Restaurant Marketing Blog

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Restaurant Marketing: More and more restaurants are putting up little signs in their washrooms about Flu reminders—wash your hands religiously and sneeze into your shoulder or inner elbow. A lot of restaurants now have separate towel dispensers to use for opening the washroom doors.

Putting these reminders up is a good idea and shows you care.

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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

For all the buzz around using social media like Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools for restaurants, a recent study by Chalkboard.com indicates the majority of restaurants aren’t catching on.  Establishments in three major urban centers, New York, San Francisco, and Portland, OR were surveyed about their internet and social media marketing strategies.

The results are interesting, and definitely surprising.  Some highlights:

While about 80% of restaurants in New York and Portland have a website, only about 50% of restaurants in San Francisco do.  This is especially surprising when you consider the fact that San Francisco is home to Silicon Valley, the cradle of the internet.  I wonder if the dominance of Yelp, which calls San Francisco home, has preempted restaurants from developing their own website.  Yelp is used in San Francisco more than any other city.

Under 10% of restaurants in any of these three cities uses Facebook or Twitter.  The vast majority of restaurants in three of the most tech-savvy cities in the country aren’t using social media to market to customers, despite the mountains of press about the benefits of doing so.  I can only imagine what the percentages of social media marketing restaurants are in other areas of the country.

So what is the disconnect between people who write about the food service industry (including me) and the people who actually work in the food service industry?  Are restaurants unaware of the benefits of social media marketing?  Unwilling to invest in social media marketing?  Unconvinced of the benefits of social media marketing?

As I have said previously on this blog, the beauty of social media marketing is the only it costs you is time.  Granted, as a busy restaurateur, time is also a very precious commodity.  But when you think about the very real dollars you must spend to advertise in traditional channels like radio, print, etc., and when you take into account how easy it is to measure the success of a social media campaign, the reasons for not utilizing social media become few indeed.

Note: This post was written by Greg McGuire who blogs about the foodservice industry at The Back Burner, which is written by the employees of Tundra Specialties, a company specializing in restaurant supplies and food service equipment.

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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Restaurant Marketing: Quick-service restaurants tend to think of the drive-thru as one area or “zone”—but it isn’t. Any drive-thru is actually comprised of many different customer operating zones. By clearly understanding each zone and how customers interact within a particular zone, drive-thru restaurants can develop merchandising and communications strategies that make the customer experience faster, easier, and more enjoyable. The right message in the right zone can maximize ticket, throughput, and margin while creating a distinct and competitive brand.

Check out this opportunity to attend a unique webinar on Drive-Through Zone Merchandising.

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Friday, September 18, 2009

Restaurant Marketing: Millions of restaurants are reportedly going to fail next year. Why? Because you can’t stand behind a counter or in the kitchen waiting for more guests to come in.

Doing that is part of the “lazy marketing method” that restaurant operators believed was the key to success. Build it and they will break the doors down. If you’re too lazy to promote your business and make connections, then save yourself a whole lot of money and close down and do something else. That’s called brutal honesty.

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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Restaurant Marketing: The CiCi’s Pizza restaurant marketing gurus have launched a tv campaign featuring their own version of the $5 value meal. The promotion demonstrates the merits of their 25 foot long pizza buffet versus the $5 burger or sub sandwich.(Brandweek) Will they get the return on their investment from this program?

It’s easy to pitch a $5 value meal. Where the big challenge comes in is providing the guest with a great experience that he/she talks about, remembers and then returns ... and finds such a value in the experience, that if the “value meal” was priced at $8 then there would be no hesitation in buying it.

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