How to Promote Your Bar or Restaurant Online

Managing a restaurant is by definition difficult because you are dealing with food and people, a critical combination knowing how sensitive people are about their food.

The success of an establishment depends entirely on the restaurant manager who wears a great deal of hats on any given day: Accountant, Purchasing Director, Sales Manager, Human Resource Administrator, Coach, etc.

The greatest challenges that restaurant managers face stem from the very tight margins restaurants generally operate and include trained staff retention and kitchen waste minimization.

Another challenge every restaurant faces is how to get people into the dining room. Restaurant marketing is very difficult and there is a great deal of debate over which type of advertising is most effective.

Newspaper ads have lost their effectiveness because not many people even read the paper any more. Television ads are very expensive and don’t necessarily reach the people you are after. Direct mail is one of the best options along with door to door circulars. Those will at least find their way into the hands of people who are close to your restaurant.

Having a marketing plan is one of the keys to running a successful business. A good marketing plan will put more attention on ways to increase the number of returning customers instead of ways to bring new ones. Here are a couple of methods you can consider applying in your workplace if you are a restaurant manager or owner.

1. Keep in touch regularly with your clients

Email marketing can be a tricky proposition. Emails and e-newsletters are a great way to engage with your diners. However, people are very unforgiving and tend to flag the sender’s address as spam if the content is not useful or interesting to them. For your email marketing campaigns to be truly effective, they must be managed properly and conducted in a professional manner.

Build your own mailing lists with capture forms

Email addresses can be collected either on your website or at the table. All email addresses should be collected ethically, and list members should have been given the option to opt in.

You should create an opt-in form on your website so that visitors to your site can sign up for promotions. Having your own opt in mailing list provides you with a highly targeted and potentially very profitable resource of subscribers. You will use a capture form to harvest the email addresses on your website, or at the table. Typically, it should include a field for name and email address that visitors can complete, as well as a tick box that they tick in order to receive further communication from you.

In exchange for their details you will need to provide something of value to your readers. Simply asking for a name and email address is unlikely to yield any positive results. Email newsletters and meal deals, are among the more popular and often beneficial methods of capturing details. All correspondence to list members should also include the option to quickly and easily opt out of future communication.

Practical aspects of email marketing

Now that your mailing list is ready, you can go ahead and send your regular weekly or monthly newsletter. Industry testing suggests that newsletters sent in the middle of the week around 2-3pm have higher open rates.

Useful Content

Before you start drafting your marketing emails or newsletter, ask yourself what you want to get out of this campaign. Is it customer retention, diner loyalty, brand awareness, etc.? Your content should be short, sweet and personal. Give your diner a reason to read on and click the voucher links you have embedded in the email.

Case-Study: Pizza Express Newsletters are a great example of a successful email marketing campaign. Each newsletter is designed on a unique format using colour blocks and pictures of happy diners. The embedded voucher links are located at the centre of the newsletter. The content is seasonal and synthetic, which incentivizes us to read through the entire email.

2. Drive guests through your door with Special Offers

With the VAT up, consumers are on the lookout for voucher codes to spice up their shopping & dining experiences. As a restaurateur, promoting special offers on websites such as Voucher Codes or sending voucher codes in your e-newsletter can significantly turn your business around in these lean times.
A great voucher code combines all the ingredients for the savvy diner –the thrill of the chase, the feeling that s/he has somehow ‘won one over’ the retailer, and a lasting feeling of brand loyalty that comes with having secured a good bargain.

Will Groupon Work for your Business?

The attraction of increased foot traffic from collective buying sites, such as Groupon , Crowdity or Living Social can be hard to resist for small businesses. But is it a viable marketing venture for your business?

The Campaign:
You offer a scalable number of gift certificates redeemable at your restaurant at a significant discount –usually around 40% to 50%. The offer is valid if the target number of certificates sold has been reached.

The Cost:
Groupon, for example, takes a 50% cut of each voucher. Remember that you are already selling a good or service at half its original price. Measure the profit margin you are making on each meal deal against the price you are paying Groupon per deal. This metric evaluates the profitability of a Groupon promotional campaign for your business.

The Coupon-a-holic:
Groupon will drive through your door a pool of price-conscious customers who tend not to order anything beyond what is part of the deal. Another metric to consider when making your decision is the conversion rate of a coupon-holder into a returning diner. Unfortunately, Groupon has not published the average return rate for Groupon buyers who redeem their vouchers. However, it is safe to assume that once the coupon no longer exists, neither does the interest in your restaurant.

Tips for running a Groupon deal:

Should you decide to go ahead with Groupon, do keep the following in mind:

a) Offer deals only on days and during hours where your restaurant is slow and only on items on which you have a high profit margin.
b) Train your staff in capturing your coupon holders’ details at the table. Use those details to create a targeted coupon holders’ list. Give them a reason to return with vouchers embedded in your regular e-newsletter.
c) Train your staff in selling adds-on.

Do you own or manage a restaurant? Find out how Bullseyehub is already helping venues and promoters to better promote their events. Get in touch with a member of our team to find out more or book a free demo!