Promoting Your Restaurant.

In a franchise situation, the brand owner will take a lot of the responsibility of the promotion, including the creating of marketing collaterals, general advertising and a degree of local advertising specific to your location. However, as a business owner it is always important to ensure that promotion for your restaurant is being done adequately.

Promotion can start anytime, but it should begin in earnest and in a planned manner with scheduled activities from the date the final launch has been planned.

Your promotion strategy depends on the type of restaurant you will be running and the catchment area for your customers. As mentioned earlier, QSR and cafes have more of a local clientele – customers who are already in the area. Casual and fine dining restaurants attract customers from further afield. Naturally, the promotion efforts for the first two formats need to be more locally focused and the promotion efforts for the other two formats should have a wider spread.

Localised efforts are cheaper to promote and restaurants that have a wider appeal would attract the lifestyle writers of city-based and national publications and hence, knowing your targeted clientele and choosing the right promotion strategy is very important.

A web presence is extremely important too. You need to have a dedicated website, and presence in all popular social networking sites. The Internet is the best way that customers can easily find all the important information regarding your restaurant, including operating hours, exact location and the menu. In the era of smart mobiles, access to people on the move is equally important.

Getting yourself talked about is the most important objective. The appeal of the concept and the experience of your restaurant is the only way you can ensure that you are talked about in pleasant terms. That is the challenge of word-of-mouth marketing.

It would be best to work out your promotion campaign through a thorough marketing plan. The following points need to be kept in mind while preparing it:

1. Design Fresh and Consistent Communication
2. Build a Public Relations Strategy
3. Do Effective Advertising
4. Drive Social Media Conversations

You can add to the list by writing in to us.