What Restaurant Marketing Strategies Should You Focus On?

As a restaurant owner, your main objective in creating marketing strategies and spending advertising dollars is to simply drive in new customers, and create loyal patrons who will make their way to your dining room time after time, however frequent–but as the saying goes–the more the merrier!

 What Restaurant Marketing Strategies Should You Focus On?

Restaurants must largely focus on branding by personally appealing to their guests with clear branding that creates a comfortable and enjoyable environment for the customer. In the restaurant industry, your customers must leave satisfied with a positive experience, and traditionally, there have been quite a few ways a restaurant can appeal to their crowd—from pleasant staffing to the ambiance to, of course, the menu. It’s all about the experience.

As a restaurant owner though, you've probably already considered the impact Social Media can have on your business, and you've probably made some steps to getting started on using Social Media as a major tactic for marketing your restaurant, like setting up a Facebook page or Twitter account. Social platforms are the stepping stones for creating incredible brand images as well as directly interacting with customers and receiving valuable insight or feedback. Every industry is different, but restaurants have a unique opportunity to reel in Social Media success from how they decide to interact on social media platforms. Hands down, using social media can be one of the most effective restaurant marketing strategies–but only when done correctly.

The greatest restaurant marketing strategies and methods you should be leveraging to your advantage over social media networks and channels are the use of contests and other similar promotions. Contests are a sure-fire way to bring traffic in through your doors in an immediate manner. With the amount of advertisement that has been thrown at consumers and customers, the lengths needed to capture your audience must go beyond the typical. Offering contests and promotions will increase awareness and publicity for your business and put your brand image in a spectacular and modern light. People want to get involved with your business, and you should want to get involved with them in new and innovative ways that don’t just benefit you, but reward them for their patronage.

5 Kick-Starters for Restaurant Marketing Strategies Success

If your restaurant isn’t seeing any substantial results from your social media marketing efforts, consider implementing any (or all!) of these ideas for restaurants marketing strategies that successfully reach out to customers with contest and will align your social media and social branding in ways that will satisfy and perhaps exceed your customers’ expectations.

1. Promote within your restaurant. Nothing motivates the team like seeing the coach on running the same drills with the players. As management or owners you need to be involved and encourage patrons to join your loyalty program. Run employee contests to see who can sign up the most people into your loyalty program with a payoff of a gift card. This top down leadership will surely drive people into your opt in database and keep customers want to come back.
2. Dump the punch cards. Using punch cards for loyalty is like using dial up to get the internet still. While it may be functional, its certainly not efficient. With today's onslaught of mobile marketing, it can be hard to choose. Consider using a loyalty program that is part of your POS, not some wart sitting on your counter that you hope gets noticed. There key advantages to using mobile number as your reward card, most people for instance will never leave home without their cell. Having it part of your POS means you no longer reward customers based on how many times they came to see you, but instead on how much they spent with you? See more in my article on Is Mobile Marketing Right for you?
3. Dump the clipboard- No one wants to fill out an application when signing up for a loyalty program, so why use a clip board to collect email address. When working with a client,  I asked if she was using a loyalty program, yes I collect emails and them send offers and specials out. Sadly none of the offers were ever redeemed. The fact is most people just don't read emails or respond to them. Perhaps, your offer requires you to print out the coupon and redeem at the restaurant. This does not help when they are at work, or running around town. Try instead using the SMS Text Message loyalty to get your offer in your customers hands and drive them to your restaurant just time for lunch or dinner!
4. Personalize. Make them feel special, appreciated and missed. Send a message via SMS text through you mobile marketing program to let them know. A great idea for creating incredible foot traffic is to offer a special discount or promotions that apply to specific people, like offering 50% off discounts or complimentary items for customers who apply to the promotion. One criterion you could offer is picking a daily name and posting it to Social Media platforms. Customers with the name of that day are applicable to the promotions, but chances are customers will come in with other non-qualifying customers.
5. Value customer check-ins. Recently I was speaking with a friend who shared with me they decide on where they were eating by the offers given for checking in.The advent of Foursquare and other similar social mobile platforms have changed the way people can share with their friends and family how and where they are having dining experiences. Another neat social platform is Scvngr, which is much like Foursquare, and allows restaurant owners to set up challenges or games for customers who check-in. If you don’t have a location based network set up for your restaurant already, you’re falling behind because many of your competitors are already employing them. But because they work! There are a number of great incentives you can offer your customers, and by setting up a network, you’re able to track the number of customers who check-in to your restaurant. One super idea is to even set up a contest that rewards the most frequently visiting customer.

Just like simply setting up Social Media profiles is not enough for Social Media Marketing success, simply setting up amazing, unique contests will do you no justice. You must promote your restaurant marketing strategies and contests everywhere possible on the net, and most definitely promote them from within your restaurant for viral success.

These were just my top 5 ideas, but what strategies are you using to drive traffic to your restaurant? If they are not working consider using these 5 quick steps.