5 Things To Prepare for A Restaurant Marketing Campaign

Planning to start a marketing campaign for your restaurant to boost customer acquisition? Here are 5 ideas to promote your restaurant. But before you start marketing efforts for your restaurant, here are 5 things to research and have in mind to make your restaurant’s promotions more successful.

5 things to research for your restaurant’s marketing

1. Know your cost and profit margins
2. Understand your target demographic
3. Set a budget
4. Research your competitors
5. Get a food photographer

Know your cost and profit margins

Having a clear understanding of cost and profit margins of your menu items helps you in your decision making on what menu items on your menu you should use in your marketing campaign.

In general, you should try to promote your restaurant using dishes that have a high profit margins. For example, instead of giving away free sides to all your customers with no terms and conditions, you could give those who spend above a certain amount freebies, or only to those who ordered a certain dish you want to promote, like giving away fries for those who ordered your latest beef burger.

Understand your target demographic

Does your restaurant attract younger or senior customers? Are your restaurant’s customers big spenders or looking for quick and value for money food? Are you customers tech savvy and active on social media?

These are some of the questions you could ask yourself when planning your restaurant’s marketing campaign that will give you more ideas and direct your restaurant marketing efforts towards your target customers.

Set a budget, choose a suitable advertising channel

Running promotions often requires advertising to reach more people. There are multiple platforms that your restaurant can use to advertise promotions. Choosing which platform to use should be dependent on whether it is popular with your target customers, and also budget.

For example, if your target audience is young, tech savvy and your restaurant is on a tight budget,  you may consider using  social media to advertise your restaurant’s promotions due to its low cost and potential reach to target customers.

Research your competitors

Always keep a look out for your competitors’ activities. This is to get a better understanding and direction that your promotion campaign to head towards. For example, if your competitors are giving away freebies, you may not want to do the exact same thing.

Instead you might come up with your own promotions or wait till theirs is over to differentiate your restaurant brand from your competitors.

Get a food photographer

As the quote says: "Pictures speak a thousand words.”

Pictures of your dishes is how your customers get a preview of your menu. Ever seen images of a delicious looking steak thinking: "that looks so good I have to try” and then proceeding to google the restaurant’s menu?

That is the kind of reaction you want to get from your target audience when running a promotion.

Thus, you should get a food photographer to capture high quality images of dishes to use in your menu and promotions on social media that will whet the appetite of your customers to garner interest.

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