In our experience, there are five key marketing fundamentals that can take a restaurant from unnoticed to the forefront of the industry. Take a look at our best practice overviews and share them within your organisation to make sure you’re in the best position to see a return on investment for every marketing dollar spent.

Event Marketing for your Restaurants

The third pillar of restaurant marketing is something quite specific to the restaurant industry, and if you’re able to nail it, will have customers through your front doors in no time. Collate good data on who your key customers are then take your regular tried and tested marketing events like quizzes, themed nights and cuisine based evenings, and leverage them to resonate with exactly who you want through the door. Marketing managers are likely quite across this sector already. Take a look at this checklist and make sure you’ve considered every avenue.

• Identify your customers and their typical demographics, and create events that will get those specific patrons through the doors. Never make assumptions about who your customers are, always back up your decisions with data.
  
  
• Ensure your marketing team has created a calendar of events that occur throughout the year, and approach each date with a strategic mindset. How can your restaurant best leverage these dates through events?
  
  
• Leverage events that are designed to promote restaurants and cuisine. Perfect examples of these types of events include food festivals, music festivals and large-crowd events where you can take your food mobile and culinary arts festivals. There are very prestigious events held globally that could be worth looking into to elevate your brand reach.
  
  
•  Partner with complementary brands to cross-promote each other’s menu items. A perfect pairing is often alcohol and food, so if there’s a bar or a brewery in mind, reach out and make a connection - it’ll give you the opportunity to create a marketing event that connects with multiple audiences.
  
  
• The second element of event marketing that will be particularly relevant to marketing managers across groups of restaurants, is keep your branding aligned and scaling events across multiple locations. The real crux is keeping your individual restaurant managers across communications and the strategic direction of your event marketing.

Brand cohesion will resonate with customers nationally and internationally, and grow a following that’s loyal across locations. Global conglomerates are excellent at this (take McDonalds Monopoly for example), but it is achievable with a smaller budget on a national scale too - take Mexico’s Taco Tuesday for example.

Here at First Table we regularly sponsor foodie events to promote our partner restaurants, who we don't charge them a penny. We’ve put together a guide to take you through exactly how it works. You can download it for free, without obligation, below.

An innovative marketing strategy in combination with the other four pillars of restaurant marketing will give your restaurant(s) the competitive edge to reach an extensive audience and positively impact your bottom line.

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