Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Restaurant Marketing: Take the lead of Southwest Airlines and provide your guests with an unexpected surprise.

Restaurant Marketing: Southwest just surprised and wowed their flying customers with a great gift. They made an announcement in the terminal that if you had a SW Visa credit card in your possession you received a gift—a $25 Southwest gift card for future travel. Just like that!

What a great surprise from the people who do it the best...Southwest.

Have you surprised your guests recently with something they didn’t expect? Have you given them something to talk about? If Southwest can do it (and give away $25) you sure can too. Show your “luv” to your guests and they’ll keep coming back.

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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Restaurant Marketing: From our recent workshop in New Orleans, “How To Outwit, Outsell & Outlast the Competition.”

Restaurant Marketing: From our recent workshop in New Orleans, “How To Outwit, Outsell & Outlast the Competition,” the two words that seem to have been ingrained in those attending—Fascinating and Engaging. Are you fascinating? Do you engage with your guest? Can your guest engage with you, your restaurant, your product, your story, your community efforts?

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Friday, November 14, 2008

Restaurant Marketing: Follow these 9 restaurant marketing and hospitality steps to ensure you’ll still be standing after the dust settles.

1. Your Menu--
Is your menu—the best sales tool you have—designed to generate the highest profits possible? Or, are you continuing to sell low profit products that should be making more money? Analyze your complete menu right now. From my experience, a proper analysis of your menu has the potential to increase your profits 15% to 35%.

2. Your People--
Is your staff on your bandwagon? Explain to them that you are building a hospitality organization that’s going to survive these times. Are they on board? If not, get rid of them. You can’t afford to have a dissenter on your staff.

Allocate some of your advertising dollars into hiring great people and build a championship team that’s going to help you navigate these tough waters.

3. Your Differentiation, Your Story, Your Value--
Do you have a differentiation or value story to tell people? If you do, people will remember you and talk about you. If you don’t … they’ll forget about you and visit the restaurants they do remember. We all remember our bed time stories don’t we? Give your guests the “materials” they need to go out and “sell” for you and be your “marketing ambassadors.”

4. Your Connections--
Be the mayor. I’ve talked about this for 20 years. The major chains are losing their shirts right now because they invested their dollars in TV and radio, rather than in nurturing connections. Put your time and energy in developing relationships within your community. The only cost is your time.

5. Your Meeting Place--
Make your restaurant a headquarters – a meeting place. Find out what clubs are in your area … car clubs, business clubs, sport teams … and offer your facilities to meet.

6. Your Personality--
Get in front of people and be the face of the restaurant. Speaking in front of a 100 people is worth more (financially and in good will) than you can imagine.

7. Your Guests--
Your guests are the sole reason you exist in business. A lot of restaurants have forgotten that. So, make your guests feel important. Ask them for feedback. Ask them “how can you help them.” And, ask them why they chose to dine with you rather than competition.

8. Your Wow--
Everything you do, everything the guest sees about you, your restaurant, your menu, your food presentation, your greetings, your landscaping, your washroom, your lobby area, must be remarkable. If it’s mediocre, you’re just “another restaurant blending into the wall.”

9. Develop A Written Sales-Building Plan--
Ideas are a dime a dozen and don’t mean anything if they remain stored in your head and are part of the “I’ll get to it later” mental list. Write down what you want to achieve restaurant and by when ... and what it’s going to take to get you there.

From this, develop a three to six month sales-building plan. Get everyone’s (your whole staff’s) feedback and get them to “buy into” the program. And finally, get someone to hold you accountable for getting the plan done, because you will get stopped and revert back to the comfort zone of dealing with minutia and firefighting.

Having a written plan and having someone to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you implement the plan will make you “Unstoppable.”

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Helpful “Recession Proof” Restaurant Video Resources--

Menu Engineering Video CD: The 3-Part Menu Masters Engineering Course & How To Engineer Your Menu And Increase Your Profits 3 to 35%.

How To Recession Proof Your Restaurant Video CD: A 6 Point Game Plan + Bonus 116 page Book, “Wow! How To Win The Battle For Dining Dollars.”

For info on both of these , click on: Restaurant Recession Video CDs.

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Sunday, November 09, 2008

Restaurant Marketing: The Real Perception of Guest Value

Restaurant Marketing: There’s a big difference between what you as a restaurateur perceive as value and what a guest perceives as value. Just recently, our family of three dined at Schianno’s in Raleigh. We had 2 pizza slices, 1 kids pasta, 2 soft drinks, 3 salads for a total of $30. 

With just average tasting pizza and average service, there was little value here for my money. I felt we could have gotten a better value for the $40 by going elsewhere.  The dining experience was little value for the money spent. 

Technorati Tags: Restaurant Marketing Pizza Marketing

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