Top Five Restaurant Marketing Tips

by Liz Lombardo-Stark

As the Director of Marketing and Public Relations at Gibsons Restaurant Group, my team and I are always thinking of ways to market our restaurants to potential customers. We believe in utilizing the people and resources around us to help achieve our goals. Here are a few tips to help your business get started.

Make Sure the Customer Leaves Happy

This is one of the first things we teach during training when someone joins our company, do whatever you can to ensure that the customer leaves happy.  We teach our servers to give fast, efficient service with a lot of personality.  When a customer has an enjoyable dining experience chances are they are going to tell their friends and family about it.  Word of mouth is still one of the best ways to get your name out there in a positive way.

Acknowledge Mistakes…and Fix Them!

Sometimes things don’t go our way! We’ve all been there: a server has a bad night, a customer has to wait too long for a table or the food just doesn’t come out the way we intended. It happens….now fix it! This is one of the areas that we work extremely hard at. When a customer doesn’t have a great experience at one of our restaurants we track them down and do whatever we can to get them back into the restaurant to try again. Most customers are grateful to have their complaint heard and the situation rectified.

Make Social Media Your Focus

Leverage the power of social media by posting frequently, using quality images, and creating brand guidelines to ensure consistency. It’s essential to engage with your customer whether it’s in the restaurant or on social media so take the time to like and respond to their comments online. Working with local social influencers can also help to expand your brand among different markets. Great photographs go a long way and can be utilized on social media, your website and for press requests. Invest in professional photography; it makes a difference!

Utilize your Employees as Brand Ambassadors

We have a wide range of employees with a variety of backgrounds and skill sets but they all share one thing in common; they are proud of where they work. We ask our employees to support us on our social media channels and “share, like, tweet” all of the restaurant news and happenings with their friends, family and social networks.

Know Your Diners

Instead of copying and pasting ideas or promotions that work for other establishments, it’s best to tailor all of your marketing efforts to your target demographic. Get to know your customers so you can better understand their needs and desires and customize your efforts based on their feedback. Whether this means a more convenient carry-out experience, Happy Hour deals to suit your neighborhood, lunch promos, social media contests, etc, resonating with the customers will keep them coming back. Easy methods to gather this feedback include: staying on top of reputation management review sites, exporting demographic data from sites like OpenTable and Venga and the best way — speaking directly to the customers!