An Easy Recipe

It's so tough to be in business these days that it can be especially difficult to create a competitive edge for your organization. The food and beverage industry is probably the most competitive and advocates additional challenges to the restaurant promoter. How can you get a meaningful return on the major investments that you have made in the business? It's important not to get too bogged down with these particular thoughts and think that you have to spend large amounts of money on mainstream projects. Great results can often be achieved with less expense.

If you are a restaurant promoter, remember that the food and beverage industry is primarily in-place to pander to the most basic requirements of a human being. This means that any promotional efforts should always bear that in mind and not get too carried away with some of the loftier goals, ideas or concepts out there.

If you are trying to smooth out the peaks and troughs that a business normally suffers, try and convince guests to come in during non-peak times instead of peak. You can achieve this by giving them some kind of special certificate or other incentive and you might be able to balance your traffic better this way. Always track and test, however.

By joining the chamber of commerce or a local business group, you can take advantage of the significant networking capabilities they provide. Just think of the cross promotion when you come up with a social event of some kind. Be prepared to allocate a little bit more money to this and treat it as a significant loss leader. You will be exposing your product in great circles.

You do not have to have a direct return on your investment as a restaurant promoter right away, so if you get involved with the charity of your choice be prepared to eat your costs of food and other resources. Word-of-mouth is everything and if you publicize what you are doing adequately you will find that your marketing dollar goes a lot further this way than with traditional advertising.

Always try and retain contact information for your clients, so that you can compose an e-mail marketing campaign for future business. Once they agree to allow receipt of information from you, you can create an autoresponder system to send them a message before their birthday inviting them to come in. Remember that they will almost always bring friends and family along as well.

Try and expand your creative process and allocate time every week to brainstorming. Think of some public-relations stories and try and get these distributed to local media. If they are newsworthy they will attract column inches and over time this can be a whole lot more valuable, dollar for dollar than direct advertising.

A restaurant promoter would be forgiven for worrying about trying something new, but should also be aware that this business is exceptionally competitive.

Expert Jose L Riesco teaches the best methods for getting more visitors to your restaurant at www.myrestaurantmarketing.com. Discover a restaurant promoter here.