5 Things Restaurants Need To Be Doing Right Now In Their Marketing – Restaurants are always a unique exception to marketing and advertising rules. They have the best customer loyalty and highest response on content. How so? You send a customer an email for a promotion available that day, just because they’ve been such a great customer.
The consumer sees the email and places the order because they love your food and now they can get a discount on it. Then probably the best part and the part that has other businesses literally jealous, the consumer goes around and asks friends and family if they want anything and once they get their food, they post in on social media so hundreds or thousands of their friends and family can see what they’re eating.
That’s really it, that’s all it really takes to get customers in the door now for restaurants, an email or social media post and you’ve got sales and potential new customers as well. Don’t you feel a bit jealous now yourself? 2020 has certainly hit the food service industry hard and many restaurants have had to shutdown permanently because of that.
It’s very unfortunate and many are blaming the pandemic and they should. However, you do have to ask the question what did those owners and managers do when the pandemic was here? Not when they were closed but when they were open, what was done to reach out to those customers?
5 Things Restaurants Need To Be Doing Right Now In Their Marketing
Some restaurants waited for their customers to come back or order takeout at least. They literally waited for the consumers to take the action which never works in marketing. You have to be proactive and part of the reason why these businesses went under is that they never had to do it before. Great locations, word of mouth and plenty of other reasons contributed to their success. But when times got tough, these businesses didn’t know what to do.
Other restaurants got aggressive with their marketing, accepting the limitations and challenges they would have to work with and focused on giving their consumers a reason to stay loyal. Social media ads instead of posts, daily emails instead of weekly emails, streaming tv ads and working with delivery companies allowed these businesses to stay open. Some still had to close and most are operating at 40%-50% of what they they normally see in revenue but they still got proactive.
Whether you manage or own a restaurant you have to ask yourself, is this the time to stick with what you always have done and wait to see what happens, or is the time to adapt? Adapt or die is a phrase commonly used and businesses are having to learn that this year. Hopefully, enough will adapt and be open to new ideas and new strategies, maybe not to thrive but simply to survive until we get back to a more normal life.