How to promote a restaurant, hotel or venue?

So, you have arrived from our cleverly constructed marketing message, what next?

First – there is no catch. This is how marketing for a venue works today. It’s pretty complicated but we can manage that for you. Read the content below and then we can chat at the end.

We constantly research new marketing methods to promote a restaurant, hotel or venue.

We do this because, everything changes all the time.

As an example, just last year, some of our clients were generating tens or hundreds of thousands of claims for offers posted on Facebook, completely free of charge.

The free lunch wasn’t to last however, as this was a test by Facebook to establish the pricing and now the same results would would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds instead!

Extending your audience reach.

For many restaurants, the growth of their business depends on extending their reach.

Ten years ago, the only way to promote a restaurant, hotel or venue and extend your reach effectively, was by one of a few channels, namely PR, regional advertising or word of mouth. That has changed.

As we researched further, we discovered that there are new effective ways to extend reach.

Marketing methods used to extend the reach of a restaurant.

Local customers

As you can see above, generating local customers is still heavily dominated by direct marketing. This could mean any number of methods including leaflet drops, direct mail, local advertising, word of mouth and so on. The cost for promoting a restaurant, hotel or venue using these methods is typically low, though the audience is within a radius of the premises. Typically, a hotel would use local marketing for promoting functions or events, unless they have a public restaurant.

Regional Customers

As we move further away from our venue, email marketing comes into play. If we are capturing data correctly, this gives us an opportunity to engage with people who are not as close to us, cost effectively.

Another opportunity begins to arise in the form of social networks. Facebook offers the opportunity for us to connect to those who follow our page and their own connections. Although many of our page followers are local, their connections are likely to cover a wider area. However, in order to reach them will likely involve paying Facebook up to £1 per connection, so this can be expensive if not managed closely.

National Customers

Once we are beyond the local area, we are into the realms of the website.

Building and optimising a website to attract local business is not too expensive, if done correctly. Once we start to extend the reach of the site, the cost multiplies very rapidly. If we are trying to build a national audience to promote a restaurant, hotel or venue, it can literally cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. The same is true of Facebook, email and so on.

Growing a restaurant, hotel or venue.

The truth is that the days of word of mouth, PR and local advertising enabling us to grow a restaurant or venue business are nearly over.

They often rely on sharing stories in places that people are no longer using, to find places to eat.

The new methods are social networks, websites and email marketing. If you haven’t adapted to this yet, that may be why you are struggling to extend your audience.

Growth is only achievable by finding more customers and if like most restaurants, your locality is saturated, your next best opportunity is to widen your reach. Where we work with clients who do this, they often find it to be so successful, they are financing even more growth from that extended reach – even opening new restaurants or venues using the same model.

With a good understanding of the methods available, we can widen your reach and grow your business, without the wasted cost you would incur by doing it yourself, or using someone who doesn’t understand how this works.

So, you have reached the end of the customer journey. We build these into everything that we do. The final thing we talked about was a ‘call to action’. Well, here it is.

Let us know if you like the idea of working with someone who understands how to promote a restaurant, hotel or venue and want to explore it further. You can simply fill in the form on this page or call one of our team on 01772 978 101 to find out more.