Just What Is Restaurant Marketing?

Copyright (c) 2011 Baz Rothwell

Restaurant marketing is a term that is often interpreted by the restaurateur as advertising and therefore associated with spending their hard earned profits on all kinds of wonderful adverts that are, in most cases, completely useless.

Let's first identify what restaurant marketing actually covers. Yes there is a element of paid advertising in there but just advertising without any strategy is pointless and just like burning money. So what is marketing - let's define it.

Marketing is any and all activity that publicizes and elevates your restaurant to your customers and the outside world in general. It includes -


The physical presentation of your restaurant to the public.
Word of mouth and word of mouse promotion.
On site promotional literature. Newsletters and updates, both via the internet and normal postal system.
Events and street sampling.
Press releases and articles.
Features in the local or national press.
Online booking services and review sites online.
Using social networks to create awareness, like Twitter and Facebook.
Leaflet distribution.
Networking events and joint ventures.

To be frank this list could go on and on, restaurant marketing includes any activity that is bringing knowledge of your brand or restaurant to the world at large.

When you look at the list above you will notice that most of these restaurant marketing activities can be done with minimal or no financial outlay at all. In fact you should concentrate your efforts on producing no cost, low cost and results cost promotion to get the very best results whenever you can.

What's more most of these forms of promotion will give you a clear indication of how effective they are, simply because they are measurable and you can see what returns you get from each activity.

On the other hand I can pretty much guarantee that you cannot get any clear indication of which of your current advertising is producing results, or what those results are. Most of your advertising spend will be completely untraceable.

The other thing about this list, is that each field is an entire article in itself and deserves much more cover than can be given here. So during the course of time, I will be doing just that, just for you.

Take a look through the list above and see if you can isolate the no cost activities, the low cost activities and the results cost activities. Just to make it clear what I mean by results cost activities, these are the marketing methods that you pay for only when they produce customers. An example of this is the review and online booking sites, that charge a small fee for each table booking they get for you and only if the customer actually turns up.

So now you have some information that can boost your restaurant profile and hopefully ignite cost efficient restaurant marketing. Begin right away with looking into these free restaurant marketing methods or check out some additional resources online.


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Baz Rothwell is a restaurant marketing specialist with over 40 years experience in the leisure industry. He has compiled a free 5 part e-course to help you get started with your Restaurant Marketing.Get it free by going to http://bit.ly/dSra0k right now or visit http://restaurantmarketingguy.com for more great articles and tips.