Marketing solution

[antoine82]

Good afternoon,

My business is getting bigger (I am opening a second restaurant) and I am now willing to spend a bit of money on marketing. Right now, I am thinking customers database management / emailing / loyalty card and any other way to help me engaging with my existing/potential customers in a better way.

I have been approached by Klik In who seem to have a nice solution. Has anyone any experience with them?
Or if you have any recommandation, please feel free to share!

Thank you

 

[columbo]

Just as side isssue, do you try to get the email address of every customer to your restaurant presently?

 

[boring-friday]

Don't know who they are but had a look, honestly most marketing agencies are over priced, a fair amount of them will just completely rip you off.
You could just have competitions for free meals for people who submit their email addresses or something, shouldn't be hard to collect a lot of emails on social media like that with the cost to you only being the price of a meal easy to do yourself or pay someone cheap to do it, a email template from mailchimp would be fine.
I personally wouldn't spend much on marketing for a restaurant, just keep making good food and you'll get popular by people coming back and telling their friends

 

[antoine82]

Hi,

Thank you for your answers. I don't have for the moment any file where I collect my customers emails but this is something I clearly must do!
Mailchimp has been recommend for emailing but I wanted something that would go slightly further in terms of customers engagement.
But I agree, good food is the best way to go! It's just that the second restaurant will be much bigger than the first (and so is the rent!) and I want to make sure to attract as many customers as possible!

 

[columbo]

I personally wouldn't spend much on marketing for a restaurant, just keep making good food and you'll get popular by people coming back and telling their friends

Excellent post by boring-friday! This will be your most powerful form of marketing. No amount of software or technology can ever beat the word-of-mouth of your customers. No agency can do what you and your team does.

But, if you really want to do "marketing" - roll it into your everyday processes. Do not over-complicate or over-think a solution. Just do it. For example, when a customer phones to make a booking - casually ask them for their email address and voila your first email contact. Do this 50 times a week and after 12 months - you could easily have over 2000 email addresses but they must all have a good experience at your restaurant first.

 

[Mark T Jones]

I personally wouldn't spend much on marketing for a restaurant, just keep making good food and you'll get popular by people coming back and telling their friends

Sorry, worst advice ever. Independent restaurants remain stubbornly at the top of the business failure league - by a wide margin (only pubs come close) - one key reason is that their owner fall into the trap of thinking it is all about delivering 'good' food. (What constitutes good food is a thread in its own right).

To put that in context, the most successful restaurant brand in the world is McDonalds, whilst celebrity chefs routinely fail at running restaurants - the difference? Celebrity chefs serve up good food whilst McDonalds cater to the needs of their market.

If you don't understand your market, you don't understand your business.

 

[The Byre]

I'm afraid Mark is right! You still need to get the word out there!

However, Boring-Friday is also right, well, partially! There are no magic answers to marketing and those who give you 'marketing solutions' to problems you didn't have are really rip-off merchants!

You have to create a buzz around your restaurant, if it is to succeed. Young people go out. Old people do not (OK, they go out less often, but you get the point!) So you have to appeal primarily to young people. That means creating a buzz around and in social media, local press, flyers and anything else you can think of. Have a blog, outlining progress. Put a video on your blog, showing the work progressing.

Think like the movie business. Right now, the fifth Bourne movie is the big social media buzz. There has been no real marketing and they have only just finished primary filming, but already the blogs and groups are buzzing with news of shoots, snippets of gossip and wild speculation. All this is fuelled by Universal's PR machine, that drip-feeds new bits of info at carefully timed intervals and allows programmes like Entertainment Tonight to show clips of filming taking place.

Tip - The hot thing right now is snacks and not sit-down and get a three course meal with soup, meat-n-tatties-n-two-veg, followed by ice cream and cheese-n-bickies. Think snacks like a scallop-on-toast for £3, a plate of cheese-n-onion soup for £5 and beer in tall-stemmed glasses for £4. That gets the singles and young couples in for the see-and-be-seen crowd.

They like to spend money, just to show that they like to spend money! Two beers and three snacks and they have spent as much as a full sit-down cover!

 

[gavco98uk]

What kind of restaurant do you run?

Your marketing choice is going to be driven by the demographic of your customers.

Social media is absolutely ideal for restaurants, and it's hard to imagine using any other kind of advertising. Sadly though, it's only really popular with younger demographics, so it needs to be the kind of restaurant that appeals to them.

If it is, then you need to set up a Facebook page, the rest will almost take care of itself. Users will be checking in when they visit your restaurant, providing free advertising to all of their friends. Also look into Instagram, food photography is massive at the moment, so get posting lots of photos of the meals on there for people to share with their friends.

Email marketing isn't very effective these days, but social media presences are huge, and far easier to establish.

 

[Mark T Jones]

What kind of restaurant do you run?

Your marketing choice is going to be driven by the demographic of your customers.

Social media is absolutely ideal for restaurants, and it's hard to imagine using any other kind of advertising. Sadly though, it's only really popular with younger demographics, so it needs to be the kind of restaurant that appeals to them.

If it is, then you need to set up a Facebook page, the rest will almost take care of itself.

Just - no.

 

[HazelC]

I have a client who runs a restaurant, his facebook page is updated daily with photos of the specials for that day and such like. He also runs facebook competitions (sticking to the rules) and encourages visitors / diners to share photos of their experience then a winner is chosen to win a free meal for two the next month. It's great and seems to work for him.

In regards to collecting email addresses, hand out feedback cards with receipts (and a pen), and people can leave feedback and email which gives you testimonials to share and contact details

 

[boring-friday]

Sorry, worst advice ever. Independent restaurants remain stubbornly at the top of the business failure league - by a wide margin (only pubs come close) - one key reason is that their owner fall into the trap of thinking it is all about delivering 'good' food. (What constitutes good food is a thread in its own right).

To put that in context, the most successful restaurant brand in the world is McDonalds, whilst celebrity chefs routinely fail at running restaurants - the difference? Celebrity chefs serve up good food whilst McDonalds cater to the needs of their market.

If you don't understand your market, you don't understand your business.

Well I didn't say do zero marketing did I? But I guarantee if the OP picks a marketing agency basically at random he will almost certainly not see a ROI, I'd bet my life on it in at odds of £2/life