subject: 1 Tip To Grow New York City Restaurant/bar In A Recession [print this page] Advertise, advertise, advertise (smartly)
The Restaurant and Bar business is doing well in New York, but with the downpour of competitors and the downturn in the economy it has adversely affected restaurant businesses to a great extent. It has become crucial that you advertise and market your restaurant so that people who are ignorant come to know about your place and visit it. If your objective is footfalls, youve got to have a full-fledged promotional strategy. The solution to this particular quandary is advertising, to be more precise advertising smartly. You got to know your target audience, their requirement. The USP of your product has to be highlighted because USP [unique selling proposition] is the one factor which would help you get extensive footfalls to your restaurant.
PRINT ADVERTISING
It is very important that your target audience has the name of your restaurant saved in their memory. For this simple reason, it is important to advertise your restaurant consistently, so that your target knows the place. Ultimately, the food and the quality service is what matters, but for the first impression advertising is very important. It is aptly said that out of sight, out of mind. It holds true for your restaurant business also, because if people do not hear about your name or do not see it at regular durations, they tend to forget the name.
Hence, advertising becomes important when you want your brand to rise above the noise. With the extensive usage of internet and the increase in its popularity time and now, online advertising on travel portals, blogs, posts, forums, etc. would be a fantastic way to increase brand awareness in a cost friendly manner.
Now, print advertising particularly newspaper advertising may eat up a major percentage of your advertising budget, so it becomes important that you find out more of cost effective way to advertise your product to the core with less expenditure. When it comes for a media plan, the account executive of your ad agency can be exploited to the core. You can negotiate with him on various barter deals, discount offers, bonus spaces, sponsorships, special rates to get the most cost friendly media budget. You can also go for tie ups with radio channels on advertising your restaurant and giving free gift vouchers, discount vouchers as contest prizes etc.
One of the cheaper and effective ways of advertising your web site smartly is consistent appearance on social and business networking sites like face book, twitter, linked-in and on blogs, forums, post related to hotels. Even email marketing to a database of customers could be a cheaper way of marketing. When doing email marketing one thing has to be kept in mind that spamming or unethical marketing should never be considered as it creates a negative effect on the image of the restaurant.
The most interactive ways of reaching directly to your consumers pocket would be sms based interactive advertising. You can create a application of your restaurant and the customer simply has to download it on his/her mobile phones and then get instant access to the special offers, discounts, happy hours etc., relative information direct on his mobile screen. You can also push mobile coupons, alerts, gift coupons to your database of opted in potential clients or existing ones.
Always, remember that if you are not going to give your customer what he or she wants, then there are loads of others to offer that to them, so in recession time pull your socks, and do not under estimate your competitors. Take the early bird advantage.
Advertise your brand & advertise it smartly, and yes surely allocate a certain budget for print advertising, but at the same time advertise smartly with the use of other media vehicles like radio, online marketing, sms based interactive marketing, special events etc. to get the best return on your investment.
