All Entries Tagged With: "Restaurant Marketing"
Simple Tips On How To Grow A Restaurant VIP Club
It just hurts me to see restaurants to not be able to grow their VIP Club membership as fast as they could. Having experienced a sluggish growth of their membership, or no growth for a long time, many restaurant owners abandon the whole idea of VIP Club. Almost always, prematurely. Which is sad. Because there [...]
5 Key Principles Of Restaurant Marketing
1. Marketing has to pay for itself (it’s never an expense, it’s an investment) The whole idea of a “marketing budget” is wrong. Most restaurants define it as a percentage of their sales. Wrong, wrong, wrong! If you had a reliable and proven way of investing $20 and getting back $30, how many of these [...]
Marketing A Restaurant In December (So As It’d Stay Busy Through January)
You know how it typically goes… You get a swarm of people before the holidays. They come in, they celebrate the jolly festivities, they eat and drink and swipe their credit cards. Then the dreadful January rolls in. Customers retreat to their caves and roll a big stone to block the entrance. They are gone [...]
Recession-Proof Restaurant Marketing Plan (Musings On How To Drive Restaurant Sales When Food Is A Little Hard To Sell)
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) [...]
Little Johnny, Restaurant Marketing, and Fed Bailout Package
Our educational system does a poor job of preparing Little Johnny to become a successful restaurant owner. Little Johnny gets a good mark every time he gives a memorized answer (the only possible “correct” answer) to the teacher’s question. Little Johnny doesn’t get a good mark for asking the right question in the first place. [...]
Marketing A Restaurant In A Slow Economy (part deux)
This is the second article in the series on how to market a restaurant during the economic slow-down and what a successful concept like Olive Garden does to grow when almost everybody else is shrinking. Loosely based on the information revealed in their Q1 2009 conference call. 4. Expand into new markets. Olive Garden has [...]
Marketing A Restaurant During The Economic Slow-Down: 5 Surprising Restaurant Marketing Lessons From Olive Garden (Darden Restaurants)
A quick story today with a critical take-away for your restaurant business, and an important announcement at the end. Onwards to a story… Last week I decided to pop in on the Darden Restaurants shareholder conference call. When a company like this is sharing what they do and why, and what they see going on [...]
Grand Opening? Soft Opening?
Lori, a reader from Florida, says she’s opening a restaurant (congratulations!) and asks this: “What is the best to open this restaurant? Grand opening or soft? Have heard arguments for both…” Well, let’s see… The arguments for either one are missing the point. It’s not one versus the other. Doing just the soft opening is [...]
Restaurant Coupon Marketing: The 2-For-1 Deal Is Dead
Restaurant coupons are a double-edged sword. Used the right way, they can get you a swarm of new guests. Used the wrong way, they will train your existing customers never to buy your food without a discount. You can hardly surprise anyone with a 2-for-1 deal these days. You can hardly entice them either. A [...]
D.I.Y. Restaurant Marketing Research
We took them to the water. We wanted to see if they would drink. The first “beta tester” group of restaurant owners and managers had completed Week 1 of our Instant V.I.P. Clubs program and we were keeping out fingers crossed hoping the aha‘s, the revelations, and the excitement that had come out during the [...]
