Restaurant Marketing Faux Pas and How to Avoid Them

Restaurant owners are good at a great deal of things, yet they are rarely exceptional marketers. While organic, unsolicited word of mouth is an incredibly important element of marketing a restaurant, you can’t rely on it entirely if you want to create a successful venue, no matter how great the food you sell is. Take a look at some of the most disastrous marketing faux pas and discover how you can avoid them.

The first big, common marketing faux pas among restaurant owners was mentioned above- believing unsolicited word of mouth will drive your business to high profitability. If you want word of mouth to work for you, if you want a steady stream of referrals, then you need to ask for them directly. You can’t simply assume they will occur in the volume you require.

The second, enormous marketing faux pas in the restaurant business is assuming great food is all the marketing you need. People love great food, but unless you offer something different you won’t have a breakout success on your hands. Likewise, in your advertisements you can’t sell your restaurant according to how good it is, how high quality the food is, and how much people enjoy it. People tend to stick with what they like and already know, even if there’s a superior alternative out there. Instead, you need to market what makes your food DIFFERENT than your competition.

Finally, the biggest marketing faux pas performed by nearly every restaurant owner is failing to retain and actively solicit your best customers. If you have customers you love, who come in often, who are a joy to work with, and who spend a lot of money, then you need to actively encourage them to return as often as humanly possible!

5 Ways for Your Restaurant to Become More Profitable

More than just about any other form of business, restaurants are infamous for running on razor-thin margins. It’s for this reason that restaurants, more than any other establishment, must do whatever is necessary to consistently insure their profitability. Here are 5 simple ways you can make your restaurant more profitable, practically overnight.

1.       Train your staff better. Taking it as a given that your kitchen staff is already producing food at the highest possible level of quality, you need to focus your efforts on training your front of house to up sell- guiding your patrons to higher priced items and greater food volume. 

2.       Embrace gadgets. You don’t need us to tell you running a restaurant is a logistical nightmare. But by keeping up-to-date on gadgets and devices you’ll be able to take advantage of advances which allow you to measure and manage every element of your business with greater detail and control than ever before.

3.       Retain your best clients. This is a no-brainer, but it’s a practice so few restaurants actively pursue. By actively working to retain your best customers and encourage repeat visits you will essentially add a guaranteed level of income to your bottom line.

4.       Use the internet. Your restaurant needs to do more than simply post a website and consider its online work finished. Your restaurant needs to take advantage of social media, social networking, email marketing and mobile apps to increase its visibility and to encourage return visits.

5.       Multiply your streams of income. Most restaurants fail because they do one thing for money- they sell food and drinks. There are plenty of alternative methods of making money you can add on to your restaurant’s services, from catering to selling pre-cooked meals in local grocery stores.