Restaurant Marketing Ideas to Help You Reach your Marketing Goals
Whether you promote your restaurant yourself or use an outside agency to handle your restaurant marketing efforts, you still need campaign ideas, specific goals to reach, and quality marketing materials to get it all done. In this post I'll give you some creative marketing ideas, suggest hosted events, and give you access to quality marketing materials that you can put to good use in print marketing, social media marketing, 4-walls marketing, and more creative restaurant marketing campaign ideas.
Creative Restaurant Marketing Ideas
2024 has started and to keep your restaurant in the minds of your local audience this year we look ahead at what 2024 has to offer. It's important to keep promoting the restaurant to stay ahead of local competition. Even if your restaurant has hit record volumes, consistent promotion will keep you from hitting a lull in the middle of season. Let's dive into some creative ways to promote your restaurant using the best restaurant marketing strategies like direct mail, social media, email/sms marketing. Let's get planning...
Direct Mail Marketing with the United States Postal Service
Direct mail marketing is a form of print advertising that involves sending promotional materials to potential customers through the mail. This can be in the form of postcards, coupon booklets, letters, menus and more. Take a look at these restaurant direct mail ideas you can implement this year.
Tips for Restaurant Direct Mail Marketing to get the Best Results
When you decide to spend money to print the mailer, pay postage and deliver your restaurant promotion it is best to include an offer they can't refuse. You don't want your mail piece to end up in the back of the junk drawer waiting to expire. The goal is for your restaurant mailer to grab their attention and get them to act on it, and to do that you need to use a great deal or discount offer. Here are some great ideas:
- Free Appetizer or Dessert
- 20% or more check discount
- BOGO deals
- Offers to specific groups or individuals to recognize
Social Media Marketing for Restaurants
Social Media Marketing is an important part of restaurant marketing. Setting Social Media goals to Increase brand awareness, Manage your restaurant's reputation, Increase traffic to your website, Improve engagement, Boost conversions or sales, Deliver customer service, Gain market insights with social listening, and Attract candidates for open positions.
Here are some Social Media Marketing Campaigns for your Restaurant:
- Highlight some of your menu items and runs discounts or promotions
- Ask customers to share pictures of their dining experience. Print QR codes making it easy for customers to check in on social media, share pictures, and post reviews.
- Ask your chef to share some favorite recipes on Social Media in honor of National food days or ask your followers to post their favorite recipe as a contest and select the best to run as a special then reward the winner by giving them the special for free. You can also do the same with cocktail recipes just ask your Bartender to help create the best.
- Ask followers to vote in a poll, for example January is National Soup Month, ask your follows to vote for their favorite soup, then use the results to run a special Soup Du Jour.
- To extend your reach to more customers get your followers to share your posts, to do this post a request asking your followers to share the post and/or tag a friend. This is easy on National Holidays like National Sean Day, National Stacy Day, or Veterans Day, Mother's Day or even Grandparents Day.
Restaurant Marketing with Email and SMS
Gathering customers contact information is actually rather easy for restaurants and bars. Your customers want to hear from you. Having a Loyalty Program or a list of VIPs makes this process simple. You can also get contact information using your Free WIFI Service by setting up a landing page for log in information. Once you have an email or phone number you can use this to stay on the minds of your customers with:
- Birthday Cards
- Anniversary Cards
- Weekly Specials
- Hosted Events
- Seasonal Menu Items
- Happy Hour Promotions
It's important to make sure you don't abuse this privilege, only send out messages that you believe they will want to see.
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