Restaurant Marketing, Pub Marketing and Bar Marketing - Guy Holmes

Good restaurant service

Once you’ve hired your employees, you must train them. Employees should be given information about the company’s history, its current businesses, and its mission statement and vision. They must be encouraged to feel proud of their new employer. You want to instil in them a desire to contribute to the company’s success.

In well-managed restaurants, service employees know the menu inside and out. They are trained to direct guests to menu selections that will be best suit their tastes. They are also taught how to sell menu choices to guests who haven’t made up their minds yet.

Every restaurant should conduct tastings, where employees sample the products they are selling. Product training is a continuous learning process; it should be part of every company’s employee training program. Properly trained employees are confident employees who deliver consistent quality service. This enhances your image and attracts more guests and potential employees to the operation.

Another aspect of training that the restaurant industry needs to emphasize is convincing employees to respect their jobs. Instruct waiting staff in the importance of this position and the contribution it makes to the restaurant. Communicate your expectation that they will treat the job seriously, not just as something to do until a ‘real’ job comes along.

Restaurant service

Like many retail operations, the restaurant industry is unique in that employees are part of your product. When managers think of marketing, they usually think of advertising, personal selling and other efforts directed toward potential customers. But a restaurant’s first marketing efforts should be directed internally, to employees.

Employees are your internal customers. They must be excited about your restaurant and items on your menu; otherwise, it will be impossible for guests to become excited. Good vibes stemming from the staff will infect the guests. When they visit your operation, they will be happy. It will then be up to you and the staff to keep them happy.

External marketing brings customers into the restaurant, but does little good if the service delivered by the employees does not meet or exceed guest expectations. The food in a restaurant may be outstanding, but if the service person has a poor attitude or provides inattentive service, customers will feel dissatisfied and down grade the overall restaurant experience. They won’t care how great your food is; without good service, it is nearly impossible to create guest satisfaction.

When employees and customers interact, a careless mistake by an employee or an unanticipated request by a guest can result in guest dissatisfaction. Your job as manager is to help employees eliminate mistakes and prepare them to meet customer demands. To do this, you need to create a service culture by hiring employees who enjoy customer service, and training them in ways to avoid mistakes and how to recover when mistakes do occur, thus providing them with the tools they need to succeed. In essence you are motivating them to give 200 per cent.

Restaurant pricing

The best price is the one that guests are willing to pay and that gives you the profit you need. It’s almost impossible to determine what that ideal price is, though. Every guest has a slightly different perception of value. Pricing formulas can’t take every variable into account and given the fluctuation in the costs of food, beverage and other supplies you must deal with daily, there is no way you can continually adjust your prices to meet new conditions.

Pricing involves a little bit of science with a lot of art. It is unfortunate that such a key part of the marketing plan has to be so inexact, but there is just no one right way to price your products and services.

One thing is certain about pricing: it is very easy to charge too little, leaving yourself vulnerable to bankruptcy. If you look at the major reasons that businesses fail, inadequate pricing is usually high on the list. This is especially true for small, independent restaurants that do not have the large accounting and marketing staff support enjoyed by large companies.

Before considering prices for individual menu item, catering events or other merchandise try to determine how much your typical customer is most likely to spend when visiting your restaurant. In other words, what is the most likely average bill you can expect to obtain, given the type of business you have and the customers you serve.

They say that value is in the eye of the beholder. You need to get a firm handle on your guest’ value perceptions, but it certainly isn’t an easy task. Even though you might have a grip on it today, it can easily change tomorrow; you need to focus on this issue constantly.

Value encompasses all of the seven P’s of marketing. But it is related primarilay to quality, price and service. There is a direct relationship between quality and price; guests expect higher quality to be accompanied by a higher price. The same relationship exists between service and price: more service and better service costs more. The trick is to find out how far guest are willing to go. What appeals to them? How much will they pay for added benefits? What are their priorities? The list of questions is endless.

Sooner or later, you will develop a feel for what your guests want. it is up to you to monitor their needs and modify your pricing strategy accordingly.

What are the 3 biggest mistakes made by venues on the Internet?

1) Website’s too fancy. Too much Flash, or animation or some other gimmick. It takes an age for customers to find what you want, search engines won’t find your pages, and many peoples’ computers will block your pages as a security risk. Web pages are text with a few simple images, they’re not a multimedia theatre yet.

2) Awful, cheap looking website. There are around 5,000 good quality venues in the UK. Most are not reflected by their websites. You need to spend time and money to get your website looking good and working well. If you do you will make money. If not you probably won’t.

3) Not enough information. People want to see menus, prices, pictures, reviews/testimonials, maps, directions, info on bookings, your full contact details and perhaps some information on your history and your chef. You’d do well to have a mailing list too. If you don’t offer this information clearly and easily then you’ll lose a certain amount of business.

It sounds simple because the Internet really is. It works on common sense (most of the time) and with some simple planning you can make your website go further and gain more customers than ever before.

Next week, we’ll be looking at design issues in more detail and touching on search engine marketing….

Many venues from fine dining restaurants to local neighbourhood restaurants do not do any kind of restaurant marketing. Instead they just open their doors and expect people to stampede in, spending lots of their hard earned cash. Most restaurants rely on word of mouth believing that the quality of their food, drink, service and décor will result in their target market hearing about their restaurant from friends or colleagues at work.

However restaurant marketing should be regarded as an insurance policy and as an investment rather than an unnecessary expense, which builds on the positive word of mouth achieved through hard word in the restaurant itself. The key points to remember when embarking on any restaurant marketing activity is to ascertain who your target markets are, how to reach them and the quality of offer or image that will result in them acting on the restaurant marketing and visit that particular restaurant. The few restaurants that do any kind of marketing rely on advertising rely but this is not always the most effective use of a marketing budget.

Media relations, public relations, affiliate marketing, local marketing and internet marketing are just a few of the ways that restaurants can use to the edge over their competition. These strategies are used effectively in many other industries from retail to designers but the restaurant industry as a whole has been slow to grasp the techniques and motivation to put effect restaurant marketing strategies in place and in today’s very competitive market the ones that do are the ones that remain busy.

As is the case for the marketing of any business you must know who your target market is before you doing anything and this of course is also true of pub marketing. Many pub customers will more responsive to price promotions than say a fine dining restaurant. It is advisable to offer some kind of promotion early on in the week when its quieter than the weekends. This might take the form of 2 main courses for the price of 1 or a free bottle of house wine when 2 main courses are ordered for example. Once you had decided on what form the promotion and the pub marketing will take then you must find ways of communicating this to your target market.

Your pub marketing will start in house with printed materials and move on to communicating the promotion to potential customers that have never visited your pub before. Pub marketing is more than just advertising and encompasses media relations, public relations, internet marketing, affiliate marketing and local marketing. A combination of these will see an increase in custom and are well worth the small investment in both time and money. For the majority of pubs the most important aspect will be local marketing ie communicating the offer and the pub in general in a favourable way to the local community. This can be done in any number of ways from distributing fliers to local residents to providing posters for the staff notice boards at local businesses (you may have to give a few people a pint for this one!)

It’s many people’s dream to give up their current career and open a bar. However it is a lot more difficult than may appear from the customer’s side of the bar. It takes a lot of hard work, a good team and a little bit of luck.

The first thing to think about is the concept ie what kind of place are you aiming to create and what type of people are you hoping to attract. Once you have a good idea of the type of place you hope to open then its time to put a business plan together for opening a bar. The business plan is not only essential to secure outside investment but the very process of researching and writing it will help enormously at every stage. You will need a lot of different skills so as soon as you are committed to opening a bar start educating yourself on subjects that you know little or nothing about.

Read as many books as possible on all subjects related to opening a bar including writing a business plan, subscribe to the trade press as you know about current trends and fashions. Pubco’s and breweries can be a good source of help and many will also lend you money more easily than the banks as long as you are prepared to tied to agreements that mean you sell their products. Opening a bar is very rewarding both financially and for self satisfaction if done correctly so don’t rush and make sure you know the trade inside and out.

You’ve found the money, decorated the restaurant, decided on the menu, trained the staff, now you’re ready for the opening of the restaurant. There are basically two different strategies for opening a restaurant; the soft launch and the hard launch. With the soft launch to opening a restaurant you open with a small amount of marketing activity, saving the big push for a few weeks after the initial opening when the staff are fully trained and competent, the stock levels are right so you don’t run out of anything and any other teething problems are resolved.

The hard launch of opening a restaurant means you create a buzz about the new restaurant from the moment you open and hit the ground running. Before opening a restaurant it’s a good idea to have a couple of days of ‘dress rehearsals’. This is when the restaurant opens to friends and family of staff, suppliers etc put anyone eating does not pay for the food, just their drink, although be prepared to fully comp some bills. Tables are required to order different items to one another so the kitchen staff get the experience of cooking all the menu items on a busy night. At the end of the meal all guests are required to fill out a questionnaire and encourage to give honest opinions of the food and service. Not only is this a great way of training staff and sorting out teething problems but the sale of drink should cover the majority of the cost of the food. Goodwill and favourable word of mouth will also be created.