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With this blog I wanted to talk about a little bit is restaurant marketing tips for 2013 and a number of different tips here listed that I want to go over with you, 14 in total and hopefully this will help you with a little bit a better focus on how to market your business, moving forward on like.

First off, what I want you to do is do a google search for your type of restaurant and location, see what kind of result you get, so if you’re an Italian restaurant for instance in Philadelphia you go on to google and type-in Italian restaurants Philadelphia, what I want you to see Is where do you rank, do you make it to the first page? Or your competitors outranking you?

Really what I want you to do is think about  what people are looking for when they go on to google and think about where you’re showing up if you show up at all, you don’t want your competitors to take all the businesses from you, so the best way you can be more effective in getting more business is to make sure that your showing up well. What I did here was provided 14 tips that I think will help with not only your overall marketing but especially your digital marketing in getting more customers.

The first thing I want to talk about is getting good press, it may seem like getting good press is kinda out of your control, but there’s a lot of different things you can actually do to make sure that the local media takes notice of your business and a lot of times those local media articles will show up on a social media sites, will show up on search engines and will rank very well if they type in something like Italian restaurant Philadelphia if its article is written by Philadelphia inquirer for an instance which is the Philadelphia major paper here and it obviously make sure that you get a top listing here.

To get good press you can try helping out the community by doing something making a creative changes, just thinking about outside the box ideas. one great way to do this is to actually enlist local food bloggers, ask local food bloggers to review your restaurant in return for a free meal, obviously its hopefully gonna be a good positive experience for that blogger, but what you want to make sure is that you’re generating an outside links from another website to help you with ranking and of course obviously the positive review will help your reputation.

So the next tip is make sure that you’re utilizing your website, if you don’t have a website already then you absolutely need to reach out to us immediately and consider some of the solutions that we offer.

It doesn’t matter how big your restaurant is, you absolutely need to have a website in today’s market and we provide very affordable monthly low-cost solutions for different types of websites and really what you need to do is to make sure you have something up there just to put a little bit about your business menu, we have a many solutions but you need to make sure that people could find who you are, where you are, and what kind of food you’re serving. That’s  critical for today’s business.

So more and more people are actually turning to the internet to decide where they going to eat on a daily basis and you can quickly lose  those customers if you don’t have a good quality website and again customers are really looking for information about you like locations, what the menu is, whether you have a children’s menu, its really critical that you have that information. It also becoming more important that your site is mobile friendly more and more people are finding out about restaurants while they’re out and on the go and if your website uses any kind of adobe flash or any other applications that are incompatible for smartphones it could really affect your business, again my company can provide you the solution with the response of designs that works not only on desktop computers, as well as mobile tablets, cellphones and mobile devices.

Make sure that you use online reservations to us as well, invite your customers to make a reservation on sites like opentable, we can integrate that into your website but you need to make sure that you have some kind of online reservation too to make it easy for your customers and easier for yourself, and sometimes people just don’t want to pick up the phone to dial, they want to handle everything in a very convenient way through just making a couple clicks on a website and that’s the best way to make sure that your getting a reservations online.

Obviously what we’ve just talk about is making sure you have a menu, the next tip is you re-design your menu, your menu is really the best merchandising tool you can have, if it’s a boring menu or its outdated or ugly it can cause customer to look at your restaurant with a lower value, make sure your menu is fresh, well-written or enticing.

The next tip is implementing a frequent diner marketing plan, so to get the most profits you absolutely need to make sure you have some kind of loyalty program to bring in repeat customers.

The next tip I think everybody should be doing which a lot of businesses don’t do is host events, turn your restaurant into a venue for wine tasting, or community business gatherings, parties, live music shows, stand-up comedy acts,any other kind of events, It will help you attract new customers and get your regular customers a reason to keep coming back.

Something that I think also critical not done by a lot of restaurants is up-selling, increasing your average check size is absolutely critical to a restaurant, its one of the smartest ways to improve with your profits by with your servers or cashiers to read the customers and suggest an appropriate side dish, drink or dessert can really make an impact on the bottom line, increase your sales and improve customer experience, people want to be taken care of, they want to have people  that know them well enough, and rather than saying we gonna have just coffee tonight, make sure that you’re selling your desserts or make sure that you recommend the appropriate side dishes, or recommend your great wine.

Market your take-out and delivery service is the next tip, if you don’t have a take-out or delivery service that’s fine, but a take-out or delivery service can do a lot of good for your bottom line, I wont do any good if people don’t know about it, so you need to make sure that you’re using flyers or making sure your website talks about it and make sure that you have take-out delivery menus that market this services, really critical for increasing bottom line.

A new feature that a lot of restaurants are starting new now, and say its an old actual feature for marketing, its promoting through email, we compared with direct marketing, email marketing is much faster and efficient it saves paper and reduces marketing expenses, and its more likely to convert into sale, the best way to grow your business is to grow your email database, if you compare to direct marketing, you can really start to promote through newsletters, through social media, on your website, inside your restaurant  and all you need to do is give somebody to sign-up to your email database.

The next tip is to commit yourself to going to green and your restaurant, this is tip no.9. Eco friendly practices will help your profits by lowering costs, it will give you an edge over the competition. Marketing your green restaurant also shows customers that you conserve resources and reduce pollution and will make an impact on people that are strict on that.

Tip no.10; involve customers into contests, having customers signed-up for a contest is always a smart strategy, it will you build your marketing database and it will also give customers a reason to come back, having a contest is the best way to increase your email database.

Another great thing that I think is important  is asking customers  for feedback, ask your customers to sign up for your facebook page or to like your facebook page, ask your customers to sign up for your email database, just ask, if you’re asking your regulars and loyal fans offline to like you on facebook, follow you on twitter and pinterest and help spread the word, send them email, call people that you have good relationship with, walk right up to their table and ask them if they’re enjoying what they do or their experience, tell that you’re enjoying what you do and find out what they love about your restaurant and spread the word. Once you have people ready to spread the word, get a social media presence.

Tip no.12, Strengthen your word and mouth marketing with an interesting interactive social media presence, it gives you the ability to engage your customers 365 days a year and it represents your  brand well and enlist customers to share their stories that you can put a price tag on, but again, make sure you provide your customers and followers with enough incentive to pay attention, giving patrons and sign-up to follow you into social channels or come in to your restaurant is critical and the key is to make it simple for them to do, if you constantly put up a restaurant  specials on facebook for instance, your fans are gonna lose interest, mix it up, don’t be afraid to have some fun with it and be part of the local community and get involve.

Last tip I’m going to talk about before the final one is monitoring review site, no. 13, pay close attention to what people talk about your restaurant online, so review sites, this is where your offline visitors can tell to the online world whats going on with your restaurant, hopefully it’s a positive experience, but it also give you the opportunity to thank visitors for positive reviews, respond to any negative reviews respectfully and hopefully appropriately.

And the final thing that I recommend you do is once you have your website up and its generating a lot of traffic, engage in local SEO practices, websites are just for big companies, no more and never, small businesses are realizing that the importance of having a good quality website is critical and implementing in the internet marketing strategy like what we just talk about is very important, about 72% of all searches are remaining to a search for a local content these days and you should be a 100% sure that your website is gonna show up for searches relevant to your restaurant , if you do that search that I talked about at the beginning of this podcast, about looking for your type of food or your type of restaurant and the local monthly area, if you’re not showing up well, you need to involve a local SEO firm or local marketing firm that specializes in restaurant marketing to help you out.

Hopefully you’ve  enjoyed this 14 tips and tricks again im gonna go through quick. The first one is “get good press”, the second is “make sure you’re utilizing your website effectively”, third is “re-design  your menu to make sure its fresh”, no.4 is “make sure you have some kind of frequent diner program or loyalty program implemented”, no.5 is “host events”, no.6 is “upsell your current clients while they’re sitting in your restaurant”, no.7 “market your take-out and delivery services” if you have one, no.8 “ promote through email” it’s the most affordable way you can do your promotions, no.9 “make a commitment to go green” not only it’s good for your customers but also good for your bottom line and good for mother earth, no.10 “involve customers in a contest” this is the best way to try and get them and most importantly they’re going to be involved in promoting your business if you have a good quality contest, no.11 “just ask” ask people to do the things you want them to do, nothing more powerful than asking somebody to like you or come back again, no.12 “make sure your social media presence is there” and make sure it’s a strong one, no.13 “monitoring review sites” following positive and negative reviews, and finally no.14 “engage in local SEO practices” make sure that people are able to find you in searching for your business .

We would love to help you out with any kind of marketing solutions that you need. Don’t hesitate to contact us today.