Recession-Proof Restaurant Marketing Plan (Musings On How To Drive Restaurant Sales When Food Is A Little Hard To Sell)

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Whenever you talk to a restaurant owner these days, it’s almost invariably a story of how hard it is to be in the restaurant business. And after a while, it may seem like restaurateurs have been dealt the worst possible deal.

Yet I’m here to say (and this may offend some restaurant owners reading this) that us the foodservice folks had it relatively easy when it comes to restaurant marketing, in comparison to many other industries.

(Please read on before you get all pissy with me; I promise to give you something very profound today, a restaurant marketing approach nobody ever shared with you.)

Let’s do a little experiment. (You can do it in your head. Or you’re welcome to try it out in real life.)

Imagine: You’re at a party and someone is asking what you do. You have to scream the answer to be heard over the loud music. And as you open your mouth, the band suddenly stops playing and everybody gets to hear it as you yell out:

“I SELL IN-SU-RANCE!”

Whoops… You probably have never seen the room clear so fast.

A very similar reaction could be expected if you decided to pose as a used car salesperson, realtor, mortgage broker, or lawyer.

Now, what if your answer was, “I run a restaurant”?

People would react to this a lot more favorably. Some would actually approach you to introduce themselves and ask about the type of cuisine you offer, the hours of operation, and the location of your restaurant.

What does this all have to do with restaurant marketing?

See, many professionals had a very hard time selling their services even in a good economy. Your food has suddenly become harder to sell. Well, wouldn’t it make sense to:

Learn from the best who know how to sell what’s hard to sell!

If you observe the most successful insurance agents, used car salespeople, realtors, mortgage brokers and lawyers, you’ll notice that all of them do the following three things:

1. They hustle to get new business;
2. They invest in the relationships with their clients and prospects;
3. They implement formal and deliberate referral systems.

New times require new approaches. And the biggest breakthroughs are going to come from “stealing” successful marketing methods from outside the restaurant business.

You could be saying now, “But most restaurants don’t do this type of marketing!”

Heck, yeah!

That’s the point.