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

We are in the midst of building our social marketing blog for the new restaurant. The basic structure can be viewed at Maggie’s City Center. While the design, colors and other aesthetics may be slowly tweaked, the elements are pretty much static.

Now is when the marketing begins along with the real value of maintaining the blog. Our plan will include;

• Getting content for the site by discussing it with individual customers as they come in. We want to get business people listed in the reference sections of the blog. The communication builds loyalty and establishes long term connections.
• The second step is to visit the municipal offices of each community listed to get the accurate contact names and numbers of key officials. We also want emergency numbers for services. Each of these visits will include dropping off some of our menus and encouraging the city staffs to join us for lunch or breakfast.
• Next we will target each of the social groups such as Rotary, Sertoma, Optimists and various other business associations to encourage them to get us their event and charitable activities posted to advertise their community efforts. Again, it gives us an opportunity to invite groups of people to our restaurant.
• Concurrent with the steps above we will invite public cultural centers and their members and/or staffs to participate. That includes art centers, marine preserves, wildlife societies and similar facilities to keep their activities in public view by giving us releases on their activities.
• Finally, we will visit individual businesses to encourage them to list their names, addresses and services in our “Yellow Pages” of local business people.

After we have started to collect enough content for the site to have value to our guests, we will begin an advertising campaign to drive traffic to the site. This will include flyers and handouts for each guest and an email to our marketing list of over 1600 opt-in email customers.

This is our answer to the social marketing initiative. It gives us the ability to reach a greater percentage of our customers and prospective customers. We are trying to build long term personal relationships, not just a brand.