Marketing is critical to the success of your business, but if your product is no good, your marketing will be much less effective, partially because the marketing message will not be attractive enough to get new customers in and partially because they won’t want to be repeat customers.
The 3Gs of a restaurant product are:
- Great Food;
- Great Value; and
- Great experience.
If you do a good job in all 3, and excel in 2 of them, you will have a product that is much easier to market and can more easily convert new customers into repeat customers and a much more profitable business!
When comparing your food, experience and value, don’t forget to list all of your competitors – these include your competitors down the street, the next suburb, different types of restaurants and take aways, other activities, such as going to the Football and the most dangerous competitor of all, eating at home.
Great Food: This should really go without saying, but you need to remember that everything is relative, so look at what you are competing with. Food is a difficult one to compete with because it relies on getting people in the door first – which is why the menu is so important. Many restaurants don’t display a menu, which means that two of the biggest questions go unanswered. Do I want to eat here, and can I afford it? Most people won’t ask, they will just keep walking.
Yankee Pier teamed up a great value Clam Chowder with 3 separate wines to try for a great example of using the menu to get customers in.
Great Experience: What is the experience that you offer in your business and how great is it? For some places, the food is the experience. It could be a family restaurant that has a playground for the kids – so the experience is some quiet time with your partner, while the kids play, or it could be looking out the window and watching the waves crash onto the beach. What ever that experience is, your marketing needs to clearly identify the experience and maximise on it. A great experience makes it a lot easier to bring in repeat customers.
Some people ask what kind of experience does a Fish and Chip shop or a Pizza shop offer, thinking that it really is just food and value that Take Aways have to offer, but there is a lot more to it than just that and it is something that is hard to put a value on, but very important, and that is service and convenience. For some reason, many people think that Pizza shops must deliver, but not many other Take Aways or restaurants view it as mandatory, but if you are at home, can’t be bothered cooking and don’t want to leave the house, delivered food it is. If there aren’t too many businesses delivering, then you have a captive market. Our local Fish and Chip shop figured this out and started to offer delivery.
For some places, the food can be the experience. Eating a huge spider in a Beijing Houtong is much more about the experience than the food!
The experience often feeds into event marketing, special nights, special guests, special foods, (such as the hottest burger) and other marketing tools to make the meal more memorable.
Great Value: The price that you charge for both the experience and the food represents the value that a customer gets. It is important to remember that great value does not mean low price. A 10 course degustation menu cooked to perfection may be great value at $300. A $10 burger may be expensive, it all depends on what it is compared with.
Remember, Marketing4Restaurants online marketing tools are designed to help you get the word out to as many people as possible. To start getting more customers today, click here, and start marketing your business in the best way possible.
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Is Poor SEO Killing Your Restaurant?
Too many times we see customers with websites that are costing restaurants thousands of dollars every month through poor design, poor messaging and poor SEO. If your website could be improved to bring in 200 extra visits per month and just 10% of those made a booking, and each booking was for 2.5 seats on average at $50 a seat, you would have an extra $2,500 in revenue a month. A 30% food cost, that is $1,750 in profit extra a month. This ignores those customers coming back as regulars – which is more profit.
Remember, if these customers aren’t finding your Restaurant, they are finding your competitors.
Get one of our obligation free 7 point website SEO audits to see what you can get your web developer to fix to increase your revenue today.