Monday, January 25, 2010

Online & traditional marketing for restaurants & takeaways

Marketing for restaurants & takeaways

Each week, E-creation produces a free marketing fact sheet for local businesses with traditional & digital marketing hints & tips. Today, we focus on restaurants & takeaways.

In the UK, food and drink spending outside of the home is close to £100,000,000. This represents a massive opportunity for growth & profit. However, thriving during times of economic difficulty requires simple, cost-effective marketing strategies that are proven to work. Marketing you restaurant or takwaway can be simply divided into four key areas:

• Passing trade
• Word of mouth
• Advertising & PR in the press
• The Internet & online marketing

Below, we have provided examples of specific, effective and quick to implement marketing to help grow your business. E-creation can help implement these as part of an overall strategy or on an individual basis. We can create a professional and unique website for your restaurant or takeaway for as little as £495. We can help with signage, design, logos, advertising, search engine optimization and social networking.

10 free marketing tips for restaurants & takeaway businesses:

  1. Have an easy-to-remember phone number. Simple yet effective!
  2. A portable folding sign that people have to walk around. It’s more effective at catching passing trade than in window marketing.
  3. Use Twitter to promote daily / weekly specials (done simply by sending a text) to achieve greater footfall & search engine rankings.
  4. Employ 3rd party marketing tools like TopTables for guaranteed bookings in slower periods of business using special offers.
  5. Create a Facebook group (it’s free!) for customers to upload photos, share experiences and do your marketing online for you.
  6. Include a photo gallery on website of famous clients (and keep a cheap digital camera on premises). Provides that ‘bling’ factor.
  7. Create an e-mail marketing database by offering a discount on first order / meal – and then communicate regularly by e-mail.
  8. Use the local press. Nurture your relationship with local press by offering ‘tasting’ evening – the PR can be invaluable.
  9. Most people eat out on their birthday – capitalize by using marketing database to ‘remind’ customers at appropriate moment.
  10. Use Royal Mail’s local leaflet drop service. It costs as little as £39 + VAT per 1,000 – that’s a lot of eyeballs for not much money.
So that’s 10 easy ways to increase turnover & profitability, as successfully used by 1000’s of UK restaurants & takeaways. There are many approaches to building business but often the simplest deliver results fastest & most effectively.

Click here for a printable PDF of our free marketing fact sheet for restaurants & takeaways.