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.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Offline 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.