Starting, Owning and Marketing A Restaurant Blog|Starting and Owning a Restaurant - Construction, Planning, Marketing, Opening and Managing a New Restaurant

The majority of money invested in the stock market looks at the long term rather than overnight profits. Yes, there are day traders that try to bet on trends that impact some stocks on a short term basis. They get in and out quickly, but the big investors, mutual funds, pension funds, institutional investors and most wealth accumulators look at years and months rather than days or weeks.

Restaurant marketing is an investment that can return short term returns and long term results. You have to choose what motivators you use according to the results you want to achieve. There are extremes that are common in both short and long term investments. For instance, if you look at Denny’s breakfast giveaway program in the first part of this year, they gave away their food and had lines around their operations waiting for a free meal. Traffic was driven to their stores, but long term results haven’t stopped their same store sales from declining.

On the other extreme,  long term marketing programs take months and/or years to effectively get results. An example of a long term strategy may be email marketing. As your email list grows, so do the customer responses to simple programs. If you offer a birthday dinner as a motivator, your guest will bring in his birthday party of four or more people to celebrate, but the real return takes constant list building that creates loyalty to your brand.

Somewhere in between the long growth approach and the quick freebie schemes are marketing programs like community involvement, direct mail, special events and social marketing through Internet sites.

When developing your marketing plan for a new restaurant, you should try to look at all the options, but remember there is a price to pay in real dollars and time to implement many strategies. Restaurateurs generally wear so many management and time eating hats that time becomes as precious as any other asset.

In the case of our new restaurant, we can see our long term strategies just now beginning to pay big rewards as the industry has struggled in this recession. Couponing and discounting has had a very low priority for us. Building quality and customer service along with guest loyalty has been our restaurant marketing program from our January opening. We are on target to meet our goal of $650,000 in sales by year end.