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 Quick Campaign Ideas to Spur your Marketing
Smaller efforts can help engage customers more frequently
It's a busy time of year, with a number of events and holidays approaching - Memorial Day, Father's Day, graduations, Fourth of July, and summer itself. But you don't need a significant event like a holiday to plan a smaller campaign to get consumers to visit your restaurant or to just say, "Thank you."
To ensure we're on the same page, we're defining a "campaign" as a specific mix of communications that will help you reach a marketing goal. A campaign is not necessarily a single email that's going out on a specific day. It could be a series of emails going out, along with social media posts that are designed to drive customers to take action. It could even include a physical event such as a wine tasting, fundraising dinner, or new-menu unveiling day.
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Social Media Success Takes Focus, Commitment
Driving restaurant sales through online ordering and social media can yield positive results, but experts caution that it takes commitment to the task and a sharp focus on marketing the service for the investment to pay off.
Executives participating in the webinar titled, "The New Social Order (ing): Monetizing Social Media Investments Driving Customer Loyalty," acknowledged that some successful operators are indeed reaping benefits in the form of increased sales and higher check averages.
However, Geoff Alexander, vice president and managing partner of Wow Bao, a division of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises in Chicago, advised that it takes time and planning to make the service work.
"Online ordering is a business, and you have to commit to it every day to grow that business," Alexander told the webinar's more than 500 participants. "You have to push it and market it.
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 Use Loyalty Marketing to Increase Guest Frequency
When you think of loyalty marketing, you probably think of loyalty programs. And that usually brings to mind the frequent customer programs of hotels and airlines. The restaurant industry would seem to be a perfect fit for loyalty programs yet according to the National Restaurant Association, only one out of three restaurants offers frequent diner programs.
The daily effort to draw patrons into your restaurant can be stressful. You want to bring in new customers, but you also know the importance of holding onto existing ones. It's no secret that it's cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to gain a new one, so using loyalty marketing is a key to increasing guest frequency.
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Guests Wary of Higher Prices, Smaller Portions
Consumers are becoming more sensitive to scaled-down portion sizes and rising menu prices in restaurants, according to a new survey by research firm Technomic Inc.
The Chicago-based firm found in a recent study that 62 percent of consumers believed that restaurant prices have increased in the past three months, while 32 percent said portion sizes have shrunk. Consumers said they saw similar trends in grocery stores - 84 percent of respondents said supermarket prices were up and about 50 percent said they noticed smaller portion sizes, Technomic found.
Commodity inflation has picked up in 2011 after a few years of easing prices, necessitating menu price increases at many restaurant chains. Meanwhile, fuel prices surging above $4 per gallon in several states have put pressure on disposable incomes of consumers in the United States, Technomic said.
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At Sysco iCare , we've done
our homework, so you don't have to. iCare partners are Sysco approved and
uphold the highest service levels, quality standards and performance guarantees
of anyone in the industry.
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