Spend your marketing budget wisely Restaurant (Part 2)

In my previous article I said that the marketing strategies that have worked for me when I bought my restaurant. (My energy and the will to continue to try to get them to work beyond my experience of marketing - which cost me a lot of wasted money).

Now let me tell you the changes I made after having lost money as a result of these strategies, and the impact that these changes led to the restaurant.

My first move was to seek a new service coupons. By the way, I am a strong supporter of vouchers as a means of bringing new people in a restaurant, since they are very measurable. You can only collect the coupons that bring visitors to your site and instantly know exactly how many new people have visited because the offer coupons. This allows you to measure whether the investment in a coupon program is worth it.

The problem I had with my previous company was not the coupon offers coupons themselves, but the public who have targeted.

You see, my restaurant was half-high level Italian place, and the company was targeting coupons for bargains, more interested in saving a few bucks on their meal, rather than having a great dining experience.

Suffice it to say that the other two restaurants in the package coupons were a sandwich and a pizza place! (Not that these restaurants have their place,. I was trying to target prospects interested in a higher caliber experience)

As you can imagine, these were not the type of clientele that I was trying to attract. Usually came to eat the dish cheaper than if we had, only drank tap water for free - then used the coupon to get the discount (not to return until it has received the next coupon).

It is really exciting stuff.

Coupons may work for some institutions, if you have a fast food restaurant where high volume is more important than the quality of the meals, then it can be effective. However, it certainly has not worked for us: a small place where people spend two or three hours talking over dinner.

So after some research, I found a company that delivered exactly what I was looking for. They should be targeted to clients who wanted to bring in prospects

The company name is RSVP. They target homeowners upper-middle class (who have their own mailing database specialist). RSVP email beautiful, professionally made decks of cards with 4 x 6 color postcards heavy paper able to impress the markets.

The delivery was scheduled for once per quarter, and each time the dispatch went out, we saw hundreds of people who come to our restaurant with the cards / coupons. Not only that, we made a good profit - even after the discount (we have offered a discount of 15%).

We could see immediately that this system worked!

By the way, I want to mention here that I prefer to offer a percentage discount for the discount, rather than a clear voice as a means to attract new customers. The reason is: if the total discount is equal to a large amount of dollars, this means they have spent a lot of money and still profit (as the server because the tips are usually added before the discount).

A standard discount rate may be even easier to manage, instead of having to do with the terms and conditions for supply of free articles (with variables such as:? He wants to enter your special day is expensive to terms of order entré salad as well?).

Now, what is a good percentage off? The answer depends on how much profit you get from each of your customers.

You need to make the numbers, but you should get 25% or more profit from each client. So even if you offer a discount of 15% is still doing a minimum of 10% profit from every coupon-holding visitors.

It may not sound like much, but remember that the idea is not to use these coupons as the only way to fill your place:

You must use these coupons to bring new customers who will be so thrilled with the experience that you will become regular customers.

This is what your goal should use coupons.

So now I had the coupon system up and running - now what?

I still need to bring more customers, so I started thinking about other companies and industries that had other types of clients I wanted to address?

I realized that there were many other businesses that cater to the public the same income I wanted. So this is what I did:

I asked the owners of these companies above for a free meal at my house (this strategy is best delivered in person, as it establishes a personal relationship with these people will open the door to cooperation much faster).

I wanted to try my restaurant for themselves, and offer them a deal that would benefit both of us.

When I explained my proposal, they could not refuse because their activities would also benefit from my offerings to their existing customers. This was a win / win situation for both of us. (In my seminar, I give you all the information about what to offer to make them accept and send more of their existing customers).

So I had my good and I had my joint venture with other business owners in place - now what? This enough?

When I started analyzing my current customer base, I realized that 80% of my clients came through references or as walk-ins (because they happened to see the restaurant and liked the look of it ).

I thought: "Talk about a waste of marketing dollars - so many thousands spent on Yellow Pages, newspaper and magazine ads to bring in only a very small percentage of the total traffic through the doors!"

It would not make sense, I think, for me to redirect my efforts to create a formalized system of reference that could bring in ten times more people, ten times more quality people than any ad that I had spent money?

Referrals are perhaps the most powerful weapon I had in my marketing arsenal, but I was not using this strategy at all.

Of course, I probably already had an informal system of reference, where customers happy my restaurant recommended to their family and friends. But what I needed was to create a formal referral system managed.

Think about it: this marketing technique can be a cost-effective, efficient system. The five main advantages of using a formal system of reference as a marketing strategy:

1. It is very inexpensive to implement.
2. It brings the quality people that turn into customers (is not it?).
3. It gives you instant credibility (people trust their friends and colleagues much more than any leaflet brochure or ad that you can design).
4. It fills the restaurant with people who know other people, and therefore they will attend your business more often with the hope that they will meet their friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc.
5. It keeps the people who speak your place and then fresh in their minds.
(Again, in my seminar I will tell you how to implement a formal system of reference that will take a lot of new - and profitable - customer).

Based on the marketing knowledge I gained from the work I had in the IT industry, I know that there are only three ways to increase my activities:

1. Increase the number of customers who come to my business.
2. Increase the amount of money you spend on each visit.
3. Increase the frequency of their visits (number of times a month / year to dine at my house).

Attracting new customers is only one of three ways that you as a restaurant owner needs to boost your business (and it's not the best).

I understand that if I really wanted to grow my business, I needed to work on the three methods simultaneously. In this way, I would like to increase my earnings exponentially.

So this is what I did, and the results were surprising. I will discuss two other ways to increase the catering sector in the next newsletter.

I hope this information was useful to you.

Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any comments or questions for me.

Happy sailing,
Jose L Riesco

Riesco Consulting and Marketing.

Restaurant Marketing Strategies Seminar ......