees afterwards.

4.    Feedback cards
Feedback cards or forms are a great way to collect the names, birthdates and email addresses of your patrons so you could send them coupons and discount offers later on. Admit it. When a restaurant you only visited once remembers your birthday, it never fails to touch a chord somewhere.

5.    Build a website
A website is no doubt the best way to communicate with customers without talking face-to-face. This is where you inform them what hours you’re open, what’s on the menu, the type of payment methods you accept, and other things. Simply put, a restaurant website is a must.

Some of these tactics you’ve already heard before. But even so, they deserve another mention, especially when there’s tough competition and your restaurant business is at stake.

I’ll discuss more guerilla restaurant marketing techniques in my next posts.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 6:10 am and is filed under Offline Marketing, Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.