Changing Your Restaurant Marketing is Difficult

I’ve just read another great blog from Seth Godin called:”Priming the pump of efficiency”. You can read it here:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/priming-the-pump-of-efficiency.html

Basically Seth states that changes are difficult and often involve an initial setback before they produce the desired outcome. Have you heard the saying: “Things will get worse before they get better”?

This is what Seth is talking about.

For example, if you change from your old manual booking system to a new computerized one, you will probably run into initial setup and learning issues. Your staff will complain about having to learn yet another system, you will sometimes get lost and blaming the new system when something doesn’t work as you expect, etc.

However, after a while, you will be able to do things that you couldn’t do before with your old system such as printing profiled lists of your customers, or just emailing them to notify about a special event or promotion, etc.

The same thing applies to your restaurant marketing. You are very familiar and comfortable with the traditional marketing venues: ads in newspapers and magazines, coupon books with discounts, ads in Yellow pages, etc. However, these traditional marketing vehicles are slowly dying and extinguishing, just like the dinosaurs, and you are probably wasting your marketing budget on them.

You see? Your customers are now mainly looking online. They don’t open Yellow Books anymore. If they want to go to a restaurant, they browse the Web and read restaurant reviews from other customers. They look at restaurant websites to get a feeling for the place. They read the online menus to see if they like them, and check prices to see if they can afford it. They are, most likely, also making reservations online right there in the restaurant websites that have an online booking option. Do your website has one?

So what are you doing about it? If your answer is nothing, then you better start thinking about moving your marketing online, fast. Your competitors are surely doing it...

Once you make your mind and start marketing online, tweeting your specials and promotions, creating a Facebook page to share with your clients, making your website attractive, and specially useful, to your prospects and clients, you will probably see that it will take a while before you can harvest the results of your initial investment.

But make no mistake. You can’t just afford to ignore moving most of your marketing online. Not only is much more efficient and inexpensive than your traditional printed marketing, it is also “trackable”. You should always invest in marketing that you can track and test.

And if there is any final doubt, the World Wide Web is the place where most of your clients are now. You must also be there if you want to reach them!

Happy marketing,

Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.
www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

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