3 Sure-Fire Tips To Promote Your Restaurant Brand Without Spending A Fortune

Tough competition has forced restaurants to advertise. There are more restaurants than most customers could afford dine in, especially in major cities. So what’s a restaurant owner to do? Advertise, of course, to get the lion’s share of the market. But when restaurant owners think of advertising they think about getting an effective message out and mass appeal. Then they think about expenses, expenses, expenses.

There are simpler, cost-effective ways to market your restaurant. You don’t always have to spend millions to advertise on Super Bowl. Sometimes all you need is a little creativity and a techie friend working at your side.

Here are some tips.

1.    Distribute business cards and leaflets
The restaurant owner must work “on” the restaurant, not “in” it. While your waiters are busy serving tables, you should be monitoring your restaurant and figuring out who your target customers are. In time you’ll form a better picture of your regular clients. These are who should focus on. Reach out to them by distributing menu fliers, leaflets and sample cards.

2.    Stay in the public eye for all the right reasons
It’s important to have locals talking about you, but make sure it’s for all the right reasons. Do this by promoting your restaurant locally. Offer discounts, coupons, and even sponsor charity events. Make sure your restaurant’s presence is heard during festive seasons.

3.    Get into social networking
This is where your techie friend comes in. Social networking is advertising on the 21st century. And the best thing about it is, it’s FREE – or mostly free. Get your restaurant’s name out through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or by blogging, what KogiBBQ did for its franchise. Social networking is the best way to get your name out without spending a fortune.

Tell me what you think about these cost-effective means of marketing your restaurant by leaving a comment below.

Five Big Reasons Why A Restaurant Marketing Blog Is Essential To Your Success

Blogging is funny. If you’re reading this article, do I really need to explain why your restaurant business needs its own blog website? This article is evidence in itself!

Anyway let’s get down to business, and allow me to explain why a restaurant marketing blog website is essential to your business success.

In another article, I talked about the decline of other advertising methods—newspaper ads, Yellow Pages ads, etc. I don’t mean to be harsh, but these platforms are simply no longer effective, and advertising through them is like throwing away good money into the roast pit. People are looking elsewhere for information: the Internet. On the Internet, blogs rule. In blogs, content is king.

I admit that sometimes no amount of words will convince a person with so much at stake, especially a restaurant operator, who’d rather spend his time managing the business than typing cutesy words on the Internet. But before you put your foot down, I recommend you check out these popular restaurant marketing blogs from Dairy Queen and Tyson Chicken.

Another popular blog website is KogiBBQ. See for yourself what a good restaurant marketing blog did for a small rolling store that sells tacos.

But to answer the question why it’s important, let me go into the details…

• Easily recognized by major search engines
• Helps identify your customers’ problems
• Allows you to share interesting and valuable information to your customers
• Works as a guide to your products and services without looking like an advertising gimmick
• It’s a great platform to cultivate your own fan base

1. Easily recognized by major search engines
Did you know that thousands—no, millions—of Internet users set their homepage to Google? Same goes for Yahoo! In fact I have Yahoo! as my homepage on my home computer. All this is absolutely free marketing. Imagine all those money used to pay for commercials turning into direct profit for you instead of being handed over to those TV executives.

2. Helps identify your customers’ problems
When you talk about new menu items and services on your restaurant marketing blog, your followers get the chance to react and post problems they might have with it. This is a good thing. As a restaurant operator, it’s important that you keep in touch with what your customers think about your little operation.

3. Allows you to share interesting and valuable information to your customers
A restaurant marketing blog is a two-way conversation platform. Customers get to share their problems, you get to communicate new and interesting tidbits about your restaurant.

4. Works as a guide to your products and services without looking like an advertising gimmick
A restaurant marketing blog is essentially a complete guide to your restaurant’s services. It’s effective, too. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for a TV commercial that says, “Hey, come to our restaurant. We have the best sausages in town”, you get to write about why your sausages are special, and let your followers decide if they want to try it or not.

5. It’s a great platform to cultivate your own fan base
A restaurant marketing blog is where you pamper your fans and followers outside the restaurant. Make them feel like they’re a part of your little operation, and I’m sure they’ll stick around much longer than if you chose not to blog about your restaurant.

Look at all the benefits of a restaurant marketing blog. Check the examples I mentioned. If you had made up your mind not to start a blog, I hope these will get you to reconsider. I’m going to spell it out for you here: there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain in starting a restaurant marketing blog.

How A Regular Guy From Los Angeles Found Great Success By Marketing A New Restaurant Online

There is always the issue of marketing a new restaurant. I mean, marketing a business that’s been in operation for a couple years is tough, too. But getting people to notice a new restaurant, that’s something else.

I think Mark Manguera had this same problem a while back when he first started getting ideas of opening a Korean BBQ-slash-taco store.

KogiBBQ is the result of Mark and his team’s hard work. It’s what I like to call a rolling food store, meaning KogiBBQ relies much on its online presence to alert some 27,000 followers, more or less, where the store is headed next. Mark’s gamble in marketing KogiBBQ online paid off big time.

I know you’re dying to get noticed too. Fact is I found this great website, Restaurant WebMaster, which caters specifically to small and medium restaurant businesses. RM offers four different levels of exposure to choose from. They are…

1. Highlighted Restaurant (around $99 to $199 a year)
Highlighted Restaurant pages are geared to receive the most traffic coming from RM’s websites. RM uses a clever little corner peel technique that lures curious individuals into clicking and revealing the rest of the ad. You also receive all the benefits of Featured and Suggested Restaurant categories.

I suggest you try this one out, if you can afford it, to jumpstart your goal of marketing your new restaurant on the Internet.

2. Featured Restaurant (around $39 a year)
This category puts your restaurant on the scroller at the top of RM’s restaurant directory files. Right now there’s only room for twelve restaurants on the scroller. If you choose this plan, your restaurant gets to be one of those featured twelve.

RM will also link directly to your existing restaurant website.

3. Suggested Restaurant (around $19 a year)
Suggested restaurants are listed with a hot link in the middle of RM’s directory site, just under the featured restaurants. In my opinion, if you aren’t completely made up about going online with your marketing of your new restaurant, I suggest you try this one out. I mean, what’s $19 a year?

4. Free restaurant listing
There’s the magic word – free. In this category, you can send in articles about your restaurant and its services and RM will publish them on its website. It’s a great way to stir some attention without spending anything.

KogiBBQ is one of the most successful restaurant businesses around. Check out KogiBBQ’s followers on Twitter if you still don’t believe me. Anyway, the importance of marketing a new restaurant online is as clear as day. It’s very effective when done right. Period.

Can you suggest any other good ways to market a new restaurant on the Internet?

Learn How To Explode Your Restaurant’s Sales Using Twitter

They say learning is a never-ending process.

For restaurant operators, here’s the opportunity to learn something very important: Twitter might just be the killer application that could turn your restaurant brand into a household name. It’s social, it’s easy, and most importantly, it’s cheap.

Let’s learn something from the success of Naked Pizza.

Naked Pizza is a small pizza joint in New Orleans, described by AdAge as a “healthful” pizza shop. Its co-founder Jeff Leach wanted to build an online following. So he decided to market the brand using Twitter. He created an account, tracked people within a three-mile radius, and then started conversations with folks he felt might be interested in what his store has to offer.

Guess what? The idea clicked. On April 23, 2009, sales from Twitter accounted for 15% of the day’s earning. Not a bad number, if you ask me.

Here are five tips on how to market your restaurant effectively using Twitter:

1.    Track every sale
Build a simple point-of-sale system that will allow you to distinguish the origin of the sale. This way you’ll know if your efforts on Twitter are paying off and by how much.

2.    Twitter isn’t Facebook
Twitter is simpler than MySpace or Facebook, says Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence. Twitter is also more immediate, more social, than Facebook.

3.    Stir up a conversation
This is self-explanatory, and I have already gone over this a couple times before.

Don’t bombard your followers with product placements, etc. Start a friendly conversation. Then slowly stir the talk towards what you’re trying to sell. The secret is for everything to appear natural.

4.    Sell last-minute inventory
Twitter’s ability to produce last-minute sales is its biggest strength. Zack Steven himself, co-founder of LocalTweeps, caught some discounted tickets at Guthrie Theater simply by founding out about it on Twitter at the last minute.

5.    Alert followers about your plans
Here I’ll be making another reference to KogiBBQ, a rolling Korean taco store that drives around LA, which uses Twitter to alert some 20,000 followers where it’s headed next.

Twitter gives you, the restaurant operator, the power to not just reach out, but also target people within your geographic location.

In many ways restaurant marketing on Twitter is similar to setting something on fire. You gather the materials (your promotions) that would start the flame, making sure they are highly combustible (effective promotions), pile them up together in one location (your target area), drench it in gasoline (start a friendly conversation), and finally flick a lit match onto it. Then step back and enjoy the show.